The Measure of a Titan
by General Havoc
Summary: With Terra's betrayal still haunting them, the Titans rescue a young kineticist in need of a home from certain death. But after their loss, can they extend their trust to an outsider again, especially one being hunted by an unknown enemy? BBxRae, RobxStar
1. The Sound of Silence

**Disclaimer:** I do not, nor will I likely ever own the Teen Titans in any way, shape, or form. This much should be patently obvious.

**Author's Note:** This tale has grown both in planning and in writing it, and the chapter below represents only the begining of the story I have in mind. Nevertheless, it is my sincere hope that you will enjoy reading it, though I make no pretentions of being an excellent writer. Credit must go to The Lady Bonny and GuardianSaiyoko, though neither of them know it, for their stories on this website were what convinced me to finally give writing my own story a shot. Whether or not that is a good thing is something I leave completely up to you. Please, whether you hate or love it, leave a review so that I may profit by your opinion. Once again, thank you very much for reading.

Oh, and it has come to my attention that apparently when I created this story, it went up and down several times within a minute or two. I'm not sure what happened but all seems to be well now._  
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**Chapter 1: The Sound of Silence**_  
_

_"Don't talk of love,  
But I've heard the words before;  
Its sleeping in my memory.  
I won't disturb the slumber of feelings that have died.  
If I never loved I never would have cried.  
I am a rock,  
I am an island._

_And a rock feels no pain;  
And an island never cries. "_

- Paul Simon, "I am a Rock"

**O-O-O**

Raven was certain of one thing. The tower shouldn't have been this quiet.

The half-demon sorceress was sitting alone on the couch in the common room of Titan Tower, a leather-bound book laying unopened in her lap, a mug of untouched, ice-cold herbal tea sitting patiently on the table in front of her. Around her, everything was as silent as a tomb. Not a peep could be heard from anywhere else in the tower, and even the usual background noises that constantly pervaded the Titans' home, the soft hum of the refrigerator, the clicking sound of the security systems cycling through their automated routines, the distant crying of seagulls outside the window, even these were subdued, hushed as though commanded to do so.

Normally of course she would have welcomed the quiet. For a change, she did not have to lock herself in her room in order to achieve the peace required for a meditative state. She could come out here, into the common room, and meditate while watching dawn break over Jump City. She could read in peace for once, not being interrupted every half-second by Beast Boy's latest antics.

And yet… for nearly half an hour now she had sat motionless and listened to the sound of her own breathing, her own heartbeat, the deafening silence crushing every attempt to shove it aside. She knew why. If it had merely been peace, she would have had no troubles.

This wasn't peace. It was a vacuum. It was an empty gaping void. And she knew what was missing.

Without even meaning to, Raven slowly opened the communicator she had been fingering for several minutes. Glancing down into it, she watched as the static on the viewscreen faded out to be replaced by the face of the Boy Wonder himself.

"Raven? What is it? Is something wrong?" asked Robin over the communicator. He, Starfire, and Cyborg were on morning patrol, investigating sketchy reports of sightings of some kind of strange creature somewhere in the northern suburbs of the city.

"No…" she said into the communicator, wishing that she had actually bothered to think up a reason to call them before doing so. "No, nothing's happening here. I was just… wondering if you guys had found anything yet."

If Robin detected her ad-libbed question, he made no sign of it. "Nothing yet. Everything's pretty quiet so far except for the news helicopters. We'll probably make a few more passes through the area, just to make sure, and then head home."

Raven smirked slightly. The battles between the Titans and Slade had been so violent and public that the local media had gotten into the habit of simply following the Titans whenever they left the tower, under the reasonable assumption that it was a good way to get interesting stories and excellent footage. It did make for a lot of anticlimaxes though whenever their patrols came up empty-handed.

Robin took a deeper breath and lowered his voice a notch or two before asking his next question. "How's Beast Boy?"

There were several seconds of silence as Raven lowered her eyes slightly. "I don't know. I haven't seen him yet today."

Robin nodded slowly. "Maybe you should see if he's OK, if he needs anything."

Raven had enough self-awareness to scoff at the notion. "You were the one telling us to leave him alone."

"I said leave him alone to work things out, not pretend he doesn't exist Raven," said Robin in a tone that was a bit harsher than he had planned it to be. Raven scowled, half at Robin and half at herself for agreeing with him.

"I'll make sure he's alright," she said, with just enough of an annoyed tone in her voice to maintain appearances.

Starfire's voice chimed in from the seat next to Robin's. "Be sure to tell friend Beast Boy that when we have all returned, we may spend the rest of the day together at the Light Projection Screens, or perhaps if he is still feeling poorly, I will make him Pudding of Sadness to ease his mind?"

"Was that a promise or a threat?" asked Cyborg from the front seat. It was meant as a joke, but Cyborg's voice did not sound particularly jovial. In fact he sounded downright angry. Raven ignored his tone. In theory the shifts for the daily patrols were doled out randomly, and yet somehow recently Cyborg's name kept coming up and Beast Boy's almost never did, much like how Starfire and Robin always seemed to draw the same shift. Cyborg never complained or cursed his luck, and Raven was certain that he and Robin had wordlessly come to some kind of arrangement. Still it was hard for him, but Raven wasn't sure if it was the extra patrol shifts or the reason he had to take them that upset him the most.

Raven considered all these things in half a second before nodding to Robin and closing the communicator. The silence of the tower swept over her again, reminding her that all was not well. Normally, with Beast Boy in the tower, silence would have been impossible. If he hadn't been blasting the sound of his video games all over the tower or singing hopelessly off-key at the top of his lungs along with some ridiculous song, he would likely be bugging her to play a game or watch a movie or just pay attention to him.

As it was, she hadn't heard him speak a word in three days, and had barely seen a glimpse of him for a week.

Well that wasn't quite true, after all he still stopped in for meals, sometimes, and he still went on patrol along with the rest of them whenever his name DID come up. Robin had cancelled their training sessions for the next couple of weeks, after the events with Slade and Terra they needed the break, but Raven imagined that if he hadn't done so, Beast Boy would have probably shown up for those too. But during those few moments when he was around, it was like he was merely going through the motions. Most of the time he would leave his food nearly untouched, save when Robin or someone else forced him to eat. On patrols he was quiet, replying to questions in single syllables, never cracking a joke, never pulling some immature prank, never harassing her or anyone else to the point of insanity. She assured herself that she didn't miss it, that her sole concern was that he wasn't acting like himself. Sometimes she believed it.

She mentally moved the mug of tea into the sink and stood up, tucking her book under one arm as she walked out of the common room. The silence permeating the tower seemed to follow her as she walked down the halls towards Beast Boy's room. It took no more than a minute to arrive at his door, and she raised her hand to knock, then hesitated. For several seconds she listened intently for a sound from within, and heard nothing. For a moment she wondered if she really should be doing this. After all, it wasn't like SHE welcomed interference whenever she was having some kind of difficulty coping with things.

'But then Terra didn't rip my heart out twice,' she thought to herself. The geomancer had betrayed them all, had tried to kill them all, but with Beast Boy it had been different. Terra had played him for a fool, betraying his unconditional trust in her in the most flagrant way possible. He had faced her nearly killing him and all of his friends, only to suddenly win her back and then lose her again just as suddenly, and this time forever. When they had laid the plaque on her statue, Raven had said something about reversing the effect, but she knew how unlikely that was. Terra was dead and gone, and while they all still felt the sting of her betrayal, they didn't feel what he did.

Thus convinced, she knocked on the door.

There was a shuffling behind it and the sound of someone walking (or wading) towards the door through mounds of dirty laundry and assorted junk. The door slid open at last, revealing Beast Boy, who was blinking in the bright light that filtered through the doorway. "... Raven?" he asked, obviously surprised to see her. "What are you doing here?"

To her abject horror, Raven realized that she had neglected to come up with a reason for paying him a visit. Thinking quickly, she came up with one that at least sounded reasonable. "You missed breakfast." she said neutrally.

"Oh... er yeah..." he said, nervously scratching the side of his head and trying to smile. "I wasn't really hungry." His voice was more subdued than it should have been, more reserved. He stood at the door in his purple and black uniform, obviously trying very hard to look like nothing was the matter. He failed. His grin was obviously forced, and his green skin had salt-crusted red-ish streaks around his eyes where he had been crying, though she couldn't tell if it was recent or hours-old.

Raven sighed, lowering her head slightly as she forced herself not to smirk at the ironic situation, that it should now be her standing outside Beast Boy's room, trying to get him to come out of his shell. She couldn't tell if Beast Boy recognized the irony or not, but she was pretty well certain he knew why she was here. His eyes held an almost expectant look, as though he had been waiting for one of his friends to come and pull him out of the pit he had fallen into.

"So... can I come in?" she asked finally, forcing herself to make it sound like an actual request and not an assignment. She wanted to help him, she wanted to see him recover from this, but she had no idea how. Beast Boy had always seemed completely inured to pain, one of the reasons she got so angry with him. She knew it wasn't true, that if anything he sometimes bottled his real feelings up more effectively than she did, burying them in immature gags and a happy-go-lucky attitude that drowned whatever pain he was in and subsumed it. She didn't know how he managed to do it, how he didn't just collapse from the crushing weight of his suppressed fears of loneliness or loss, but he didn't. In fact he made it look easy, which she never could forgive him for.

Beast Boy paused for a moment before replying. A guilty look came over his face, as though he was sorry for having brought this on. "Sure," he said softly, and opened the door wider. Raven carefully entered, not entirely convinced that there wasn't something growing in the middle of the mess that was Beast Boy's room. Beast Boy let her in before closing the door and flipping the lights on.

"How can you find anything in all this?" she asked, momentarily forgetting everything else as she waded over towards the bunk bed on one side of the room, stepping over knee-deep piles of junk.

"Well I was gonna clean it up," replied Beast Boy, "but I was afraid you guys would think I'd really lost my mind."

It took Raven a second to realize that he was joking, and as she did, a large weight seemed to vanish from the room. Maybe Robin had been right. Maybe Beast Boy had just needed some time to work it all out. The joke was delivered monotonously, without Beast Boy's usual self-satisfied flair, but it was a great improvement over what she had heard from him before. Perhaps just knowing that his friends cared enough to worry about him was helping.

Raven cleared a spot on the bottom bunk of the bed, and sat down. Beast Boy sat down next to her, not bothering to clear a spot beforehand. His face was glum and he tucked his knees up against his chest as he stared off into the cluttered space of his room. Raven watched him for a second, wondering what to say, when to her surprise he took the initiative and spoke.

"So, did Robin send you here?"

Raven debated for a moment what to say, and then decided on honesty. "Sort of. He was worried about you, wanted to know if you were OK, and so did I."

"I see," said Beast Boy distantly.

Raven knew he needed her help to navigate through this, but she wasn't sure what the best way to help him was. Was she supposed to just be understanding and let him vent? Was she supposed to draw it out of him? Was she supposed to give him some kind of speech? Robin knew how to motivate people and cheer them up when they were down. She was no good at this sort of thing. But still, she was here, and her friend was hurting, and she had to try something. Largely by habit, she decided on the direct approach.

"So?"

"So... what?" asked Beast Boy, puzzled.

"So are you OK?"

Beast Boy blinked several times before he registered that Raven actually meant the question seriously. "I..." he stammered, not certain what to answer with. "I don't know..."

Raven sensed that more was coming, and she waited for it.

"I mean... I thought she was part of our team. I thought she'd become part of our team, and that... it would stay that way. She'd become one of us, you know? You guys are... you're my family, you're everything I have. And I just... I wanted her to be a part of that. I REALLY wanted that. And I thought she wanted it too..."

He lowered his gaze to the floor and sighed sadly.

"And... now I'll never know if she did or not."

"She didn't know either," replied Raven quietly. "She didn't know what she wanted, and she wound up losing everything to Slade because she couldn't figure it out. That's why she was able to fool us for so long. That's why we didn't see it coming."

Beast Boy just shrugged. "You did."

"No, I didn't," said Raven, "If I had, I would have tried to stop her."

"But you never fell for it. Not really I mean. You never liked her. You never really trusted her."

Raven thought for a moment that Beast Boy was accusing her of having driven Terra to her betrayal, only to realize that there had been no bitterness in his words, no implications. He wasn't angry with her for having suspected Terra. He was angry at himself for not having done so. Raven had seen this before. For weeks after Terra's true colors had become known, Robin couldn't bear to so much as glance at anything that reminded him of Terra, not because he missed her or felt anything special for her, but because he felt responsible towards the rest of his team. Because he felt that he SHOULD have seen the signs, that he should have better protected his family. Raven had let Robin work that one out by himself and with Starfire, she wasn't going to be able to change Robin's pathological need to try and be the perfect leader, shielding his team from every threat. That need was too deeply engrained in his psyche to be parsed out.

Beast Boy wasn't precisely talking about the same thing. He wasn't angry because he had let the team down. He was angry and hurt because he had opened himself up to Terra completely, had trusted her implicitly, had even refused to believe that she was capable of such a thing when the evidence slapped him square in the face... and she had torn it all to shreds with a wave of her hand.

"No, I didn't like her," admitted Raven finally. "I thought she was a pushy, arrogant, show-off. I didn't think she could ever really be a Titan, that she was too self-centered and worried about herself to do that. But that's not the same thing as not trusting her. None of us saw this coming Beast Boy. Not even Robin or Cyborg."

She reached over and put a hand on his shoulder, and felt him relax slightly as he raised his head and looked at her.

"And all of us liked that she made you happy, even me. She liked it too. Why do you think she drew you out of the tower when the Slade's robots attacked us? Even though she had already decided to betray us, she obviously wanted to try and make sure you didn't get hurt. I never thought she'd be capable of that. I certainly never thought that she could be brought back and would turn out to be... well... more than a traitor."

Beast Boy closed his eyes as he blinked the tears out of them, before reaching up and placing his hand on top of Raven's. There was a time, a recent time, where such a gesture would have been met by a cold stare or perhaps even something exploding in the nearby vicinity, but not now. Not here.

"And the only reason she did turn out to be more," continued Raven, hoping that she didn't sound like a babbling idiot, "is because you forced her to see that she could be more. If you hadn't done that, she might have killed us all."

Beast Boy winced at that, which stopped Raven from saying what she had meant to follow it up with: 'or we might have killed her.' Indeed she thought that was more likely. The shock of her treachery had been bad enough; the pain of being defeated by her so totally and left to die was a terrible humiliation, not to mention a source of righteous rage, but that moment in the cavern when Terra seemed ready to kill Beast Boy before all of them... Raven couldn't speak for the others really but she had seen the look in their eyes. It was the same desperate look of fear at the prospect of losing someone infinitely close to them that Beast Boy had in his eyes when they had stood before Terra's statue. The same look that he had periodically whenever one of the Titans were injured or in trouble. The same look he had had the day they thought they had lost Robin forever. All bets were off at that moment. Blood was going to be repaid with blood.

They sat in silence for a few minutes. Beast Boy continued to stare into nothingness motionlessly as Raven simply watched him. The more she got to know Beast Boy, it seemed the less she actually knew him. The green changeling was sometimes as thoughtless and careless as a spoiled child, and other times as serious and solemn as a priest. It never ceased to astonish her how he could go from one to the other so quickly, or even embody both simultaneously. He could be infinitely caring, even with hardened villains, as exemplified by the incident with Thunder and Lightning, to say nothing of his repeated and ultimately successful attempts to 'rescue' Terra, and would follow his friends quite literally to Hell and back without so much as a second thought. He was always there for all of them, even for her, despite the way she knew she sometimes treated him, and yet at the same time he was immature, persistently annoying, overemotional, and utterly and completely unable to EVER shut up and leave someone alone, even when they really truly needed to be.

Except of course, for right now.

"So what happens now?" asked Beast Boy, finally breaking the silence. He still sounded hurt, but she could tell from the tone of his voice that he was feeling better, still not recovered of course, she didn't think any of them ever would REALLY recover from this, but better nonetheless.

Raven allowed herself a small smile (for professional reasons only, of course) and gripped his shoulder a bit more tightly. "Now we move on." she said, knowing that it was in a strange way what he had wanted to hear.

"How?" he asked, turning to face her directly for the first time since they had sat down, five week-long minutes ago.

A professional at this sort of thing would probably have found a concrete answer, however Raven wasn't here as a professional but as a friend. "I don't know," she said directly as she stood up and offered him her hand, "but we'll figure it out. We'll all figure it out together."

Slowly, a small grin began spread over Beast Boy's face as he took her hand and she pulled him to his feet. "Thanks Rae." he said.

"It's Raven." came the half-demon's reply giving the green changeling a warning look as she moved gingerly around the piles of laundry and garbage towards the door. "Now come on, you should eat something before Robin calls us both out for some kind of emergency. You're no good to any of us if you pass out in the middle of a fight."

It may have sounded harsh to an outside listener, but Raven knew that Beast Boy understood what she really meant.

Beast Boy followed Raven out of the room and down the hallway. She could tell just by the way he was walking that it had worked. His posture was straighter, his stride was more purposeful, and his face, though still more composed than usual, was at least not the dead blank stare that was all she had seen of him in the last few days. It occurred to her that she had actually missed Beast Boy's grin, his optimism, and even his stupid antics, though she was fairly certain he would remind her why this was a mistake shortly.

The two Titans re-entered the common room and Beast Boy stepped into the kitchen to get himself some kind of late breakfast. Raven sat back down on the couch and opened her book again, a great feeling of relief coming over her as she heard the sound of Beast Boy scrounging around in the refrigerator for something to eat drown out the piercing silence of the tower, and suddenly she realized that Beast Boy wasn't the only one who was hoping things would return to normal, or rather the warped version of 'normal' that they all were used to.

She had managed to finish only a few pages when Beast Boy sat down across from her on the other couch with a large plate of tofu eggs and a side of toast with soy butter. He ate quickly and with gusto, obviously ravenously hungry after having skipped both breakfast today and dinner yesterday, no matter what he had claimed before, and the noise of him eating completely destroyed all possibility of Raven actually getting anywhere in her book. Still, she wasn't angry. This here, this was the reality she recognized. This was an indication that despite Terra's betrayal and death and the terrible events of Slade's year-long campaign against them, that things were slowly returning to normal.

"Hey, Raven?"

Lost in her own thoughts on the nature of reality, Raven gave a start as Beast Boy spoke. She turned to see him sitting back on the couch, watching the television which he had apparently turned on while she was daydreaming. She did notice that he had turned the volume on it down to a low whisper, perhaps so as not to disturb her? Probably not.

"You think… maybe after the others get back, we could all go somewhere? Like to the park or something?"

Normally, words could not describe how little Raven wanted to go to the park or any other sort of public place. As it stood however, while she was still not wild about the idea, she had to admit that it was a relief just to have Beast Boy ask. "I suppose if the others want to you all can…

"Aw c'mon Rae," he said, giving her the first example of his pleading smile that she had seen since Terra abandoned them. It usually made her want to fling him across the room, both because it looked so stupid, and because it often worked anyway, not that she was about to let that on. "It'll be fun. You don't have to play football or whatever; you can just sit and read if you want."

Loathe as she was to admit it, the prospect didn't sound all that bad. As she was considering whether to agree or to refuse a few more times (she already knew that she wouldn't hear the end of it until she eventually said yes), her eyes caught something on the television, and she glanced at it for a second. Moments later her eyes flew open wide and the book fell from her hand.

"Beast Boy, be quiet," she said quickly in a tone that was hurried and startled.

Beast Boy stopped pleading in mid-sentence and his gaze turned to puzzlement as he stared at Raven. "Huh?" he asked. "Raven what do you…"

"Shut up and look!" she snapped as she snatched the remote control out of his hand and aimed it at the television, cranking the volume up until it filled the room. Beast Boy turned around to face the television, and the words died in his throat.

On the television screen was news camera footage, evidently shot from a moving helicopter, of a large section of suburban development that looked as though it had been leveled by a tornado. Buildings were torn open; their sidings cleaved off and cast into the streets. Streetlights and traffic signals had been ripped up and flung about like bowling pins, while trees had been snapped in half or even uprooted and left to block the various streets. As the camera panned slowly to show more of the swatch of destruction, Raven saw fire hydrants shorn clean off their moorings, leaving fountains of water in their place, and full sized cars smashed flat by a tremendous force, as though they had been beaten into the earth by giant hammers. Clouds of brown dust and smoke obscured much of the scene, even as the helicopter struggled to find a clearer position, while a small symbol in the bottom corner of the screen showed that the images were being transmitted live.

"Once again," said the admirably calm voice of the news reader, "at this time we have no estimate on the number of casualties from this disaster, nor are we certain exactly what happened to cause this much destruction. Jump City police are ordering a complete evacuation of the entire Almond Hills region as a precaution, pending consultation with the Teen Titans, at least three of whom entered the affected area several minutes ago presumably in pursuit of the agent of this terrible catastrophe. We have no information on their whereabouts at this time, but our helicopters are attempting to find a better vantage…"

"What?" shouted Beast Boy at the television. "They went in there after someone? Why didn't they call us?"

Raven was equally astonished and equally perplexed. She glanced down at her communicator just to ensure she hadn't inadvertently missed their signal. She had not. "Maybe there wasn't any time to call for backup," she surmised.

"Well they could be in trouble! We've gotta go help them!" shouted Beast Boy, springing to his feet. He grabbed Raven by the wrist and took off down the hallway, dragging her along with him as he ran for the exit.

"Beast Boy! Wait! We don't even know where they…" began Raven, only to be interrupted by the simultaneous beeping of both of their communicators. Beast Boy ground to a halt as both he and Raven flipped them open.

Robin was on the screen, sitting in the backseat of the T-car, his hair and face lightly streaked with dirt. Behind him, out the rear window, they could see scenery flying past as the T-car raced at top speed towards wherever it was headed. Evidently Cyborg was driving, as they could hear him in the background speaking to the car itself, his baby, urging it to go faster even as he hurtled it through the streets of Jump City. Starfire could not be seen, but her voice could also be heard in the background, speaking with urgency to someone, though only snatches of her speech could be heard, something about "getting help" and "over soon".

"Robin calling Raven and Beast Boy, come in!"

"We're here!" cried Beast Boy. "Dude, what happened?"

"No time to explain," said Robin hurriedly. "I need you two to get the medical bay ready. We're coming back to the tower as fast as we can and we've got someone badly hurt."

Beast Boy's eyes flew open wide with fear even as Raven felt an icy chill run through her as she instantly envisioned the worst. Evidently Robin noticed their expressions turn to mortal terror, and he quickly explained as best he could.

"No!" he said, "Not one of us, someone else. A bystander in the fight, we think. He needs medical attention right now."

"Then take him to Jump City General," replied Raven. "They're closer to you than the tower is and they've got an emergency room for…"

"We can't," said Robin quickly, cutting Raven off, "there's no time to explain now but we need to take him back to the Tower. We'll be there in a few minutes, get ready for us."

The communicators went dead as Robin closed his, evidently having more pressing matters to worry about. Beast Boy and Raven looked at one another for a moment, before both running off towards the medical bay as quickly as they could. As soon as they had entered, Beast Boy rushed around the room switching on all of the assorted equipment and clearing off the examination table, while Raven closed her eyes and began chanting her mantra quietly to herself, marshalling her inner focus, preparing for what was certain to be a difficult task of magical healing, if Robin's assessment was to be believed.

Neither one spoke a word. Neither one wished to. They both had felt the exact same terrible fear for a second, the fear that another one of their number had just been taken from them, and it scared them both to silence as they waited expectantly for the others to arrive, bearing whatever casualty they had picked up from the scene of the disaster.


	2. But for the Grace of God

**Disclaimer:** I do not own the Teen Titans, nor do I have the first idea who does.

**Author's note:** Firstly I would like to profusely thank all those who reviewed the first chapter, and say that I am deeply honored by your praise. I hope that this one meets the standards you have set. Writing for Starfire in particular is very, very hard (at least for me), and I hope she came out in-character. Once more, any feedback I can get on that subject (or any other) is most appreciated.

One other quick note: I sent a personal reply to everyone who reviewed my first chapter, but as of a couple of days ago, stopped sending Email alerts to me whenever I had a private message or story alert. I don't know if this is widespread or not, but people assure me it simply happens from time to time. Regardless, if you did not hear a reply from me after reviewing the story or sending me a private message, it is likely because of this weird issue. Hopefully it will be fixed soon.

- General Havoc

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**Chapter 2:** **But for the Grace of God**

"_Men should either be treated well or utterly crushed, for while a light injury serves as a chastisement, and a heavy injury serves as an example to others, an injury which gravely damages a man, and yet leaves him able to act will serve as nothing but the instrument of one's own destruction…"_

- Nicollo Machiavelli, "The Prince"

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Suppressing a yawn out of decorum, Raven allowed the blue glow around her hands to die as she stood up from the seat she had been in for the last four hours. "I'd say he's lucky." 

Beast Boy and Robin both looked at Raven as though she was crazy, while Starfire appeared to be assuming that she had misunderstood. Cyborg merely grunted a small "Hmph," as he continued to adjust the settings on the IV pump he had placed next to the large hospital-style bed sitting in the center of the room, though whether that meant that he agreed or disagreed was unclear. The semi-robotic Titan had barely said a word since his, Starfire's, and Robin's return, completely preoccupied with properly setting up the battery of medical equipment that was now clustered around the rolling bed, as well as running all kinds of tests and checks to establish just how bad the damage was.

"How do you figure that?" asked Robin, pre-empting what was likely to be a far less coherent question from Beast Boy.

Raven shrugged as she gestured at the bed, and the figure that lay motionless atop it. "He's alive, and he's probably going to stay that way," she said. "If he actually had part of a building collapse on top of him, I'd call that lucky.

"We are uncertain of exactly what happened," said Starfire, as she looked past Raven to the motionless figure lying on the bed. Starfire had been worried enough to nearly crush Robin's hand when they had first pulled into the tower, but Raven's prognosis had dulled the worry enough to reduce it to mere concern. "By the time we arrived, Cinderblock had already collapsed the building and was attempting to take him and escape."

Cyborg appeared to disagree. "We all know what happened."

"Forgive me friend Cyborg," began Starfire, "but we do not know exactly what..."

"What happened," chimed in Cyborg with a bitter tone in his voice that revealed just how upset he was, "was that Cinderblock flattened half of Almond Hills before we could stop him. "What happened was that he killed hundreds of people before we could even get in his way, and then we let him go!!!"

Robin forced himself to remain calm. "We didn't let him go Cyborg, he escaped into the bay."

"And we should have gone after him instead of turning around and running!" shot Cyborg back at Robin. "We should have chased him down and made sure he couldn't come back and take out another couple hundred civilians! They're still pulling bodies out of the wreckage man! What if he comes back up on shore and decides to try…"

"The Jump City police have boats and divers out looking for him," explained Robin, "and Aqualad has half the wildlife in the ocean scouring the bay to help. We couldn't chase him underwater anyway, not without the T-sub." He didn't add '…or Beast Boy' to his statement. It wasn't the green changeling's fault that he wasn't on that particular patrol.

Cyborg didn't reply, but simply clenched his fists in frustration and glanced about to see if there was something he could hit. There wasn't, and he settled for returning to his work calibrating the last of the medical equipment. The others all let him work. Cyborg had been in a cold fury ever since they had come across the first signs of the damage Cinderblock had wrought on the city, and every fresh police blotter report of another body found in the ruins only made him angrier that he couldn't have stopped it. He knew Robin was right and that this kid would likely have died had they not raced for home as fast as they could, but that didn't make it any easier.

"Besides," Robin added after a long pause, "I don't think he's coming back for a while. We got what he was looking for."

Robin's gaze was fixed squarely on the unconscious form of the teenaged boy lying motionless on the hospital bed. The boy looked like a survivor of some kind of terrible natural disaster (which, Robin supposed, wasn't all that inaccurate). His face and clothes were covered in scorch marks, dirt, bits of rock, and plaster dust, probably from when the wing of the building he was in had come down on top of him. His light brown hair was matted with blood and grime, and his dark green jacket had been torn apart like a kite in a hurricane. One of his eyes was purple and swollen shut; his left arm was encased in a cast that Cyborg had put together, and even through the haze of the painkillers and sedatives that they had given him, he still winced subconsciously every time he took a breath, likely from the cracked sternum and broken ribs that Raven had sewn back together with her magic.

"Who is he?" asked Beast Boy, sounding, Robin thought, much more like his usual self, even if he was subdued a bit by the setting. Robin had meant to ask Raven how their little talk had gone, but as usual, things had come up.

"He does not have a card of identity," replied Starfire, "and he did not tell us his name before he fell unconscious."

"I wonder what Cinderblock wanted with him?" said Beast Boy

"I don't know," replied Robin, "but when we got there Cinderblock had already picked him up and was carrying him off somewhere. We managed to stop him, but we were almost too late."

"We WERE too late," snapped Cyborg, but before Robin could reply, Raven cut him off.

"That doesn't matter now," she said, prepared to tolerate no further argument, "Cinderblock escaped, and we're all back here, so it's pointless to argue about it."

Cyborg looked disinclined to agree, but he didn't protest further, and in any event, Raven didn't give him the opportunity to.

"Anyhow, I think I might know what Cinderblock wanted," Raven explained. "I noticed something when I was trying to look for internal bleeding. Something abnormal. I'm not totally certain, but I think he might be a psychokinetic."

Raven had expected the word to be a bit unfamiliar to the others perhaps, but she did not expect Beast Boy to literally jump backwards with his eyes wide open as though startled by a firecracker. "He's a PSYCHO?!" he shouted, and morphed instantly into the form of a growling saber-toothed tiger, as though he expected to see the unconscious teen leap from the bed brandishing a bloody knife at any moment.

Raven rolled her eyes at Beast Boy's antics. It was really all you could do with them. "Not a psychopath, a psychokinetic," she explained as patiently as she could. "Psychopaths have disturbed minds. Psychokinetics can disturb other objects with their minds. Agitate them, even make them to explode."

"… oh." said Beast Boy as he sheepishly shifted back into his human form and stood up. "So… kinda like you then?" All of the Titans knew what he meant. It was a notoriously bad idea to anger Raven, as her powers had a habit of explosively laying waste to everything in the immediate vicinity when she was upset.

Raven however merely shook her head. "No," she said. "My powers are mostly magical. I'm not sure how psychokinetics work but it's not magic. I think it has something to do with manipulating the molecules of something, making them unstable. At least that's what I've read."

"Wait," said Robin, still taking all of this in. Now they had some kind of kineticist on their hands? "How do you know that he's a psychokinetic?"

"Because I can read minds, remember?" said Raven evenly and with a touch of annoyance in her voice, obviously not pleased at having to give out all these explanations. She saw Robin's eyes widen beneath his mask and she cut him off before he could lecture her about privacy. "I didn't read his mind directly," she explained, "but you insisted for some reason on dragging him back here, and I had to heal him. Powers like this are hard to mask. He's got some kind of psychokinetic ability. I don't know what kind..."

"What kind?" asked Beast Boy, "but I thought you just said..."

"I said he has kinetic abilities," snapped Raven, tired of being interrogated as to the capacities of a teen-aged psychokinetic she had never met or spoken to. "There's something like four dozen different kinds of those that I've read about and probably another four dozen I haven't. Some of them can start fires, some can blow things up, some can move things with their minds, some can even take an object apart and turn it into something else. I don't know what kind he has, I don't know how strong they are, I don't know if he can control them or if he even knows that they exist! If you want answers, ask him!"

Beast Boy took a step or two back even as Robin stepped forward, holding his hands up as a gesture for her to calm down. "Easy Raven," he said, "we're just trying to figure out what we're dealing with here."

"Then wait for him to wake up and ask him, and stop assuming I know everything about it," said Raven, still annoyed, "and while you're at it, you can explain why you decided to drag him all the way here instead of taking him to the hospital."

Robin wasn't looking at Raven as she spoke to him accusingly, staring past her instead at the injured teen laying motionless on the table. "Because I think someone sent Cinderblock specifically to get him."

"Why would someone do such a thing?" asked Starfire, echoing the same question that was in all of their minds.

"I don't know," said Robin, "but Cinderblock was looking for something. When we attacked, he started repeating something like 'devastator' over and over again. 'Find devastator.'"

"Wait… what?!" said Beast Boy, looking even more confused than before. "Cinderblock can pronounce that? Cinderblock can TALK?!"

"Apparently," said Cyborg. "We all heard it. He was just babbling the same thing over and over 'fore we finally drove him off. Kept going on about this 'devastator'."

"And you think that this child might be the 'devastator' that Cinderblock was seeking?" asked Starfire. She too had heard Cinderblock's words, but she had presumed it to be some kind of war cry, or another Earth custom she had not yet come across. When she found that the others had as little idea as she did about what Cinderblock had meant, it had come as a rude surprise.

"Maybe," said Robin, "but if he is what Cinderblock was looking for, then we can't risk taking him to the hospital. Cinderblock barely has enough of a brain to keep moving. Someone else had to have sent him to 'find devastator', and he was willing to kill hundreds of people to get him. If we took him to the emergency room, it'd put the entire hospital in danger, and we can't take that risk.

Raven let her annoyance subside at the thought as everyone else fell silent. They all knew Robin was right. If whoever was behind this catastrophe had been willing to cause this much destruction in pursuit of this teen, then wherever they took him would be in extreme danger of becoming the target of another terrible attack. Whoever had orchestrated this certainly wouldn't hesitate at attacking a hospital or any other instillation to get what they wanted. While they had no proof, they couldn't possibly take that kind of a risk when the lives of hundreds if not thousands of civilians were at stake.

Which still left them with far too many questions.

"So... we're just gonna keep him here?" asked Cyborg after a long pause. All of the medical equipment was functioning perfectly, and he had stepped back to survey the work.

"We don't have a choice," said Robin, relatively convinced that this was the right thing to do. "We'll keep watch over him in shifts, and make sure nobody but us knows that he's here. If we're lucky, whoever sent Cinderblock will think he's dead. If we're really lucky, Aqualad or the Coast Guard will catch Cinderblock and we can see what he knows. Either way, I can't think of a more secure place than Titan Tower. We'll see what he has to say for himself when he wakes up."

Beast Boy meanwhile had moved over to the side of the bed, and was looking down at the unconscious teen with a puzzled expression. "Dude, I don't know..." he said, sounding unconvinced. "I mean... how do we know that he's this 'devastator'?" The young teen looked to be perhaps 14 years old at the most, and was scarcely Beast Boy's height. He was slight and thin, and there was no sign that he was anything other than another high school freshman who had gotten into a bad car accident or a particularly ugly after-school fight. There was nothing visible that could be construed as extraordinary about him, no strangely-colored eyes, no abnormal skin tone, no obvious indication that he was anything other than what he appeared to be. "He looks like a civilian to me," said Beast Boy at last, as though making some kind of profound judgment.

"Not everyone with powers looks like one of us," said the hulking half-robotic warrior to the dark green changeling as he stepped up to the other side of the bed, his anger finally corralled now that he had another job to perform. "We don't know he's what blockhead was looking for, but Robin's right. We've gotta keep him here until we do know." Cyborg adjusted a setting on the IV pump as he prepared to bury himself in more technical work, his usual method for combating disappointment and anger. "Y'all go on ahead," he said, "I'll keep watch for a while."

One by one, the other four teens began to file out of the room. Starfire still wore a deeply concerned expression, hesitating several times before leaving, as though she wished to stay as well, just to ensure that the injured boy would recover as Raven had said. She had spent part of the car ride back trying to keep the half-conscious boy from injuring himself further as he literally writhed with what was no doubt agonizing pain, and trying as best she could to assure him that everything was going to be alright. She had no idea if he had heard her or not, but when he had passed out at last she had feared the worst. Despite Raven's assurances (and Raven tended to know what she was talking about with these things), she was still worried that they had overlooked something.

Beast Boy also lingered a moment or two, obviously wanting to know more about this mystery. Cyborg could have laughed if he hadn't still felt like putting his fist through a wall after all the chaos of today. Beast Boy was never content to leave well enough alone, not like Robin, the detective, who buried himself in research and investigations, but more like a kid who enjoyed finding things out that he wasn't supposed to know, an ironic trait for someone with the attention span of a fruit fly who by his own admission, never made much use of his brain. There was however, quite obviously nothing more to find out about this teen until he woke up or Robin came up with some kind of breakthrough.

Raven looked as if she wished to know more as well, but her expression was not one of curiosity. She looked suspicious, as though this was all some kind of darker plot the details of which she had not yet discerned. Cyborg normally couldn't pretend to know what Raven was thinking at any given moment, nobody could, but right now he knew that she was thinking of the last time that an apparently harmless teen with unknown powers had been brought into the tower, and exactly what had resulted from that disaster. Terra hadn't been far from any of their thoughts in the couple of weeks that had passed since her death, and to put it mildly, this whole situation wasn't helping them to get over the experience. Raven however was no fool. She knew that there was no basis yet to really worry, and that it was pointless to speculate about what might happen in the future. After all, if there was anything Raven was good at, it was parsing out what was pointless and what really wasn't.

Robin stayed the longest of all, his mask shielding his eyes and preventing Cyborg or anyone else from figuring out what he was thinking. As it was, he was running over the unanswered questions in his head. Who was this kid? If he was the 'devestator' Cinderblock had been talking about, then how had Cinderblock known to go after him and where to find him? And why hadn't THEY heard of him? For that matter, where HAD Cinderblock found him? Robin vaguely remembered that the building Cinderblock had brought down atop the injured teen was some kind of government building, but a mundane one, an office building or a processing center of some kind, not something high-profile like a weapons lab. He'd never thought it important to find out what went on there, and now he needed to know. But once he found out, what was he going to do? What about once the injured boy woke up? They couldn't very well keep him locked in the basement of Titan Tower until they had solved the mystery, especially if he had family somewhere in the city.

As he turned finally to go, it occurred to Robin that Batman would have probably known precisely what to do here, and how to puzzle this all out. Not for the first time, he reminded himself that he wasn't Batman.

He had resolved to go straight to the evidence room and begin researching all the various questions that he still had, but no sooner had he left the medical bay, than he found Starfire waiting for him. Starfire's look was one of worry as Robin walked over to her. Something was bothering her, and Robin could guess what. None of the Titans liked to see innocents hurt, but all the others had ways of dealing with it. Raven would meditate, Cyborg and Robin would plunge himself into their respective work, and Beast Boy would bury himself in a video game or some insane antic. Starfire however did not have the same distractions to fall back on.

"What's wrong?" asked Robin, though he was certain he knew the answer.

"I am merely..." Starfire trailed off, unable to find the words to explain properly. Robin smiled slightly and placed a hand on her shoulder as she lowered her head.

"I know," he said. All that destruction and death couldn't help but affect someone as emotional as Starfire, to say nothing of the helpless sensation of watching someone in pain and being unable to do anything about it. "But we did what we could. We stopped him from hurting any more people. Sometimes that's the best we can do."

"I am aware..." said Starfire, but she still did not raise her head. So it was something else then.

"Look, Star... Raven said that he'd be OK. He'll probably be awake in a few hours. I know it was hard in the car, but you probably saved his..."

"No," she said, "that is not it either." This time she raised her head, and Robin saw that she looked almost afraid. This one puzzled him. Starfire was certainly caring and emotional, but she wasn't often scared of anything. "It is... I am... worried that one day it will be one of us laying on a bed attached to machines, and the rest of us will be wondering if that person will ever wake up again."

So that was it. Robin placed his other hand on Starfire's other shoulder. "We have a dangerous job, but it's our responsibility to keep going," said Robin, knowing that she already knew this, but figuring it couldn't hurt to say anyhow. He hated to see Starfire upset or sad. He hated to see any of his team upset or sad, but with Starfire it was particularly painful for him. Perhaps that was because she was upset so infrequently, or perhaps it was some other reason...

Starfire nodded in ascent. "You are right... but it is just that with the death of Terra, and her attempts to kill all of us, and now this attack, it seems... more likely than it once was. It seems as if things are getting more and more dangerous for all of us... and... I am worried."

Robin was quiet for a moment as he thought of his own fears of losing one of his team, his family. This was a fear they all had, and that there was no real cure for, only temporary relief. Fortunately, it didn't take much to get over it for a little while, or at least to push it away to the back of her head where it should have been. "So am I," he said, "but we all know that we can count on each other to do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening. That's more than most people have. And we've made it this far alright."

"Yes," she said, and slowly her mood seemed to brighten back up. The fear seemed to leave her eyes, or at least recede, and was replaced by her normal look of something between wonder and happiness, "we have." She smiled, and Robin remembered why her smile always seemed to make him feel better. "I am sorry," she said, "after today, I did not wish to add to your worries. I just have trouble sometimes when I see others hurt who could have been us if not for chance and luck."

"It's fine Star," said Robin as he grinned softly, "we all do. But it's not up to chance and luck. Whatever this attack means, whatever's coming, we're as ready for it as anyone can be."

"I suppose so," she said, and this time she sounded as though she believed it. "And after all, it is foolish to worry about what might happen when we do not even know what is happening."

Starfire was perhaps the only person who could make their confusion and uncertainty somehow sound like a hopeful sign, but then Starfire had always been good at finding the silver lining of any circumstance. Robin was still marveling at this capacity when she leaned in and hugged him briefly, hard enough to squeeze the wind out of him, though it was probably no more than a light embrace to her alien strength. "Besides, we would not be a very good team if we did not worry about one another, would we?"

Robin realized that that was what he was trying to think of to say to her. "No, we wouldn't." he said as she released him and he breathed again. Starfire seemed fully back to normal, another sign that perhaps the Titans had taken all of the chaos of the past month better than he had originally thought.

Starfire smiled again. "Come with me," she said as she took Robin's hand and walked back towards the elevator to the common room of Titan Tower, dragging him along with her before he could figure out what was happening.

"Where are we going?" asked Robin.

"On my planet, when people are upset about something, they eat pudding of sadness to drive the painful thoughts from their mind," Robin suppressed an urge to run screaming. There were in fact more disgusting substances on Earth than Starfire's pudding of sadness, but most of them were used for stripping the paint from walls. To Robin's everlasting gratitude however, Starfire continued. "However I am told that on this planet, people eat something called 'cream of ice' instead when they feel bad. I believe friend Cyborg keeps some cream of ice in the freezer. Let us see if it will drive our worries away!"

Robin relaxed slightly, as he wondered if he shouldn't be busy trying to find out the answers to all these questions they still had hanging over them. Starfire however did not seem particularly inclined to take no for an answer, and Robin had to admit that ice cream sounded pretty good right about now. He caught himself up with Starfire as they walked hand-in-hand towards the tower's kitchen. "And when we are done," she said, "perhaps we can get the others together and see if it will help them as well?"

Robin merely smiled. "That sounds good to me," and even as he said it, he resolved that he could probably wait a few hours before going to the evidence room. After all, some things were more important even than mysteries...


	3. Through the Looking Glass

**Disclaimer:** I own none of the Teen Titans, nor do I own DC comics. One day...**  
**

**Author's Note:** I'd once again like to thank everyone who has so kindly been reviewing this work-in-progress. I sent private replies to each one of you that I could, but thanks to the infernal private messaging system's breakdown, I think they likely only arrived in your Email boxes today, if they even arrived at all. However now that the system is back up (YAY!) I will hopefully be able to get through to everyone with something approaching punctuality.

Anyhow, I would just like to say that for those who were crying for more action, I can only assure you that I have plenty of action planned, but that in my opinion, action is most effective when properly set up. Accordingly I'm going to have to ask you to bear with my story as I move through it, and simply assure you that it is coming, and hopefully will be all the more effective for the wait. Obviously if you disagree, feel free to let me hear about it in reviews. As to those who agree, the same applies. Reviews, even a small number, are the fuel that keeps the engine running, and I assure you it is a LOT easier to write another 5,000 word chapter when I have a review or two to look at than when I don't. So please, whatever your opinion, just stop in to say a few words. I appreciate them more than I can ever describe.

So thanks again, and here's the next installment!

* * *

**Chapter 3: Through the Looking Glass**

_"In a mad world, only the mad are sane."_

- Akira Kurosowa

**O-O-O**

There was debris. There was lots of debris. Concrete and plaster and drywall, all around him, all over him. He could feel and taste and smell every bit of sparking wiring and half-slagged metal, every piece of shattered cement and broken rebar and spilled asbestos. He wondered hazily if he should stop breathing or not, and then realized that he hurt too much to care.

There was dust in the air, thick enough to choke on, blinding and stinging his eyes. He couldn't rub them. He couldn't free his arms. One was snapped at an angle it shouldn't have been able to attain; the other was stuck under a forty-pound block of roofing material. The pain forced tears to his eyes even as he hissed through clenched teeth. Was that horrible weight on his chest from the rubble or from his broken ribs? Or was it both? Half of him was numb, and the other half wracked with pain. He wasn't sure which he preferred.

There was blood in his mouth, blood on his shirt, blood on the rubble. Was that all his? He wondered idly how much he had in him to lose. Or was there someone else in here, crushed to pulp beneath him? He found himself realizing that it would probably be next to impossible to get the blood out of his clothes, and for some reason this made him angrier than the fact that the building had collapsed on him. He retained just enough lucidity to recognize this thought as weird.

The ground was shaking. Sounds from outside? Rescuers? He heard rhythmic crashes as something dug into the rubble. He knew he should shout. He knew he couldn't. He could barely force himself to take another breath. The weight on his chest was crushing, or perhaps it was the ribs sticking into his lungs. He knew he would be screaming now if he could manage it, rescuers or no.

Suddenly a wrenching pain tore through his chest, strong enough to cause his vision to blur and make him gag on his own blood. And then there was something grabbing him, lifting him up out of the rubble, something huge. A crane? A steam shovel? He forced his eyes to open. He made out a blurry outline of something huge and grey and humanoid-looking. Sounds. Words. 'Devastator'. His broken ribs bored into him like hot pokers as the thing lifted him free of the rubble and he moaned softly, the best he could do. He felt himself moving now, being carried somewhere. Where? Did it matter? The grip on his chest and waist felt like concrete. He couldn't focus enough to tell what it actually was.

There was more shouting now, and explosions. He'd know that sound anywhere. Whatever was holding him shook violently. His ribs jarred against the concrete fingers, and this time he did scream. Screaming made the pain worse. And then there was a sharp impact and he was falling. He landed hard, on his side, on bricks and pieces of concrete and rebar. There was no longer anything pinning him down, but he still couldn't move, couldn't do anything but twitch and writhe on the broken ground, and painfully force one agonizing breath after another down his lungs. He had long passed the point where he knew why he was doing it. He didn't know if he was alive or dead. All he knew was that he was in excruciating pain, that moving made it worse, and so did staying still.

The world around him was melting into a uniform grey in which nothing solid could be discerned, only echoes and shadows. He saw figures moving around him. He heard sounds, whispers or cries heard from miles away. He felt something wrapping around him and lifting him again, something soft and malleable and remarkably cold, and yet his agony was such that even this was torture. He cried out, or rather he thought he did, writhing and twisting involuntarily, which only added to the torment. After a few moments' movement, the soft cold material melted away, leaving him lying on something that could have been leather, but by now he was fading in and out of consciousness, his feeble, spastic movements still bringing shocks of terrible agony to him. And as he felt the leather cushion beneath him shake and vibrate as though a motor were being run far below it, the last thing he heard before he mercifully passed out was the very faint sound of someone's voice, telling him to hold on...

**O-O-O**

A soft buzzing sound, like an insect droning above his head, was the first indication he had that he was actually awake.

For an unknown period of time, he had lain there, atop something that wasn't a bed or a table but some strange combination of the two, fading in and out of consciousness, listening to sounds he knew that he knew, but couldn't immediately recognize, and listening to his subconscious debate whether or not to open his eyes. But when slowly he noticed the buzzing sound, it very, very gradually pulled him into the world of the living.

And so David woke up.

He was laying on a hospital bed, of that he was sure, for it had metal guardrails around the sides to make certain he didn't inadvertently roll over and off it. Overhead was a single fluorescent light bulb, buzzing softly as it cast a gentle blue glow over the bed and the myriad of machines that surrounded it. David moved his eyes to look around, not yet daring to turn his head. Medical equipment was scattered in every direction, much of it connected to sensors, tubes, wires, and IV drips, and all of it plugged into his body somehow. And as he followed the tubes and cords with his eyes, he slowly realized that he could feel his limbs and torso again, and that the pain had died down significantly, a smoldering ember rather than a roaring bonfire, suppressed by the aftereffects of some kind of drug.

For several minutes he lay still, still trying to puzzle out where he was, and how he had gotten there. Initially he had thought he was in a hospital, but the more his brain cleared, the more confused he became. There was no sign of any doctors, nurses, or orderlies, no light other than the single glowing bulb above his head, and beyond the circle of machines there was a dark gloom that could have been that of a cave or a basement. The air was cold, cold enough to feel even through the blankets draped over him. And from somewhere, far or near he couldn't tell, there was the soft clinking sound of tools being used.

Apprehension began to build up in his throat as he tried to make sense of what was happening. He was no longer in the center. That much he was certain of. The center had been flattened and destroyed. He wasn't in a hospital either. So where was he? And who was making that noise? He waited another minute, breathing slowly and trying to marshal his energy to move, feeling that somehow he had to figure out where he was and what was going on.

With a soft groan, David managed to lift his head slightly off the pillow before gently working his way up to a sitting position. He winced as he felt sharp pains stab through his chest and abdomen, but to his surprise, his ribs, while they still ached, no longer seemed to be broken. His left arm was encased in a plaster and metal cast, but he could still move his shoulder, and with his other arm to help, he slowly managed to sit up in the bed. He rested then a moment, all the while remarking that he felt better than he should have, before taking a good look around, peering off into the darkness, looking for some sign or clue as to where he was.

"Hello?" he managed to croak out weakly, his throat still scratchy from the dust and debris he had inhaled, and his voice weak and thin. "Is anybody there?"

He doubted that his voice was loud enough to alert an attentive cat to his presence, however no sooner had he spoken than he heard a loud "CLANG" from the same direction as the tools, followed by a muffled curse. There was a shuffling noise as something was hurriedly put down, and then footsteps, heavy footsteps, approaching the bed. Metal-shod boots crunched against the cement floor as something, something big, loomed into the shadows just beyond the periphery of the lit area surrounding the bed. David felt his heart starting to speed up as he suddenly wondered whether or not speaking had been a terrible idea. He slid backwards almost without meaning to, pivoting around painfully and slowly to face whatever the dimly-visible figure was even as he glanced around for something to use as a weapon, as though whatever had flattened the center would be repelled by an empty glass test tube or a tin medical kit.

But the figure beyond the light did not advance. Instead it stopped and placed a hand on one of the machines that ringed the bed, turning it around to read the screen. Even as it did so, it spoke, in a voice that was steady and cautious, as though whoever was speaking didn't wish to cause undue alarm.

"Easy man," said the voice as whoever it was read the figures on the medical screen. "Take it easy. You got pretty badly banged up back there." The figure slid the machine back around to face David again, and walked around the periphery of the light radius, remaining out of direct sight. David's gaze followed as it checked one machine after another. "Didn't think you'd be up yet," said the figure, "What's your name?"

The voice was deep and calm and had a trace of a black american accent to it, though the vague outline of the figure speaking was larger and bulkier than any human. David ignored the question as he painfully turned around to face the unknown person once more, and asked one of his own, his voice sounding raspy and weak even to his own ears. "Where am I? What... happened?"

"It's alright," said the voice. "You're OK now. You're in Titans' Tower. That place you were in before got trashed. We brought you here to patch you up. How you feelin'?"

"Where?" David had never heard of a place called Titans' Tower, but then that wasn't surprising. Everything else was.

"Not from around here, are ya?" said the voice with a chuckle. "Don't worry about that now. You're gonna be OK." The figure stooped and opened a drawer of some sort, drawing what looked like a large syringe out of it. It turned to face him and stepped forward towards the bed. "You were in bad shape when we found you but we pretty much..."

David's eyes nearly burst from their sockets as the figure came into view. It was a man, or rather most of a man, but a HUGE man, towering over the bed, the equipment, and everything else. The man was black, built like a football player or a bodybuilder, but half of his body was... was just _missing_. Where the other half should of been was instead a series of metallic limbs and plates containing robotic hands, eyes and other less identifiable instruments, all polished blue and silver. In his right hand he held a syringe filled with a green liquid which he extended towards David.

Several things happened at once. David gave a sort of stunned yelp as he scrambled backwards as best he could, dislodging half a dozen pieces of medical gear attached to his body in various places. As the large half-metal man hesitated and drew back, David, seemingly without thinking, extended his hand forward towards the man, palm outwards, as though trying to ward off a blow. Instead of a blow however, the man with the blue and silver parts suddenly felt the syringe in his hand tremble. He glanced down at it to find that the liquid inside the needle had frozen solid, expanding and cracking the glass container that held the medicine, and then, suddenly and without warning, there was a flash, and the entire syringe exploded in his hand.

Broken glass flew in every direction, pinging off of the man's plated surface and scattering all across the floor. Several larger fragments landed next to the startled young teen sitting atop the bed, who seemed just now to be realizing what he had done. The man took several steps back, dropping what was left of the demolished syringe and holding both hands up. "Whoa!" he said, "whoa, take it easy man! Nobody's here to hurt you." David did not appear to move at all as the half-robot continued. "Look, I didn't mean to startle you. Just calm down."

David took several long breaths, his gaze fixed on the giant, and he slowly lowered his hand back onto the bed. "Sorry..." he mumbled nervously, wondering what on earth had possessed him to do that, and automatically starting to think up excuses to explain it as something mundane rather than what it actually was. The gaze in the other figure's eyes was one of surprise, but also of brief pain, as though he had suddenly been reminded of something unpleasant from a long time ago. David felt a twinge of guilt as he caught the glance, and he lowered his eyes a bit. Whoever this guy was, he didn't appear to be the same person who had destroyed the center, and from the look of things, he was used to that sort of reaction. The larger figure seemed to nod, and then gingerly took a few steps forward to the side of the bed, moving slowly and deliberately, with no sudden moves, being careful not to startle David further. Slowly the robotic man lowered his hands and then extended one to David.

"Name's Cyborg," he said, "Sorry about giving you a start there. Most people in Jump are used to... me... by now."

David hesitantly raised his own hand and gently shook the metallic one, trying not to wonder if his hand was about to be crushed to a pulp. "I'm sorry," he repeated, now feeling somewhat sheepish at having essentially panicked at the sight of Cyborg. "I'm... not from Jump." It was a lame excuse, but it was something, and the larger figure didn't seem to have taken it personally.

"Heh, go figure man, so what's your name? Or do they call you Bomb Squad or something?"

"David," he said, smiling a bit, not at the admittedly lame joke, but at the fact that Cyborg seemed to find the explosion of the syringe more worthy of a laugh than an interrogation. Normally he would be falling all over himself to explain the exploding syringe as a chemical reaction or a flaw in the glass, or perhaps even blame the robotic giant for having squeezed it too hard, but somehow he suspected that whoever Cyborg was, he was used to things more or less as odd as this, and after all, the interrogation might be coming later. He accordingly decided to pretend nothing had happened. "David Foster."

Cyborg smiled as well and released David's hand. "Well good to meet you," he said as he stepped back and checked on a machine that had begun emitting some kind of loud beeping noise. He pressed a button on the machine and the beeping stopped. "So you feeling OK? Like I was saying, you were pretty banged up when we found you, but it looks like you're doing alright."

David took a second to ascertain just how he felt. He felt tired and sore, not to mention terribly confused, but on the whole, better than he felt he had any right to be feeling, given what had happened. Then again, what _had_ happened? His memories were unclear, just flashes of debris and pain and dim sounds that he couldn't quite make out. "I think," he said, pausing and coughing to clear his throat, "I think I'm OK." He sat up a bit straighter just to see if he could, and was rewarded with another twinge of pain in his stomach. He winced and hissed, but stayed sitting up, and after a moment or two, it passed. "What happened?"

Cyborg shook his head. "We were kinda hoping you'd tell us that, man. You remember anything?"

David closed his eyes as he tried to recall the details of what had occurred. He had been walking to the cafeteria, he remembered, hurrying because he knew it closed at 2:30. There was a tremor, then a violent crash, and the floor seemed to give way underneath him, or had the ceiling caved in? He remembered thinking it was an earthquake at first, but then he had seen something moving outside the window. Something huge. And it had turned towards him and seen him, and let loose some kind of a shout and then...

He forced himself to think. Everything was fragmentary. He remembered running down a broken hallway which seemed to be coming apart behind him. He remembered flames and screaming and the sounds of shattering glass and collapsing walls. He remembered fear, a terrible bone-chilling fear, fear that whatever it was, was coming for him, was chasing him, even if he didn't know why he felt it. He remembered finding his way blocked by a massive piece of shattered masonry that had fallen through the roof, and that he had hesitated before it, not sure if he should risk doing... it.

But he had done it. He remembered that part clearly. He remembered watching the chunk of masonry melt before his eyes into its constituent parts. He remembered the network of glowing pinpoints of energy that comprised the smashed rock, remembered reaching for them with his mind, remembered forcing the energy inward, towards the core of the blockage. He remembered the fear creeping into the borders of his concentration, reminding him that he was taking too long, and remembered willing the energy to compress further and faster, and then finally releasing it in a flash. He remembered seeing the masonry fly to pieces like an over-wound pocket watch. He also remembered realizing that it was too late. The explosion brought something down from overhead, and then he couldn't remember any more.

"No," he said finally, opening his eyes again. "Not really. Just... that there was something trying to break into the center. Something big and..."

"The center?" asked Cyborg.

"The building," replied David, "the one that..." David's voice went hollow as his overloaded brain, forced to conjure back up the images of the disaster, refused to stop processing. The center had collapsed. The entire center had collapsed. With a burst of horror, David realized that there had to have been five hundred people inside! He'd only been a few yards from the cafeteria when the roof caved in, and the cafeteria was always packed at that hour! David suddenly remembered the blood that had been splashed so liberally all over the rubble, the same dried blood now encrusted on his shirt, and he realized that it hadn't been his. It hadn't all been his.

A sudden wave of nausea flowed through him, and he turned pale as he doubled back over onto his hands and knees atop the bed. He'd only been in the center for a couple of days, but the sobering realization that every single person he had met there was probably dead sent his head spinning and summoned up a violent spasm from within his stomach. His entire body shook as he attempted to cough up the contents of an empty stomach, to no avail. His head swam through images of fire and destruction, the sounds of people screaming, and a smell, a strange burnt smell that he realized was probably that of roasting flesh. The realization made him wretch again, and this time he nearly fell off the bed. He closed his eyes and clenched them shut, digging his hands into the bed sheets and gripping them tightly, waiting for the spell to pass, trying to push the images and the smell aside. It might have only been a second later that he felt a huge metallic hand gently patting him on the shoulder, but then it might just as easily have been an hour.

"I'm... I'm sorry..." said David, not entirely certain what it was that he was sorry about.

"It's alright man," replied Cyborg with what sounded like genuine understanding, and David slowly felt the spell passing, giving him time to wonder just who this guy was. He was no doctor, nor was he a rescue worker in a normal sense, that much was obvious. Yet he and whoever these 'others' were had obviously saved his life, but how? And why? Yet as he slowly managed to sit back up, various bits of information began to gel in his head. A place called 'Titan Tower', a giant man made of steel with a call-sign instead of a codename, a rescue unlooked for, a remote location filled with advanced equipment, vague references to the 'others'... it hit him all of a sudden with the force of a brickbat. Why hadn't he realized it before? Cyborg was a superhero. He was in a superheroes' lair.

And just as his face was flipping from horror to stunned wonder, things suddenly became even weirder.

The overhead lights all came on at once, filling the room with a brilliance that appeared dazzling compared with the darkness before. David now saw that he was in the center of a large open room, at the side of which was a door that was presently slid open, and standing in the doorway was a green elven vampire.

... or something.

David blinked, slowly and deliberately, and when that failed to dispel or clarify the image before him he did it again. The figure in the doorway was not giant but small and wiry, humanoid, just like Cyborg, but that was where the similarities ended. It was a boy about David's age, but whose skin was a uniform dark green, green like an emerald or a field of ripe grass. His hair was also green, though darker, and cut short, and his ears were pointed like those of an elf or a Vulcan from Star Trek. He had fangs, glistening and sharp-looking, long enough to protrude from his mouth even when closed, and as though this wasn't enough of a strange sight, he was dressed in a purple and black one-piece outfit with light grey gloves and heavy purple boots with velcro fasteners that looked almost like those of a skier. Had he been in a normal frame of mind, David might have reacted with fear or shock, but dulled as his brain was with all of the surprises and trauma of the last few minutes, the best he could manage was to sit on the bed and blink stupidly at something which literally made no sense. He had not, after all, discounted the possibility that he was hallucinating.

But if the figure was a hallucination, it was a damned convincing one. In the split second it took for David to run through all of this in his head, the green one entered the room, and David saw that he held a large plastic bowl in one hand from which steam was rising. "Brought you some chili, Cy!" said the newcomer with what David could have sworn was a mischievous look. Before either Cyborg or David could reply however, the emerald teen noticed that David was no longer asleep and broke into a wide grin as he confidently bounded over towards them. "Dude! Why didn't you tell us he was awake!"

"He just woke up." replied Cyborg, neither he nor the green one addressing David directly, which was just fine by David as he was still having trouble convincing himself he hadn't completely lost his mind. Cyborg eagerly stared at the food in the smaller teen's hand. "Tell me you didn't make that."

The younger one shook his head. "Nope, no tofu this time. It's even got hamburger in it. I didn't want any, but we all thought since you were stuck down here for a while..." he offered the bowl to Cyborg, who snatched it up eagerly and turned to dig a spoon out of a compartment somewhere while the green teen turned to David with a grin that was _definitely_ mischievous before quickly walking over to the side of the bed. "So what's up, dude?" asked the green one, all swagger and self-satisfaction as he extended a gloved hand, speaking as though he had known David for years, and that nothing was at all abnormal. David managed to weakly shake the green boy's hand even as he continued speaking. "I'm Beast Boy. Let me guess, they call you Bomb..."

"I already told him that one." interrupted Cyborg, who had finally found a spoon, or rather an ice cream scoop, which for him would serve. "He thought it was just as stupid as Raven did."

"Dude!" said Beast Boy with an offended tone, "That was my joke! Make up your own!" Cyborg smirked as he dug into his chili and Beast Boy turned back to David with a feigned look of disappointment. "It wasn't that bad, was it?"

By now David was starting to wonder if he was actually in a lunatic asylum, and the blank stare on his face betraying complete and total mystification was apparent enough to cause Beast Boy to tone it down a bit. The green teen smiled as he adopted a slightly more relaxed gaze. "So what _do _they call you?"

"Er..." hesitated David, by now having trouble remembering his own name with any degree of certainty. "I'm David."

Beast Boy seemed puzzled by the reply. "Oh, I meant your superhero name."

David was equally puzzled if not more so. "I'm not a superhero."

"You're not?" Beast Boy shot a quizzical glance over at Cyborg, who was too engrossed in shoveling the chili down his throat to reply. "Raven said you were a psychokewhatsit..." David did not recognize the term, and merely shook his head in non-comprehension. Beast Boy tried again. "You can... make stuff move or change or blow up or something?"

This time there was a instant's recognition, followed for David by a cold wave of fear that rolled over him like an ocean breaker. They _knew_. How? The syringe thing had happened only a second ago, and prior to that he had been so careful! Had Cyborg placed some kind of a call to Beast Boy or whoever this Raven was? Had they known all along? Was _that _why he was here, in whatever this place was? They thought he was a superhero? He could have laughed if he hadn't been so terrified of the prospect that these people knew about... what he could do.

His thoughts and abject terror were rudely interrupted as Cyborg suddenly emitted a sound that was some kind of cross between a steam whistle and a roar. David jumped in astonishment and whirled around to see Cyborg spitting the chili out of his mouth like a machine gun spitting bullets. "GYYYYEEEAAAACCCCHHH!" he shouted, or something like it, and as he did so, Beast Boy exploded into laughter and fell over backwards literally rolling on the floor. Cyborg whirled around to face Beast Boy. "What the hell did you _put_ in that!" he bellowed, loud enough to shake the machines around the room.

Beast Boy was laughing so hard that he could barely speak, but managed to cough out an explanation. "It wasn't me!"

"Like HELL it wasn't!" shouted Cyborg as he threw the bowl of chili at Beast Boy. David barely had time to gasp as the green teenager suddenly morphed before his eyes into a small rodent, easily avoiding the flying Tupperware, before returning to his human form. Suddenly David understood where Beast Boy's name was derived from.

"Dude, you asked if I made it, and I told you I didn't! You never asked if Starfire did!"

Cyborg stopped dead in his tracks with a horrified look on his face. "You let Starfire make chili and didn't warn me about it? That's just _wrong_!"

Beast Boy seemed disinclined to agree, but fortunately for David's poor, battered sanity, the green shape-shifter seemed to switch gears all of a sudden as he sprang back to his feet. "Hey! Now that you're awake, you should come up and meet the others."

Cyborg answered before David could. "He still needs to rest man. He's been through a lot."

Beast Boy would not be deterred. "He'll be fine Cy! We not gonna grill him, just ask him some stuff. Besides, I want to hear the story, and Robin wants to know what Cinderblock wanted."

Cyborg was still unconvinced. "I don't know man, you feeling up to that?"

It took David a few seconds to register that the last question was aimed at him. He thought about it for a second, and to his surprise, he found that the pain in his chest and stomach had all but evaporated, and while he still felt pretty weak, he thought he probably could walk a bit.

"Yeah," he said, forcing all the insanity aside as he slowly slid off the bed and stood up a bit unsteadily, "yeah I think so. How far are we going?"

Beast Boy grinned. "Just to the elevator and up to the common room. You'll be fine, c'mon." Beast Boy turned and walked to the door of the room, glancing back and gesturing for David to follow. David took a second to recover his breath and then slowly followed Beast Boy out of the room and down a long hallway towards what was apparently the elevator as Cyborg kept close behind, making certain he wasn't about to fall. Every so often he had to stop for a second and grab a hold of something as a spell of dizziness or nausea would hit him, but it always passed quickly and he pressed ahead. As he walked, with Beast Boy chattering away ahead of him pointing various things out, and Cyborg right behind, saying nothing but watching in case he passed out all of a sudden, he tried to make some kind of sense out of what he had just seen. He had about a hundred questions of his own right now, not the least of which where in relation to where he was and what he was doing here. One of the few things he had managed to decide on however, was that whoever the 'others' were, and whatever they wanted with him, he would have a better chance of getting some answers by agreeing to meet them than he would remaining in the impromptu medical bay that Cyborg had set up down here in the basement. However, despite all the questions and confusion, as David entered the elevator alongside Beast Boy and Cyborg, all he could think about was the fact that all of a sudden, everything had gotten extremely complicated.

And somewhere in the back of his mind was the nagging feeling that this was only the beginning...


	4. An Object in Motion

**Disclaimer:** I don't own Teen Titans, nor do I own Monty Python. You'll see why I mentioned that in a little bit.

**Author's Note:** I am deeply humbled by the reviews I have been getting, and I cannot thank everyone who has read and commented on my story enough (though I'm trying to). This chapter below is a bit longer than the previous ones, but I'm actually rather pleased with the way it turned out (which is uncommon). Please, if you have anything at all to say in regards to it or the story in general, no matter how harsh or mundane, do not hesitate to leave a review. I know that there are authors out there who refuse to update unless they get a certain quota of reviews, and I do not hold at all to that philosophy, but it cannot be denied that a single review (to say nothing of many) does wonders for galvanizing one's desire to continue the story. In consequence, don't feel obligated to review, but do rest assured that I appreciate any feedback more than I can ever say.

A couple of minor notes for this one: For those who actually DO have a background in physics, I beg your indulgeance if the explanation below does not make sense. Do bear in mind that the character giving the explanation does not have such a background either, and so it is liable to be somewhat inaccurate. In addition, I will be on vacation for the better part of a week or so starting tomorrow, so I will likely be unable to proceed with chapter 5 until my return. At the very least it should give people a chance to catch up in the story, if they should wish to.

* * *

**Chapter 4:** **An Object in Motion**

_"Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence. True friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation."_

- George Washington

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Cyborg stood against the wall, just watching the proceedings as the young kid they had rescued sat in a chair with his hands cupped around a large mug of some kind of hot cider, and stared down into it for a few moments. Robin had just asked him just what the building that Cinderblock had flattened was, and Cyborg could tell by the teen's reluctance that nobody was going to like the answer.

"It was a foster care center."

Cyborg cursed under his breath at the news, Beast Boy actually winced and groaned, for once without irony or humor, and Cyborg's enhanced hearing could detect Raven's sharp intake of breath as her eyes narrowed ever so slightly. Robin didn't appear outwardly affected by the news, he had probably suspected something like this, but Cyborg noticed that his grip on the coffee mug in front of him had suddenly tightened, and that his knuckles were white from the strain. Cyborg knew that they were all thinking the same thing. Of all the things that Cinderblock could have chosen to attack…

Only Starfire seemed relatively unperturbed, looking to her friends with concern at their reactions. "Please friends," she asked, "what is a 'foster care center'? Is it a place of great importance?"

"It's a fancy word for an orphanage, Star," said Cyborg evenly. Seeing that this did not lessen her confusion, Cyborg continued to explain, "It's where they take care of kids who don't have any parents."

Starfire may have been ignorant of the terminology, but the explanation was clear enough, and her eyes opened wide. "You mean that it housed children?!" she exclaimed in abject horror. Nobody answered her. "But why were we not informed that such a place existed?! We could have taken better care that it was protected from…"

"It only opened a couple days ago," said the young teen sitting at the table with the mug of cider monotonely. The kid looked shell shocked, and his voice was hollow and quiet. Cyborg could tell that his hands were shaking almost imperceptibly, visible only in the vibration of the liquid in his mug as he held it with both hands. He couldn't really blame him. "They hadn't transferred most of the kids in yet. Just a dozen or so of us."

'And you're the only one left,' thought Cyborg. He'd been passively scanning the radio reports from the media and the EMTs. The casualties from the incident had been remarkably light, with less than forty dead instead of the hundreds that had been feared. Rather than blaming the Titans for allowing such a thing to happen, the media was rather praising them to the skies for having driven the monster off before it could cause any more damage, declaring that but for their intervention, there would have been many times more fatalities.

Cyborg privately thought that the low body count had more to do with the solidity of the construction and Cinderblock's single-mindedness than anything they had done, but he was grateful nonetheless for the break. Robin would take on enough of the blame by himself, in private, without some columnist insinuating that they had let the city down, to say nothing of the fact that Cyborg had been cursing himself blue for several hours over the same exact issue. The difference, Cyborg knew, was that he'd get over it. Robin never got over these things. And the fact that the police and Aqualad's searches had turned up no sign of Cinderblock wasn't helping.

At present however, the Boy Wonder was staring at the lone survivor of the disaster, his thoughts as inscrutable as ever.

"Can you think of any reason why someone would want to send Cinderblock after you?"

The question made the kid raise his head sharply, looking confused. "After me?" he asked, "I thought you said this 'Cinderblock' person just attacked the center."

"Cinderblock was looking for something or someone," explained Robin, "Someone called 'Devastator'. Have you ever heard that name before?"

Cyborg watched as David shook his head in puzzlement. "I remember somebody saying 'Devastator' over and over, but I thought that was _his_ name. Cinderblock's name." The kid paused and glanced around at the other four superheroes. "You think that was _me_?"

"Maybe," replied Robin as the others remained silent. "You've never gone by that name?"

"No," said David almost plaintively, desperately trying to retain some sense of reason in this whole mess, "I told you, I'm not a… whatever you people are. I'm not a superhero. I don't have a nickname or a call sign like that. I've never heard of anyone or anything called 'Devastator' in my life!"

Robin remained motionless as the bewildered teen looked to each of the Titans in turn, confusion and fear written so plainly on his face that even Starfire could read it. Each of the five Titans looked back at David, Starfire with an expression of sympathy and concern, Raven with one of suspicion and doubt, Robin with a calculating stare that betrayed nothing, Beast Boy with a soft grin (how the hell did Beast Boy manage to smile in these circumstances? Whatever he and Raven had talked about had obviously worked), and Cyborg himself with what he hoped looked like understanding, but given his messed up features, to say nothing of his mood, it could easily have been the opposite.

Cyborg could tell that David had many questions of his own to ask, and so when he met David's furtive glance, he gave him the slightest of nods, as if to say that it was OK to ask. David did so.

"Look, I probably should already know this," he said hesitantly, "but who are you guys? I mean you gave me your names and all but I mean… are you some kind of a team? What is this place?"

"We're the Teen Titans dude!" replied Beast Boy instantly with another smile, and when that name drew a blank stare Beast Boy raised his eyebrow in confusion of his own. "You mean you've never heard of us?"

"I've heard of him…" said David hesitantly, glancing back at Robin for a second. "But I didn't know that he was in Jump City. I didn't know anyone was. Like I said, I've only been here for a couple days."

'Hell of a welcome,' thought Cyborg, as Beast Boy apparently decided that this was a dangerous lapse in David's education and began giving a rather exaggerated and animated description of each Titan's powers and abilities. He was in the middle of describing Cyborg's sonic cannon as the next best thing to the Death Star when Raven cut him off.

"I've got a question," she asked in her usual deadpan tone. Beast Boy fell silent as David turned around to face her, visibly hesitant. Raven could be very intimidating to those who didn't know her... and even more so to those who did.

"You say you don't know why Cinderblock would come after you?" David nodded, the tone of Raven's voice already putting him slightly on-edge. "Are you sure there's _nothing_ you can do that someone powerful and ruthless would be interested in?"

Robin leaned forward a bit onto the table, and Beast Boy turned eagerly to hear the explanation even as Raven's sarcasm-laden comment seemed to wilt the young teen in the proverbial hot seat. He lowered his head a bit, almost guiltily, but said nothing, until finally Robin spoke in a relatively calm voice. "We need to know," he said, "we need to know what Cinderblock was after and why, or we won't be able to stop him from killing again."

David looked up at Robin nervously, still obviously reluctant, hesitating between whether to tell them or not. His glance fell on Cyborg, who walked over to the nervous teenager slowly. "We're not gonna tell anybody else," he said, guessing at what the issue was.

Beast Boy also approached and placed a hand on the boy's shoulder as a friendly gesture of support. "Besides dude," he said with a lighthearted grin, "it can't be weirder than any of us," Cyborg knew that wasn't _necessarily_ true, but given the fact that it was Beast Boy saying it, he had to admit that it was pretty unlikely.

David for his part lowered his head again and took several long, slow breaths, as though trying to work up the courage to admit what it was. Beast Boy continued to grin in anticipation of seeing something impressive, but Cyborg knew how hard this could be, especially for someone who was plainly already feeling unsure of his surroundings. Nevertheless, after a short pause, the young teen finally spoke.

"I can… blow things up," he said without raising his head in a quiet voice, "with my mind."

There was no shock or surprise, Raven had predicted something of the sort, and Robin merely slid his half-empty coffee mug across the table towards the teen. "Can you show us how it works?"

"I'm not really sure how it works," said David, but he lifted his head to look at the mug. He glanced for a second at Robin, as though to confirm that he actually meant for a demonstration, but Robin simply nodded for him to go ahead. David sighed almost resignedly, and turned back towards the mug, staring directly and intently at it as he explained as best he could.

"I can see… what something's made of," he said as he fixed his gaze on the object on the table. All eyes followed, "like the cup there. I can see what's in it. I don't mean the coffee; I mean what the cup's made from."

"You are able to visualize its nature?" repeated Starfire in her own words, "How?"

"I don't… I don't know how," replied David without moving his eyes, "I just think about it and I see it. It's like a network of millions of little bits, all connected to each other. There's... quartz, some silicon, a little... mica I think, and then some bits I don't recognize, but I can see them. I can see them moving and bouncing off each other, just by thinking about it."

"Go on," said Robin.

David took another deep breath, and his voice became a bit softer. "Well I don't just... see the bits," he said hesitantly, "I can change how they move."

"Wait, how they move?" interrupted Beast Boy, "the mug's not moving."

"No," answered Raven, "but the molecules in it are. Is that what you're talking about?"

"I… maybe…" replied David uncertainly. "I don't… really know what they are. But they move. They're always moving, like they're shaking in an earthquake or something, not hard enough to fall apart, but enough to see. And if I think about it really hard, I can take the energy that makes them move and I can sort of… shift it."

David raised one hand and gently extended it out a bit, his eyes still focused on the ceramic cup. Very gradually, a thin film of what appeared to be ice crystals began to form on the outside of the mug. Slowly at first, then more rapidly, the frost spread over the coffee mug, coating it in frozen condensation. It wasn't long before the remaining coffee within the mug began to freeze as well.

"I can sort of push all the energy inward," said David, still without moving. "I can make the bits on the outside stop moving and press all their energy down into the bits near the core of it. I'm not sure why, but whenever I do that, it makes the thing start to freeze." He extended his hand a bit further, concentrating now on the cup which continued to accumulate a layer of frost, creaking as the coffee inside it expanded from being frozen.

"It's the heat," said Cyborg, whose background in engineering and mechanics enabled him to follow what was going on somewhat, "that's what makes a molecule move, right? Heat? You're pressing the heat down into the center."

David sort of half-nodded. "I... I don't know physics real well but... when something's very hot, the bits inside it start to shake harder and faster, and when it cools down, they slow down. I just make the ones on the outside slow down and push all their energy inside."

"So you can freeze objects?" asked Robin casting a confused glance at Raven. What did this have to do with blowing things up?

"No," said David, now with a bit of difficulty. "I mean... not the whole thing. I'm not taking the energy away from it. I just… compress it all, down into a little tiny area, down in the core." David was breathing harder now, and his brow was furrowed as he held his hand rigid. "You might… want to move back," he said.

Robin slid his chair away from the table even as Cyborg and Beast Boy took several paces back. Starfire and Raven remained further away even as the mug seemed to shake a bit.

"So... I squeeze it all down into a tight little ball of energy," said David, "and then… eventually the bits in the center start moving so fast that they start to fall apart. And once _that_ happens I just sort of... release it" David let his arm fall back to the table as he gave one more thrust forward with his fingers, as though flicking something away. An instant later there was a bright flash and a "BANG" as the mug exploded into a thousand pieces, bits of earthenware scattering across the table and tumbling onto the floor, even as a small puff of smoke rose from the remains. The coffee in the mug, suddenly thawed, splattered onto the walls, ceiling, and all across the table.

David let out a sigh of relief, and sat back in the chair, as though the effort of doing what he had just done was draining somehow, though given the condition he was in, the effort of lifting his arm might well have been the draining part. Cyborg looked around to gauge the others' reactions as the young psychokinetic (the term appeared to fit after all) took several more deep breaths before speaking again. "That's… pretty much it," said David as he looked over the wreckage sheepishly, "sorry about the mess."

It didn't appear to Cyborg like any of the others looked particularly stunned by what they had seen, for the explosion, while certainly odd by the standards of normal society, was nothing compared to everyday occurrences in Titans' Tower. Raven after all produced far more powerful explosions merely by accident, and on a weekly basis at that. The explosion had an impressive sound and flash to it, but was obviously not even as strong as one of Robin's explosive birdarangs, to say nothing of a starbolt or a shot from Cyborg's sonic cannon.

Beast Boy was the first to speak. Laughing nervously, he stepped back over to David and intoned with total seriousness, "I guess you could say... you're the bomb?"

Robin and Raven both groaned audibly. Starfire, as usual, missed the joke entirely, while Cyborg himself just shook his head and had to chuckle. All of them however were willing to put up with the joke, even one that bad, as it was a sign that Beast Boy's quiet moping was... if not over... at least ending. As to the 'bomb' in question, David was staring up at Beast Boy with the look of someone who could not quite believe what he had just heard. Surely nobody could actually think that was funny...

... clearly David didn't know Beast Boy.

"You can do that to anything?" asked Robin quickly, before Beast Boy could think of any more one-liners.

"Pretty much..." replied the young teen, "I mean, it depends on how complicated it is and all..."

"Complicated?"

"Well... that mug had, I don't know, four... maybe five different kinds of stuff in it? Like I said, quartz and mica and some others. Something simpler, something with just one or two elements or parts or whatever, that'd be easier. Something more complex..." he shrugged, "like I said, it depends."

"So you couldn't do that to a person or something?" asked Cyborg.

David shook his head. "No," he said, "I mean I've never tried or anything!" he added quickly, "but people have, what? Thousands of different chemicals and things in them? Tens of thousands? I wouldn't even know where to start. Besides, a person's a lot bigger than a coffee cup."

"Does the size matter?" enquired Starfire. Beast Boy snickered at the question and Cyborg elbowed him.

"Well yeah," said David, who clearly didn't get the unintentional joke. "I mean there's more bits or molecules or whatever they are to try and control with a big thing."

"So what's the biggest thing you can blow up?" asked Beast Boy, who had switched to that semi-wicked looking grin that he always had when he was plotting something both embarrassing and flamboyant. Cyborg didn't want to know what.

David thought for a moment. "I blew a bicycle up once," he said, and the memory brought a soft smile to his face, the first that Cyborg had seen from the psychokinetic since he awoke. "I used to... blow car tires out once in a while, when I was like ten or so," that memory was apparently less amusing, and the smile faded. He thought for another moment. "I don't think I've ever tried anything much bigger than that," he said finally.

Beast Boy looked almost disappointed. "Why not?"

David blinked at him. "Well why would I?" he answered, "I mean it's not really the sort of thing you can practice, you know? Somebody probably would have noticed if I started setting things off left and right. I don't think I've done it more than a hundred times altogether, and most of those were a long time ago. There just... there never was a _reason_ to. Before this morning, I don't think I'd done it in almost a year."

"Wait," interjected Robin, "you used your power this morning? During the attack?"

David nodded. "I was trying to get away from that big... from Cinderblock, and there was this big piece of masonry that had come down through the ceiling. It was blocking the hallway, and there wasn't any other way to go so... I blew it out of the way." He shook his head and sighed, almost smirking at his own foolishness. "At least that was the plan. I think that's what brought the roof down on my head."

"How big was the piece?"

"Maybe... about the size of this table?" said David, indicating the table he was sitting before. "It was made of granite."

Beast Boy whistled softly. Even Cyborg was a bit impressed. A block of granite that big could have weighed half a ton, still small enough for any of the Titans to have dealt with themselves without trouble, but considerably more of an obstacle than a coffee mug.

The young teen seemed to find their reactions humorous, and he laughed a bit, grimacing and clutching his stomach after a second as the laughter caused him to ache again. "It was solid granite," he explained, "nothing else, not even any cement. That's just how it works. I can blow a block of steel to bits," he smiled again, "but I can't even crack a wristwatch. I guess I just got lucky... sort of."

'Kid, you have no idea,' thought Cyborg, but he kept the thought to himself, for at that moment Robin slowly stood up. "Can you wait here for a minute?" he asked David in a tone that indicated that this was definitely not a request. David may still have had dozens of questions, but this was plainly not the moment, and the still semi-bewildered teen merely nodded to the Boy Wonder. Robin gestured to the others to follow him, and walked out towards the hallway that led into the common room. Cyborg followed along with Starfire, Raven, and Beast Boy, leaving David sitting in the other room, watching them as they left.

Robin closed the door to the common room and made certain that it was both locked and magnetically sealed to keep the sound of their conversation out of the common room before he turned to the others. He was to the point, as always. "What do you guys think?"

Starfire and Beast Boy both looked like they had plenty to say, and Cyborg, who was only just beginning to form his own coherent opinion, decided to let them go first. But to his surprise, the first person to speak was Raven, who, with her usual disregard for beating around the bush, threw her opinion down for everyone to see in a very direct fashion.

"He's lying."

Beast Boy, who had already taken a breath to express his own view, stopped dead and turned to Raven with a look of something like astonishment. Starfire wasn't far behind, a look of complete surprise written on her. Even Robin raised an eyebrow at the declaration.

"Lying?" asked Beast Boy, just barely pre-empting Starfire from asking much the same question, "How do you know he's lying? He said he could blow stuff up and he did it, didn't he?"

"That's not what I mean," said Raven sharply, "his story doesn't hold up." When none of the others appeared to agree immediately, she sighed with exasperation and explained.

"He says he's been in town for just a couple days, and that he hasn't used his power for a year?" said Raven, "and yet somehow somebody knew he was here, knew what he was, and managed to set up an attack on the foster center he was in using Cinderblock, all in two or three days? Even Slade never worked that fast. Plus the attack doesn't make any sense either. If whoever set it up wanted to kill him, Cinderblock would have crushed him like a grape when he grabbed him out of the rubble. And if they wanted to capture him, then why would they send Cinderblock to do it? Why not try something a little more subtle instead?"

Beast Boy fell quiet as the explanation sank in, and Cyborg saw Robin nodding thoughtfully, as though he was thinking the same things.

"But instead," continued Raven, "this mystery person sends Cinderblock of all people to go smashing a path through the whole city and flatten the entire building, but _doesn't_ want Cinderblock to kill him. He makes enough noise that we're guaranteed to show up and at least drive Cinderblock off, and he knows that we can do it because we've beaten Cinderblock what? Three times already? I don't know about you guys, but it sounds to me like whoever set this up _wanted_ us to rescue him."

A chill fell over all five Titans as Raven finished. Nobody needed a reminder of what Raven was referring to obliquely. However, to her credit perhaps, Starfire was not prepared to accept such an explanation at face value.

"But even if that is so," said the Tamaranean, with conviction, "none of that is necessarily the fault of the one we rescued. Even if we were meant to rescue him by the one that instigated this, we cannot refuse to aid him simply because we do not understand what is going on. And I do not see how any of this means that he is telling us the lies!"

"Because what he's saying doesn't make any sense," replied Raven, equally convinced, "Think about it. He said that he's never blown something up bigger than a bicycle, and then ten seconds later he admits that he blew a piece of rock apart the size of the kitchen table in the middle of Cinderblock's attack. He says that he's in foster care of some kind, but he also says his _name _is Foster?" Raven shook her head, an edge to her voice as she continued. "Lies are bad enough, but these are _stupid _lies. And best of all, his records, if there ever were any, are all destroyed now along with the building he was in, so we can't check on anything. We only have his word to go on that he is who he says he is."

Starfire fell silent before Raven's evidence, and even Cyborg had to admit that she had a damn good point. Nothing here added up right. There was perhaps a time when they would have all accepted such discrepancies as unimportant background mysteries to be solved later, but that was before someone had repaid their trust by sending a mole into their very midst with a cover story of being a young superhero looking for friends and nearly destroyed them all. Too much of this situation was grotesquely familiar.

And yet... Cyborg turned and looked back through the window built into the common room door at the young teen still sitting alone in the common room. David had one hand over his face, his other hand clutching the side of the table tightly, and even at this distance, Cyborg could see he was shaking. Anyone with eyes could tell that the teenaged psychokinetic was as nervous as a startled field mouse, but the question was, was it because of the incredibly strange situation he had been plunged into, or was it because he knew that they suspected his part in a conspiracy against them? Or, for that matter, was it all a highly practiced act?

"I don't buy it," said Cyborg finally, breaking the long silence. When nobody interrupted him, he continued. "I mean, I was there when he woke up. He nearly had a heart attack when he saw me and another one when the grass stain here walked in. You ask me, nobody's that good an actor. I got no doubt that somebody set this all up, and maybe whoever they are even wanted him to wind up here, but I think BB was right to begin with. I think this kid's a civilian, and I don't think he's got the first idea of what's goin' on here, any more than we do."

"A civilian who just happens to have psychokinetic powers?" asked Raven rhetorically, "and what? Nobody noticed until now except for one supervillain? There's too many coincidences."

"He _was_ in the attack however," insisted Starfire, "and he _was_ very gravely injured. Without our intervention, is it not likely that he would he would have died? That could not have been at his instigation. Why would he allow himself to be so horribly injured in the hopes that we _might_ take him home? Could we not just as likely have taken him to a... a..." Starfire stumbled over the word, "a Hos-Pit-El? To a place where the people of this planet are taken when they are injured? Surely no-one could have predicted that we would bring him here instead." Raven didn't reply to that one, in fact nobody did. Starfire may have been naive, overly trusting, and inexperienced with the realities of life on Earth, but she had been the one who had watched the kid dying in the backseat of the T-car on the way to the tower, and while Cyborg still had no idea what to think, he knew that Starfire had already made up her mind about this question. He also knew that changing Starfire's mind about something was not an easy task, for the Tamaranean's naive exterior cloaked a will of solid iron, as evidenced whenever her sister showed up to cause trouble.

"It's unlikely," said Robin finally, also looking through the window at David, who was now looking around the room from his chair as though trying to spot hidden weapons aimed at his head, still not having dared to stand up. "But you were right Raven. They _are_ stupid lies. They're _too_ stupid." Robin turned back away from the window to face the others. "Whoever set this in motion was planning something. We don't know what he was planning, but it doesn't make sense that whoever it was would make all these plans and then send David or whatever his name is in here with a story that full of holes. If his real name isn't 'Foster', why pretend that it's something that sounds that fake?"

Raven still sounded unconvinced. "Maybe because he wanted us to think that?"

"... and maybe he wanted us to think _that_," interjected Cyborg, "or _that_ or a hundred other things. We don't know. We're not gonna find out by second-guessing it to death. Besides, I don't think he's lying at all. I think he's scared half to death and can't keep his facts straight. And Foster's not all that uncommon a name. There's gotta be _some_ kids in that system with it."

Beast Boy now finally spoke up, not with an opinion, but with a question. "So... what are we gonna do with him?"

All four of the other Titans paused, realizing they had drifted off-subject in their debate. The time had come however to make a call, and as usual, Robin was the one to make it. Cyborg however was pretty sure he knew what it was going to be before he said it.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A few minutes later, the door to the common room opened back up, and all five Titans re-entered the room. David, who was still seated in his chair, appeared to have been dozing, probably a lingering aftereffect of the drugs they had given him, and awoke with a start. He stood up slowly, facing the five Titans, trying to read their faces, but clearly having no success. Robin walked over to David as the other four moved around the room and took up various positions, seated or standing.

"Look," said Robin, "I know you're probably confused about what's going on here, but all we know now is that someone probably sent Cinderblock after you. We don't know why, but it's the only explanation that makes sense."

"But..." protested David weakly, "I mean... you just said Cinderblock going after this 'Devastator?' Are you sure that was me?"

"Dude, you can blow things up with your mind, remember?" said Beast Boy, "Who else do you think he meant?" The psychokinetic teen looked as though he was trying very hard to think of someone other than himself. He failed.

"We don't _know _that Cinderblock was talking about you," explained Robin, "but it seems very likely. And if he was, and he was coming after you, then that means you're in danger."

"I... sort of figured that part out," said David, casting glances at all the other Titans in turn.

"The foster care center," said Robin, "was that where you were living?" David nodded and Robin continued. "What were you going to do now that it's been destroyed?"

The question clearly caught David unprepared. "I..." he stammered, "I hadn't... hadn't really thought about it. I guess they'll transfer me to another facility or something?" He made it sound like 'they' were shipping boxcars of freight from points A to B, but his voice wasn't bitter.

"They think you're dead," said Raven evenly.

"What?!" This clearly DID come as a shock, and David spun around to face the others in turn. "They... they think I'm _dead_?! Why?!"

"They've been digging through the ruins all day man," said Cyborg as gently as he could, "they just announced on the radio that the rescue teams don't think there's any more survivors left under there, and anybody they haven't found yet is assumed dead."

"But I'm not dead!" exclaimed David, and this time both Beast Boy and Cyborg had to stifle their laughter at the infamous line, exclaimed with such seriousness by the young teen. "I mean, I've gotta get back to the center or wherever and let them know!"

"We do not believe that is wise," said Starfire. From anyone else, the line might have sounded ominous, but from Starfire it sounded like mere concern for his wellbeing.

"You don't?" asked David, looking first at Starfire and then at Robin for some kind of answer.

"If whoever sent Cinderblock knows you're still alive, they might try again," said Robin, "and if they do try again, then that not only puts you in danger, but everyone around you as well."

David waited several seconds before replying guardedly. "So... what am I supposed to do?"

Robin took a deep breath and let it out before making his 'suggestion'. "If you want," he said, "you can stay here in the Tower with us until we figure out who's behind all this. It's the safest place in the city, and nobody but us knows that you're here. It'll give us time to solve this, and find out if you are this 'Devastator' or not. If it turns out you're not, and this was all just a coincidence, then we can take you back to the child welfare people and let them know that we had you for a few days and that you aren't dead, no harm done."

David stood still for a second or so, as though trying to re-interpret what he had just heard to make sense. Cyborg found himself wondering what the kid's reaction would be. Beast Boy had bet them all that he would be overjoyed and would accept without a second thought (as he likely would have done in David's place). Raven had remarked that he would probably refuse to have anything to do with the offer or with them (as she likely would have done in David's place). As it was, David seemed to be reacting neither with enthusiasm nor refusal, but with surprise and some degree of hesitation. He slowly sat back down, no longer looking at anyone in particular, but appearing to be somewhat overwhelmed with everything that had happened, as well as with the suggestion Robin had made. None of the Titans interrupted him. The poor kid had barely had a chance to blink before all this had been dropped on him, Cyborg thought, assuming that he wasn't in on it all, which Cyborg was becoming more and more convinced he was not.

"Stay here?" said David, as though he could not decide if the prospect was thrilling, horrifying, or simply absurd. "I..." He trailed off, clearly lost for words, and Cyborg stepped forward.

"Hey man, it's whatever you think you should do. We ain't gonna force you one way or the other. But we all think it might be a good idea to lay low for a little while, and if you think so too, then you're welcome to crash here for a while."

David lifted his head, and Cyborg could see a change slowly come over his face as he looked around at the five superheroes, his expression turning from shock and incomprehension to something like gratitude and wonder. "Well," he said sheepishly, "I guess... I mean... if it's OK..."

"Dude it's fine!" exclaimed Beast Boy with a wide grin that boded ill for everyone's mental health, though Cyborg doubted that David knew that yet. "We've got plenty of room, a gamestation, and an awesome movie setup. Plus you get to see us in action!" To make the point, Beast Boy suddenly cycled through a variety of animal forms at high speed, leaving David blinking in astonishment once again.

Cyborg saw Robin smirk a bit as he tapped the ocelot-turned-leopard-turned elephant seal with his foot, causing Beast Boy to shift back into his human form. "So that's settled then?" asked Robin.

David gulped a bit and smiled nervously, as though still unwilling to believe that this was all really happening, but nodded. "Thanks," he said, "thanks... for all of this..." and he meant it, or at least Cyborg thought he sounded like he did as he stood up again, putting his hand on the table for support. He clearly still wasn't feeling fully recovered, though considering his condition when he was brought in, the fact that he could walk and speak at all was a miracle (or more accurately, magic). "... but," he hesitated again, "what... happens if it wasn't all just a coincidence?"

Robin full-on smiled this time, though still with a hint of a smirk. "Then we'll figure out what to do next," he said.

David took another deep breath, and nodded again, and Cyborg smiled despite himself as Robin extended his hand towards the young psychokinetic and, after a second's hesitation, David took it and shook. "Anyhow, we'll get you set up in one of the empty rooms," said Robin, and he glanced to Starfire who quickly walked over, took David by the hand, and led him out of the common room towards the elevator, accompanied by Beast Boy, who was already spouting a long list of various amenities that the tower possessed, real or exaggerated. Cyborg watched them go, remarking to himself that it looked like Beast Boy was acting much more like his old self again, and knowing that took a large weight off of his mind that he hadn't even noticed was there before.

As the door closed again, leaving Cyborg alone in the common room with Raven and Robin, he noticed that Raven was slowly shaking her head. She had said next to nothing the whole time, but it was obvious she had not completely abandoned her position from before.

"This is a big risk," she said simply, "even if he isn't in on the plot, whoever was behind it might know that we took him here, or might guess. They know that he was alive when Cinderblock left, and that we were already there, and they know that nobody took him to a hospital."

"It's a risk we've got to take," said Robin, "if not for his sake, then for the sake of everyone else in the city who might be put in danger if we turned him loose." Cyborg merely grunted an agreement, but Raven shook her head slowly.

"We'll see..." she said cryptically, as she turned to go back to her room.

"We'll watch him," said Robin as he turned to go as well, probably to the evidence room to begin the search for answers, "it'll be fine. Besides, he'll probably only be here for a few days."

As the door closed behind both of them, Cyborg walked back into the kitchen for a snack, and as he did so, the thought occurred to him that this might indeed be a terrible mistake. Terra after all had been not just one but a series of terrible mistakes, and they'd been on edge ever since against making another terrible mistake. Now they, or rather Robin, had chosen to risk making a terrible mistake, and maybe the willingness to take that risk was Robin's way of trying to put the Terra disaster behind him... behind all of them.

'Besides,' he thought as he rummaged through the refrigerator for some meat, 'we've survived a hell of a lot worse than whatever this kid could possibly throw at us, even in the worst case.' How much, after all, could really result from taking in a shaken, injured, civilian kid for a couple of days?

Cyborg didn't know. None of them knew. None of them could have known. Had they known the complete answer, it would probably have frozen the blood in their veins and sent chills of fear up their spines. But the short answer could be summed up simply as 'a lot'.

_A whole lot._


	5. The Affairs of Gods

**Disclaimer:** I went all the way to Oregon and back, and STILL I do not own the Teen Titans. More's the pity...

**Author's Note:** I am returned alive at least from my vacation in the rainy north (it was a lot of fun), and, as promised, I have put the finishing touches on another chapter. I found this chapter to be more and more unique in my experience of writing the further I got along in it, and though I do not know if it is excellent, horrid, or merely plain and unremarkable, I hope it will prove worth the effort to read. I wish to apologize in advance to those who venture into it, for it is considerably longer than my previous chapters, moreso than I had intended, and I do not plan on making a habit of chapters of this length. I felt it important however to tell this part of the tale in one cohesive unit, as it is, to me, a single and unified piece. As always, your comments and reviews are jewels beyond price, and I sincerely hope you enjoy this episode. Thank you, and good luck to you all in all your endeavors.

* * *

**Chapter 5: The Affairs of Gods**

_"Come not between the Dragon and his wrath."  
_

- William Shakespeare, "King Lear"

**O-O-O**

To the extent that it was possible to use the term in a place where an average day consisted of engaging in preternatural combat with any one of a host of monstrous super-villains, as well as dealing with the latent chaos that always transpired in a tower inhabited by five teenaged heroes, the days following Cinderblock's attack could be described as "business as usual". There were crimes to stop of course, the occasional clash with an over-eager gang of thugs or a tragically misguided super-villain, but nothing that any of the Titans would consider out of the ordinary. Nothing of course except for their guest, and the events that had brought him to the Tower.

Robin had been spending most of his free time in the evidence room (not that this was at all abnormal) poring over police reports, news footage, surveillance videos, paper records, and all kinds of other data, trying to form a better picture of what had actually lead to this attack, who could have instigated it, and why. He discussed his research with no-one, but from the amount of coffee he was drinking, the growls of frustration that periodically emerged from the evidence room, and the fact that he had scarcely been inside his own room for more than a week, the others could guess that there was precious little to discuss.

Cinderblock's trail had lead into the bay where it abruptly ended several miles off the shoreline and, despite Aqualad's best efforts, not a trace of the living battering ram could be found. It was as though Cinderblock had vanished into thin air (or water in this case), a patent impossibility, and yet there was no better explanation to be had. When Aqualad had let them all know that he was unable to find any trace of Cinderblock's whereabouts, Beast Boy had made some half-hearted joke about how the only thing worse than Cinderblock was a Cinderblock who could speak and teleport. It had fallen flatter than usual.

As to their guest, the evidence was no better. As Raven had predicted, the records kept in the basement of the foster care center had been not only crushed under hundreds of tons of collapsed debris, but mostly incinerated in the fire that had swept through the ruins following the collapse. With the records computers smashed to bits, and their paper copies reduced to ash, there was no way to tell who had been in the center when it caved in, let alone whether one of the victims of the attack was named David Foster. Robin had attempted to track down records from other foster facilities across the state, only to find that the state's child welfare office had only recently begun computerizing their archives, and that all of the original records for the kids sent to Jump City's new facility had been sent along with them, and thus destroyed in the attack. There was nothing left.

Of course there were other ways to confirm an identity. Teachers, social workers, and even other foster kids could potentially be found who knew David, or at least remembered him from before the assault, but all such people were in other cities scattered up and down the coast, and for a superhero or an official to contact them asking if they knew a certain young kid who had just recently been involved in a tragic attack in Jump City might well open up unwanted questions about where he was and what he was doing there. He had, after all, been declared dead (or at least not listed among the survivors, which was the same thing), and for the moment that was probably the best place to leave it officially, lest whoever was behind all this make a second attempt at doing... whatever the object of the first attack had been.

All this, of course, was in the background. On a more immediate note there was the question of what to do with David while he was staying with them in the tower. He was, after all, their guest, not their prisoner, at least in theory, and yet there was much in the tower that was of a more or less sensitive nature, and it would not do for a civilian, let alone one under suspicion, to be allowed to go poking around in places like the evidence room or the central computer. Ever since the first incident involving the H.I.V.E. academy, Cyborg had installed scanners into all the doors in the tower, meaning that they only opened when the cameras confirmed the identity of one of the five Titans, and so initially, Robin simply had one of them escort David to and from the guest room they had set up for him, the common area atop the tower, and anywhere else he had to go. This system worked well enough until the day when David had wound up stuck in a hallway for four hours after all five Titans had suddenly been called out to handle an emergency. After that incident, Cyborg had reprogrammed the security systems to allow David access to a section of the tower containing the common room, the guest rooms, and the hallways connecting them.

Security aside, there were more mundane concerns. David's belongings had of course been obliterated in the attack, leaving him with nothing more than the singed and bloodstained clothes that he had been rescued in. Fortunately, while he was a bit smaller than Beast Boy, he was close enough to the green changeling's size that he could fit into some of Beast Boy's older street clothes, some of which had never even been worn, as Beast Boy almost never wore anything besides his purple and black Doom Patrol uniform. Starfire had been kind enough to volunteer for a quick expedition to a "store of drugs" (nobody had the heart to correct her) to pick up various necessities such as a toothbrush, though true to form, she had returned with about four hundred containers of fluoridated toothpaste, and expressing shock as to why nobody had told her that such delectable desserts were available on Earth.

Business as usual, if you could believe it.

Once elementary needs were out of the way however, the young teen proved to be remarkably "low-maintenance", as Cyborg put it, though whether that was because he was used to occupying himself without much else or because he was too intimidated by his surroundings to ask was anyone's guess. He spent most of his time in the guest room they had set up for him, only occasionally venturing out on his own accord. When he did venture out, his eyes seemed to flicker from point to point, as though he were exploring some kind of hidden temple which might contain lethal traps ready to spring at any moment, and his manner was ever so slightly on-edge, as though he couldn't bring himself to relax in the strange surroundings, though he was unfailingly polite and agreeable as if worried about what might happen if he were not. He was neither a carnivore nor a vegetarian, thus robbing both Beast Boy and Cyborg of an ally in their neverending culinary debates, but seemed quite willing to eat whatever was being prepared that day without complaint. In fact, he claimed that there wasn't any sort of food that he either hated or even disliked, and even when it was plain that he could barely bring himself to touch a bite of whatever was being served, he still maintained that there was nothing wrong, that everything was fine, that he simply wasn't hungry.

He didn't speak much, and when he did, everyone could tell that he was choosing his words particularly carefully, as though trying to guess what the Titans wanted to hear rather than speaking his own mind. It would have been suspicious if it wasn't so blatant. Indeed, he behaved as though the word 'no' might trigger something disastrous, and agreed, without argument or even question, to practically everything that anyone suggested. The others might not have noticed this tendency, until one time after dinner when Robin proposed that David carry a small tracer beacon on him at all times to enable them to track his movements. To combat the inevitable protest that any teenager would make to a proposal like that, Robin had prepared a series of explanations and arguments about how it was purely for David's own safety (which of course it wasn't), how it wasn't because they didn't trust him (which of course it was). He needn't have bothered. To everyone's surprise, David agreed to the suggestion as easily as if he had been agreeing to a grocery list, dropping the beacon into his pocket without so much as a sarcastic remark. He agreed to it so quickly in fact that Robin suspected a trick and unbeknownst to David, snuck a second beacon into the clothes Beast Boy had lent the psychokinetic, disguised as a button, and began randomly checking the two beacons' signals on the Tower computer. No matter how often he checked the signals though, both beacons were always together, and both of them appeared to be on David's person at all times.

With Robin searching for clues, Raven spending most of her time locked in her own room, and Starfire quite politely giving the young teen whatever space he seemed to require (after all, if Raven chose to remain hidden away most of the time, why shouldn't David?), Cyborg and Beast Boy were the ones who wound up spending the most time with the young kineticist. Beast Boy was direct as always, periodically dragging David out of his room to go play a round of gamestation games or try his latest tofu concoction, usually right after Raven had refused to participate in the very same activity. Unlike Raven, David never refused, though it wasn't clear if that was because he genuinely wanted to try Super Mega Monkeys 7, or because he was simply unwilling to risk refusing. Beast Boy _did_ have enough sense to never bring up the attack, nor to pester David with what were obviously going to be unwelcome questions, and David, for his part, endured the semi-manic changeling's antics with stoic patience, even if Beast Boy's mile-a-minute stream of consciousness behavior sometimes left him so perplexed that he practically needed to be led back to his room.

Cyborg on the other hand tried his best to be as calm and level-headed as possible around the psychokinetic teen. He knew just from watching the logs of the tracer beacons Robin had given him that David wasn't sleeping well, spending half the night pacing back and forth inside his room or just sitting in a chair. He recognized that something was wrong, very wrong, beneath the overpolite exterior that David had applied, and while he didn't think David was actually scared of the Titans themselves, he was clearly way over his head in the middle of what was surely from his perspective some kind of madhouse. It was no surprise then to Cyborg that as the days went on, the young teen began to spend more of his time down in the garage workshop that Cyborg had set up, just sitting quietly in a corner reading a book, making odd small talk with Cyborg as he conducted some kind of maintenance, or even lending a hand once in a while with some extremely simple task. As a sop to Robin and Raven, Cyborg was always careful never to leave David alone in the garage, and kept an eye on him while he was there, but David either didn't notice or didn't care. Cyborg guessed that in some strange way, David felt that he was the most 'normal' of the bunch, and by being down in the garage watching him work on the car or whatnot he was able to return to something closer to the life he was used to... at least for a while.

The others dealt with David less often, for various reasons. Starfire was, if anything, even more polite than David, always asking if he was alright or needed anything. David however was clearly intimidated by her odd and alien mannerisms, and often had to catch himself staring in wide-eyed astonishment as Starfire drank a full quart of mustard or casually lifted a half-ton piece of furniture with one hand so as to retrieve something that had rolled beneath it. Raven was distant, as always, and even more intimidating than Starfire, if only because she (probably) intended to be. She never vocalized her suspicions to David himself, but David was clearly uncomfortable in her presence, not that he dared say anything. Given that she was usually locked away in her room with her books however, the two of them didn't interact all that often. Everyone could tell however that David was especially careful around Raven, despite Beast Boy and Cyborg both assuring him that there was no reason to worry. As to Robin, the Boy Wonder refrained, for the moment, from asking questions of David other than his exact recollections of the attack itself, but his gaze always promised that the questions were coming, and the prospect plainly unsettled the young teen. Robin kept his own opinions to himself, but with all of his work in researching the disaster's cause, as well as running the team on a day-to-day basis, there wasn't a lot of time left. Most of Robin and David's conversations arose when, every couple of days, Robin would stop by to let him know that there were still no leads, that nothing new had yet been found, and that given Cinderblock's still at-large status, it would probably be best if David stayed in the tower for a few more days.

And so things remained for more than a week. The Titans had fallen back into something approximating their usual routine, and after ten days had passed, even David seemed to be adjusting, slightly, to the pace of life around the Tower. Beast Boy crushed him repeatedly at every single Gamestation game they played, Cyborg taught him the difference between a socket wrench and a saltus wrench, and Starfire even managed to elicit an admission that he didn't really care for her mustard and tabasco sauce soup (after a single spoonful had caused him to fall off his stool and convulse on the ground for several moments). To most of them, it looked like David was beginning to believe he might actually survive this experience, or perhaps he was simply becoming slightly more sure of his surroundings. Either way, he was, just maybe, starting to be able to relax a bit around them.

... and then came the day of the Dragon.

**O-O-O**

The day had started out as any other. Starfire and Cyborg had managed, for once, to convince Robin to give the search for more answers a rest, insisting that Robin needed the break after more than a solid week of no progress on that front, coupled with a series of half-alluded to incidents involving some kind of mask that David neither knew about nor probably wanted to. Starfire had occupied herself with lord-knew-what, while Beast Boy and Cyborg, as they had been all week, engaged in a very weird game of their own invention called "Stankball".

The best David could tell was that Stankball consisted of wadding unspeakably filthy and smelly clothes into a tight ball and then throwing them at another player, similar to the old schoolyard game "ball tag", only with a borderline chemical weapon instead of a ball. The rules of this particular game were left somewhat unspoken (and appeared to change at will), but that didn't stop Cyborg and Beast Boy from insisting that they required the services of a referee. They apparently had asked Raven at some point to take on this role, but she had declined rather forcefully. Robin wanted absolutely nothing to do with the game (wisely enough), and Beast Boy was reluctant to ask Starfire to participate in a game where filth was thrown back and forth, having botched some kind of similar prank on Starfire a while back, an experience he was not interested in repeating. As a result, more and more often the two players wound up roping David into overseeing their game. Most of the time this meant simply accompanying one or the other of them as they stalked their counterpart throughout the tower, keeping a running count of the "points" that they scored respectively on one another, and deciding how many points each particular hit was worth. Thankfully, the mandate of a referee did not extend to actually being hit with the Stankball itself, though accidents of course happened...

Much of the day had been occupied with Stankball, but as evening fell, David managed to excuse himself from the game and take a moment to journey up to the roof of the Tower, so as to take in the magnificent view it afforded. Normally not a fan of heights, nor especially given to taking in panoramic views for their own sake, David had found that the roof of the Tower was an excellent place to recover his wits after a particularly strange day, a little corner of sanity where he could relax a bit, and on a good evening, such as this one, the view it commanded was simply stunning, with Jump City spread out before it like a giant tapestry, the lights of the buildings and streets flickering in the twilight darkness.

No sooner had he arrived atop the tower than the alert had rung, sending all five Titans off to deal with yet another threat. David normally withdrew to the guest room at such times, but on this particular evening, he elected to remain where he was. The night was warm and clear, and the roof was large enough to let him walk about a bit if he wished to, or simply sit (well back from the edge of course) and think about how on earth he had wound up here of all places, and what in the world he was going to do now.

It was barely an hour after the Titans had left before David felt the soft vibrations of the underground garage doors sliding open to re-admit the T-car, signalling that they had returned from their expedition. David remained seated for a few minutes, debating whether or not he should go back downstairs, when suddenly the door to the roof flew open, and Beast Boy stomped out onto it. Right away, David knew something was wrong. Since he had met Beast Boy, he had never once seen him with anything but a grin on his face, but now the green changeling was scowling, his brow furrowed, his fists clenched, obviously upset about something. David watched as Beast Boy emerged, grumbling to himself about something, and stalked over to the edge of the roof without even noticing that there was someone else around. David for his part didn't know if he should say something to announce his presence or perhaps simply try and sneak back down the stairs into the tower itself. As it happened, Beast Boy reached the roof's edge and turned sharply all of a sudden, and spotted David standing against the Tower's chimney.

As though a switch had been thrown, Beast Boy seemed to relax suddenly and he smiled, albeit somewhat less forcefully than normal. "Hey," he said as he walked over towards David, "didn't know you came up here."

"I..." David stammered, worrying suddenly that the roof was another section of the tower he wasn't supposed to enter. "I was just... I mean... I didn't think that anyone would..."

"Dude, relax!" said Beast Boy with a grin. "It's OK to be up here. It's gotta be pretty boring just sitting around in your room whenever we get a call, right? We're not gonna feed you to the sharks just 'cause you wanted some air."

David forced himself to calm back down again. "Right," he said, "sorry. I just wanted to take a look around is all." He winced at how foolish he was sounding, and quickly changed the subject. "How did it go today?"

It was the wrong subject to change to. Beast Boy's grin faded as quickly as it had arisen and he groaned softly. "We won," he said evenly and left it at that, not entering the usual animated and colorful re-enactment of the battle that he usually engaged in whenever David asked how it had gone.

"Did... something go wrong?" David asked. Beast Boy seemed more annoyed than anything, so he doubted it was anything _too_ catastrophic, but...

Beast Boy turned away and shook his head as he grimaced slightly. "No... I mean yes... I mean... _ugh_!" He began to pace back and forth in front of David as he explained. "It's just Raven _again_," he said with an exasperated tone. David didn't reply, not certain what he meant, but Beast Boy continued to explain, venting his frustration at the situation.

"I mean, it's bad enough that she's been cooped up in her room for like a week solid, and gets mad at us whenever we try and get her to _do_ something," said Beast Boy, walking back and forth, gesticulating wildly with his hands as he did so, "but now she's got this magic book or something with this guy inside it that she's been talking to, and she's all mad at me just because I told her she was creepy and listened in for a little bit. I mean I was just making sure she was OK! And then, today, just before we went out on that call, she walks into the common room and she uses her magic to morph me into a rat! Just like that! Without even asking or anything!"

David could only blink silently at Beast Boy's explanation. Raven did spend a lot of time in her room, but David had simply assumed that it was normal for her to do so. He didn't have the perspective to tell if she was acting differently than she usually did. As to magic books and transformations, Beast Boy might as well have been talking about nuclear physics for all David knew about it, but it was clear he was upset at having been forcibly shifted. Not for the first time, David realized that he had no idea just what the various Titans were really capable of.

Beast Boy meanwhile, continued. "And _then_ we go off to fight Kardiac, he's that big cross between a heart and a vacuum cleaner I told you about? And Kardiac's got this little girl inside him, so Raven does some kind of super magic spell and nearly blows him up with the girl still inside! We told her to stop but she said she couldn't, and I nearly had to knock her out just to snap her out of it. And once she comes around, she just storms off back to the Tower and goes right back into her room without saying a word, like it's my fault she lost control!" Beast Boy turned and kicked at a small rock that was laying nearby, knocking it off the rooftop as he folded his arms and crouched down, facing away from David, scowling once more.

David pondered all this in silence. On the one hand it was actually something of a relief to hear that Raven's hard-edged act wasn't reserved only for him, but on the other hand Beast Boy was clearly frustrated and annoyed, and David didn't know what to say, or even if he should say something. Beast Boy crouched silently for a while, then stood back up as he spoke suddenly.

"It's like, yeah, Raven's usually pretty weird, and she's always all mysterious and creepy, but once in a while she sort of comes out and acts like a normal person for a little bit, just enough to make you think that she's really OK, you know? Like she really cares? And then all of a sudden she snaps shut again and it's 'leave me alone' and 'don't bother me'. And now all this happens..." Beast Boy trailed off in frustration and shook his head. "I don't know, what do you think?" he suddenly said.

The question brought David up short. "What do I... what?" he asked, confused. "Think about what?"

"About Raven," replied Beast Boy. "What do you make of her? Doesn't she act like what I just said?"

The conversation was getting weirder by the minute. "I don't even... I don't _know_ her!' he exclaimed, "I don't know enough to make anything of her!"

"Yeah but, I mean you've been here for a little while," said Beast Boy, "and you're kinda... what's it called... 'objective'? Since you got here, wouldn't you say she's been kind of shut off?"

David didn't know what to say, his few impressions and encounters with Raven having left him with the overwhelming sense that she was merely tolerating his presence, and that to anger her would be a monumentally stupid move. Cyborg kept insisting that she was more bark than bite, but David had absolutely no desire to find out firsthand whether or not he was right. But as to her character or habits, he was about as well qualified to speak on that subject as he was on the subject of vascular surgery. Still, Beast Boy was waiting for a reply, and so he did the best he could.

"Well... yeah I guess," he said guardedly, "I mean I... sort of get the impression that she doesn't want much to do with me. I've been basically leaving her alone since I got here." To be fair, he'd been basically leaving everyone alone since he arrived, save perhaps for Cyborg, and him only in moderation, but unlike Beast Boy, Cyborg, Starfire, or even Robin to an extent (a small extent), Raven hadn't made an overt effort to be friendly, or to engage with him at all really. She wasn't unpleasant to him or anything (and he certainly never gave her a reason to be), it was just that while Beast Boy had been extremely pro-active in dragging him off to some activity or another, Raven had been the exact opposite. There was nothing wrong with that. He was the one intruding on all of their lives after all.

"Yeah, she'll be like that," said Beast Boy a bit sheepishly, "but usually she's not _that_ bad about it, and this past week it's like she's been that way with all of us!"

A thought came to David unbidden. "You think it might be because of..."

"What? No dude, no way," said Beast Boy, anticipating what David was going to say, and he sighed, "she just sorta gets like this sometimes. It's not you. Like we said, don't worry about her."

Beast Boy's admonition might have held more weight if he hadn't been plainly worrying about Raven himself, in a different sense of course. David fell silent again, sensing that Beast Boy was just trying to vent his frustrations, letting him continue if he wanted to. As it happened however, after a half-minute or so of silence, Beast Boy suddenly stirred again.

"Well anyhow dude, Robin said he wanted to see you about something and to meet him downstairs when you had a minute. I'd wait a little bit though if I were you, that thing with Raven tonight's got him pretty worried."

David nodded. "Thanks, I think I'll do that," he said. After a second's hesitation, he added "So what are you gonna do?" not even certain why he had asked

Beast Boy's ears fell a bit and he sighed again. "I guess I'm gonna go apologize to her again," he said, and from his tone it sounded like this was a common enough occurrence.

David looked puzzled, "Why?"

Beast Boy shrugged, "Cause I hit her back there to knock her out of that spell, and cause I sorta snapped at her after she came around," he paused for a second and then grinned a bit, "and cause I might have spied on her a little bit and told all the others that she had that magic book she was talking to..."

David couldn't help but laugh. "You're braver than I am," he said, shaking his head a bit. "I think I'd rather meet Cinderblock again than get Raven mad at me."

Beast Boy's grin broadened into his usual cocksure expression, "Dude, she's not that bad. Worst that'll happen is she'll throw you out the window a couple times!"

"Which is all fine for you," said David with mock incredulity, "but I can't fly, remember?"

"So with you she'd probably aim for the water," replied Beast Boy as he turned to go. "and 'sides, you should be careful what you..."

Beast Boy was interrupted in mid-sentence by a muffled rumble that emerged from somewhere within the tower below, like distant thunder from a storm far away, loud enough however to be clearly heard as well as felt. He stopped in his tracks, looked down at the roof beneath him, then turned back to David with a confused look. "Did you hear that?"

David was equally confused. "Yeah," he said, "what was that?"

"I don't know," said Beast Boy, puzzled, "Did you set something..."

"No!" exclaimed David, "that wasn't me. It sounded like it came from inside the..."

David was now cut off, this time by a much more powerful sound, a massive thunderous crash that seemed to emanate from below. The entire tower shook, nearly throwing both teens off their feet. David clutched the chimney next to him to avoid falling, and as soon as the shaking subsided he turned to Beast Boy, who had managed to retain his balance. "What the hell was that?" he exclaimed.

"I don't know!" said Beast Boy quickly, his eyes wide and worried-looking. "Stay here, I'm gonna see what happened!" Morphing instantly into a cheetah, Beast Boy took off like a green blur back down the rooftop access stairs, leaving David once more alone on the roof.

David remained where he was for the better part of a minute, listening for any further sounds and trying to imagine what could possibly have happened. He was just beginning to think that it might just have been some kind of freak accident, when all of a sudden the tower shook again, violently enough to knock him sprawling onto the roof, and a series of ever-louder explosions seemed to sound from below. David scrambled to his feet as best he could, and stumbled backwards from the epicenter of the sounds as the noise grew louder and louder, causing the roof to shake as though an earthquake were occuring. His eyes wide with fear, David watched helplessly as a section of the roof barely twenty yards in front of him seemed to buckle and twist, glowed cherry red for a moment, and then suddenly disintegrated and exploded upwards and outwards, blown off with enough force to knock David off his feet again and onto his back on the roof.

He raised himself up on one elbow, shielding his eyes with his other arm, and watched in stunned horror as a huge, black, winged shape clawed its way out of the hole it had blasted in the tower's roof, and loomed up into the air before him. His mouth fell agape, his eyes practically popped from their sockets, and a wordless gasp of horror was all he could manage as the smoke shrouding the monstrous thing was torn aside by a single beat of its giant wings. It lifted its head to the heavens and let loose a deafening roar, drowning out all else in a cacophony of sound and thunder. The very air seemed to shake with the fury of the monstrosity's cry, and as David watched, the clouds and stars overhead vanished, and the entire sky turned a sickly green color, as though presaging some kind of apocalypse. It took David's battered psyche a moment to return to functionality, and only then did he realize that he recognized this thing. In fact anyone would have, and the realization of what it was only added to the horror.

It was a dragon.

His conscious mind shocked into numbness by virtue of the dragon that had quite literally erupted out of nowhere before him, David's subconscious demanded that he run and hide, and his body obeyed. He half-scrambled, half-stumbled back, towards a series of massive steel air vents that emerged from the tower's roof. Ducking behind one of them, he turned back and watched the dragon climb out onto the roof fully, snapping its jaws in the air, turning this way and that as though surveying its new realm. For a brief, horrible second, David thought the dragon had seen him, but then suddenly a blue energy beam flew out of the hole the beast had torn in its escape, striking it across the face, to little effect, and its attention was diverted by a ferocious counterattack from the Tower's residents.

Up flew the Titans, one after the other, hurling themselves at the dragon without an instant's hesitation, those without capacity for flight being carried and thrown at the beast by those with it. As David watched in amazement, first Cyborg, then Robin launched themselves at the black beast, Starfire flinging them through the air as though they weighed no more than matchsticks. Cyborg's face was contorted with an expression David had never before seen as his sonic cannon lashed the dragon again and again even as Robin implacably flew straight at the beast's head and struck it with all his might using a metallic staff he seemingly produced from nowhere. Neither blow was telling however, and the dragon lashed back, striking with tail and claw and clobbering both heroes in mid-air, battering Robin down onto the rooftop hard enough to crack the masonry beneath him, while flinging Cyborg across the roof and into a satellite dish perched nearby.

Starfire herself now emerged to the attack, flinging a barrage of green blasts at the beast's head and body conjured up from lord-knew-where, no longer the polite and cheerful alien girl that David had met before, but a blazing, meteoric superhero, terrible and awesome to behold. Beast Boy was right next to her, now a soaring eagle, and he flew straight at the dragon before his form suddenly rippled and then expanded a hundredfold, transforming before David's eyes into a Tyrannosaurus Rex. With a primal roar equal to anything the dragon had uttered, Beast Boy, though David was hard-pressed to associate this monster with the goofy green changeling he had been speaking to a moment before, collided head on with the dragon, biting, grappling, and clawing at it with enough force and weight to stagger the giant beast.

The scene was like nothing David had ever imagined before in his wildest or darkest dreams, a scene of pandemonium, of chaos, of unbelievable violence and power unleashed like a flash flood. And in that instant David realized that this, _this__ here_, this was who the Titans really were. These were the people he had been living amongst for more than a week, these Olympian beings of power and wrath, who possessed not only the will to hurl themselves at such a foe, but the means to do it and live. He had known of course, on some level, that these were superheroes, he had been intimidated and frankly a bit scared of them and their abilities and powers, but to know it intellectually and to see it live before his eyes were two entirely different things, and the spectacle filled him with astonishment, wonder, and awe, as well as the sickening feeling that he was puny and insignificant, a mere insect, watching giants and gods clash at the ending of the world.

But just as David's fear was being subsumed by wonder at the marvels he was seeing, the dragon proved that it too had the means and will to fight. With a twist and a massive heave, the dragon managed to wrench Beast Boy off of its throat, and threw the changeling-turned-dinosaur across the roof and into Cyborg, ripping the satellite dish off of the tower and sending both of them sliding towards the edge of the roof. Before David could so much as cry out, before he had a chance to think, much less act, Beast Boy and Cyborg crashed into and through the low wall that ringed the tower's roof and plunged off the edge and out of sight in a shower of masonry.

With a gasp of horror, David recoiled from the vent he was hiding behind. Had he been able to think clearly, he would have realized that Beast Boy could fly, and could easily catch Cyborg on his way down, but in the chaos of the events, this was well beyond his capacity for rational thought, and he felt a stabbing, wrenching pang of nausea flow over him as he collapsed to his knees, shaking like a leaf in a windstorm. "Get up!" screamed a voice in his head, "Do something! Help them!" but he could not get up, for the fear and the shock were too great. He turned his head to see Starfire, now alone, blasting at the dragon with her green bolts in righteous fury, dodging swipe after swipe of the dragon's tail and claws, undiminished in her power and glory even as the dragon roared and lashed out to tear her from the sky. What could he possibly do that would be of any help in a situation like this? What could he possibly do against that _thing _that stood before him? He was no superhero! He was nothing compared to the Titans! What good could he...

He froze.

In David's terror he had averted his eyes from the monster just for an instant and his gaze had landed upon the most mundane of objects. It was a large metallic tank, specifically a 500 gallon water tank, round and capped with valves and hatches, just one more piece of gear that littered the roof of Titan's Tower. Why it was there, what it was used for, was immaterial at the moment. What was material was that David could see, or more properly sense, that it was filled to the brim with pure, distilled water... and that the dragon's foot was planted on the roof of the tower scarcely two feet away from it.

And then a thought formed in David's mind.

He had no plan. He had no conception of what he was doing really, just a vague, general sense that he had to try to do something, anything, and before he could think it through or decide if it was a good or a bad idea, he was doing it. He reached out with one hand, extending his fingers towards the tank, focusing his eyes and his mind on it, forcing the fear and doubt aside as best he could. The tank was made of some kind of complex alloy, aluminum and stainless steel and a dozen other things, and he ignored it, focusing instead on the pure water that lay within, watching the tank dissolve before his eyes into a network of tiny parts, flowing about one another in a fluid mass. His hand went rigid and he began to press at the network with his mind, herding the latent energy within it together, freezing solid some parts of the water, setting others to boil. Slowly the tank began to vibrate as the water within was agitated, but he forced himself to concentrate, to focus. Somewhere in the back of his mind was the nagging knowledge that this was far, _far_ bigger than anything he had ever attempted before, but the water was distilled and purified, probably a reserve tank of some sort, with no chemicals or other additives to complicate it, and he forged ahead, knowing somehow that he had no choice but to try.

A cry diverted his attention for a brief instant, and his eyes flickered up to see Starfire, now caught within the dragon's jaws, straining to force them to remain open. A gasp escaped his lips and he nearly lost his concentration, but he forced himself to hold on, to force the energy inward, to push towards the critical point. The tank buckled and shook, and fissures appeared in it as David froze more and more of the water solid, expanding it beyond the volume of the tank. A hatch atop the tank burst and overflowed with freezing water, but David ignored it, all thought bent on compressing the energy still further.

There was a burst of fire and heat and David vaguely felt a jet of flame fly over his head as the dragon blasted Starfire off of the tower and out into the bay below. Its enemies seemingly beaten, the beast gave a mighty roar of victory, beating the air with its wings and nearly knocking David over with the wind gusts thus produced. Any moment now it was going to turn and incinerate him. He knew that any gesture he could make was futile, but somehow he felt he had to make it anyhow. With a last shove of his mind, David packed the water's energy tightly enough to set the reaction in motion, and as he raised his eyes once more to gaze at the monolithic beast, he braced himself against the rooftop, and released it.

The dragon's roar was cut off by a horrendous blast from near its feet as the water tank exploded into a million pieces, the water inside vaporizing instantly and erupting forth as a giant cloud of compressed steam. Caught off-balance by the unexpected explosion, the dragon's foot was knocked out from under him, and it teetered for a second and then plunged out of sight with a hideous wail. David felt himself shoved flatly down onto the rooftop by the force of the blast, as bits of metal shrapnel flew overhead. He saw the dragon vanish over the edge of the tower, and then the steam cloud enveloped him, and he saw no more.

For several seconds he lay flat on the rooftop, breathing heavily, not daring to move. The steam soaked him as it began to condense in the cold air, swirling around like mist, obscuring everything. He could hear nothing but the sound of his own breathing and the faint whistling of the wind as it blew over him. Slowly, cautiously, he stood back up, peering through the cloud, looking for any sign of what had happened to the dragon. He couldn't make anything out, neither the beast, nor the Titans themselves, nor anything else distinctive. He considered calling out, but fear restrained him from doing so. Gingerly, he crept slowly towards where he knew the edge of the tower was, shivering in the cold, wet air, just barely daring to think that maybe, just maybe, it was gone?

And then suddenly a huge shadow loomed up from the side of the tower, visible through the mist only as an indistinct black mass. Two giant red eyes appeared within the mass, boring down on David like glowing coals. Their gaze was malevolent, vicious, merciless, terrifying, and as David stumbled back, his eyes wide, his voice silenced by the re-appearance of the giant black drake, he realized that all he had succeeded in doing with his explosion had been attracting the dread beast's attention. Before he could react or run or even scream, the dragon's tail lashed out like a whip and struck him squarely in the chest, flinging him off his feet like a toy and sending him slamming back into an air conditioning unit mounted near the opposite edge of the roof. He landed face-first on the ground, hard, tasting blood on his lips, his lungs on fire from the force of the impact, and as he slowly raised his head, he could see through tear-stained eyes the dragon land on the roof and stride towards him purposefully, snapping its jaws as though anticipating a meal.

He tried to stand, and found that he could not, the impact having knocked all of the wind out of him, and his quivering, injured muscles refused to obey his commands. Desperately he sought for something else to detonate, anything to keep the monster off of him, but terror, black terror was upon him and he couldn't focus, he couldn't concentrate, and even had there been something nearby within his capacity to blow up, which there was not, he could not have so much as twinged it in his current state. The dragon now filled his vision, towering above him like a primeval force of nature, its wings stretching from horizon to horizon as it reared its head back. An orange glow formed within its mouth, and David clenched his eyes shut, raising his arms in an automatic, paltry defence as the dragon belched forth a stream of fire to reduce him to ash.

But the fire never struck.

The roaring of the flames filled his ears, the heat of the barrage seemed just inches away, yet David did not burn, and after several seconds he opened his eyes to see the cause. A semi-spherical shield of pitch darkness had sprung into being around him like a protective bubble, repelling the searing flames, if only barely. Only vaguely could David make out the dragon's form from within the black shield, and he scrambled back from it, pressing up against the back of the spherical barrier. The dragon itself seemed perturbed, but it had no time to try and figure out what had cheated it of its prey, for even as it reared back for another try, tendrils of black energy emerged from the roof, snaking into it like forked lightning, and then from behind David came the muted sound of someone speaking words that he had never heard before.

"Azerath, Metrion, _Zinthos_!"

A flash, a cry, and something passed overhead, a figure that David couldn't identify through the barely-opaque shield, but a voice he recognized as Raven's. The dragon stepped back and roared in defiance as Raven flew to engage it, but she ignored the cry, and unhesitatingly released what David could only guess were magical spells, beams, and other blasts of dark energy. Bolt after bolt and spell after spell crashed into the dragon, who retaliated with bursts of fire that rent the roof of the tower and scorched the air even as Raven darted around them. With a gesture of her hand, Raven tore up a section of roofing and hurled it into the beast, but the masonry merely shattered against its iron hide and the dragon laughed as it snatched Raven out of the air with one hand. Raven twisted and struggled to no avail as the dragon brought her in close. David could see the dragon speaking, leering at Raven, but between the shield deadening the sounds of the world outside and the ringing in his ears from the explosion and the impact, he couldn't make out what was being said.

Without even realizing what he was doing, he crept on his hands and knees back over to the front of the shield, and pressing his hands against it, stared up at the sorceress and the dragon, unwilling to watch what was happening and equally unwilling to look away. As he watched transfixed, Raven raised her hand, and something flew towards her out of the hole in the tower to his right, something small, perhaps a book or a laptop computer. She caught it in her outstretched hand, and as she did the dragon screamed, not in defiance but in mortal fear, rearing back and blasting another gout of flame at the sorceress. With one hand, Raven held the book she had summoned, and with the other she extended her own energy beam, negating the dragon's. Desperately the monstrous creature poured on the heat and fire, slowly overwhelming Raven's own magical spell, but it was too late. With a sudden cry, Raven thrust the book forward, and from it sprang more black energy, tearing up through the dragon's fire wave and striking it in its gaping maw. The dragon screamed, a piercing, chilling scream of horror and pain, as the energy flowed over it, and it writhed, twisted, and then dissolved before David's eyes into a cloud of darkness that was sucked, shrieking, into the book that Raven held aloft.

The echoes of the calamatous battle faded slowly, and David watched from within his protective enclosure as Raven slowly floated back down towards the tower's roof. The shield, having served its purpose, now lowered around him and vanished, leaving him kneeling on the rooftop, shaking uncontrolably, surrounded by the last thin wisps of steam from his explosion. One by one, the other Titans slowly reappeared, Robin digging himself out from under a smashed air duct, Beast Boy hauling Cyborg back up onto the rooftop in pterodactyl form, and Starfire returning on her own accord, soaked with sea brine and singed black, but alive. David took a deep breath, trying to breathe the fire out of his lungs, and as he let it go, his muscles buckled beneath him and he flopped down onto the roof like a boned fish. The adrenaline slowly faded, leaving in its place a dull headache, a throbbing, painful sensation in his chest from where the dragon had belted him, and a feeling of total, complete exhaustion, not merely physical, but mental and emotional, an empty, drained feeling that buried everything else beneath it. This was simply too much. A mythical beast from the darkest recesses of his nightmares had emerged without warning in his very midst and nearly killed him, and his body and mind demanded time to recover from the experience.

For some time he lay there, it could have been a few seconds or a few minutes, and then distantly he felt someone helping him to his feet. He was too tired to even open his eyes and see who was helping him into the tower and down the stairs. By the time he had reached wherever they were taking him, he was already barely awake, and when they laid him down on something that could have been a bed or a table or an execution pallet for all he cared by that point, it took him approximately two seconds to fall asleep.

**O-O-O**

He woke up several hours later, laying on the a couch in the common room of the Tower with a blanket of some sort laid over him. The lights were out, but a faint blue glow out of the corner of his eye indicated that the television was on, though the sound had been reduced to a soft whisper. His headache had gone away, and his chest no longer throbbed, the pain reduced to a dull ache whenever he breathed. He groaned for a second, then slowly sat up and looked around the darkened room. He could barely see anything in the dark save for the television which was playing some kind of black and white 50s sci-fi movie involving giant ants. There was a figure seated in the chair next to the couch, but he couldn't tell who it was, at least not until the figure noticed that he was awake and muted the movie before illuminating most of the room with a green light emitted from her hand.

"Friend David!" exclaimed Starfire in her eternal tone of gentility and compassion, a tone that seemed so completely at odds with what had happened earlier that evening. "You have awakened!"

David rubbed his eyes sleepily, his brain still trying to catalog everything that had transpired. "Hello Starfire," he said weakly as he fought back a yawn. He felt that he should have had ten thousand questions, but right now all he could think about was that he was more tired than he had ever felt. "What... time is it?"

"It is the tenth hour of the clock in the post meridian," said Starfire, and David took a moment to translate that into english, "you have been asleep for nearly three hours. Do you feel that all is right?"

"I think I'm OK," he said, and to his surprise, he actually meant it. He guessed that once he had time to recover and settle himself, he would start to realize just how close he had come, again, to getting killed, but for now everything was so dulled that he could barely recall with clarity what had happened.

"Friend Cyborg said that you were not seriously injured during the battle," said Starfire, "but after you fell asleep with such speed, it was thought that one of us should remain just in case you had been."

Had Starfire been sitting here for three hours waiting for him to wake up? David was surprised and more than a little embarrassed that she or the others would have done such a thing. "T... thanks..." he stammered (had he gotten off a single sentance without stammering since he got here?), "but you guys didn't have to... I mean I'm... I'm fine, really."

"Oh it was no trouble at all!" insisted Starfire with a warm smile, "I have been watching a fascinating documentary on the invasion of the United States by the oversized insects in the year 1954." She gestured at the screen, still filled with images of men with submachine guns battling hordes of giant ants. "Though I am puzzled why I have not heard of this incident before?"

"Starfire, I don't think that's a documentary," said David hesitantly.

"But it is in the black and the white," redplied Starfire, "is that not the style that is used for the documentary films?"

"I... I'm... really not sure about that," said David, as he decided that he had long-since passed his quota of strangeness for today. "Where's... where did everyone else go?"

"Friend Robin was here for some time, but went to sleep just over an hour ago," said Starfire. "Friend Cyborg wished to play more of the stankball with Beast Boy before bed, but he was unable to."

"Why not?" asked David

"I believe that Cyborg wished to hide the stankball from Beast Boy so that he might win the game, and he chose to hide it beneath the water tank mounted on the roof, which was destroyed during the battle."

David winced and groaned at the news. So not only had he obliterated the water tank _and _failed to harm the dragon with it, but he had _also _managed to destroy the stankball. Just great.

"Friends Beast Boy and Raven both returned to their rooms after the battle was ended," finished Starfire, not noticing David's discomfort.

"Are they OK?" asked David.

"They were not seriously hurt," said Starfire worriedly, "but I fear that friend Raven is most upset by the events. She believed that the being who was locked in the book was her friend, but instead it betrayed and attempted to kill her." Starfire's tone turned to one of regret and sadness as she lowered her head. "There have been many such occurances in the past months, and both Raven and Beast Boy have been... struggling... to deal with them. It is very hard."

David remained silent for a bit, not sure of what to say. He had no idea what these 'occurances' Starfire was talking about were, nor had he noticed anything of the sort bothering Beast Boy, but then after today, he didn't trust his own judgement to tell him the time of day, let alone what everyone around him was feeling or thinking. After everything that had happened over the past week, David had come to the realization that there was a great deal going on in this tower that he didn't understand at all.

"I... think I'm gonna go to bed..." said David finally, and Starfire smiled and wished him a good night. He turned and slowly walked towards the door, but hesitated at the door and turned back for a moment. Starfire was staring back at the TV, smiling, serene, kindly, and in his mind, David tried to reconcile that image with the one of Starfire hurling bolts of energy at her gigantic foe like some kind of vengeful deity, and he found that he could not. Shaking his head, he turned away and left the room.

Down the halls and around corners he walked, trying to remember the path to the guest room, knowing that it had to be around here somewhere, his addled mind refusing to make the appropriate decisions. It was only a few minutes after he left that he heard the sound of voices ahead. For no reason he could distern, he walked towards them, and came to a corner around which the voices were eminating from. He stuck his head around the corner, and saw Beast Boy standing in a small patch of light before a large metal door that he vaguely remembered was Raven's.

"Raven?" said the green changeling in a tone David had not yet heard him use, "It's me. Look, I'm sorry."

David had the sudden urge to back away from the corner, to go back to his room and go to sleep and leave Beast Boy and Raven to whatever they were doing. He didn't know why, but something in Beast Boy's tone told him that this was something he was not meant to see or hear. He did not back away however, and remained hidden in the shadows in the corner of the hallway, just watching and listening.

There was the sound of movement from within the door, and then Raven's voice was heard, thinner, weaker, and sadder than he had ever heard it before.

"For what?" she said, "You're not the one who..."

"No," interrupted Beast Boy, "I'm sorry that... he broke your heart."

There was a long pause from within the room, then Raven spoke again. "I know it was all a lie. But he was the only person who ever made me feel like I wasn't... creepy. And don't try to tell me I'm not."

She was, and to his credit perhaps, Beast Boy did not attempt to lie about it. "Okay, fine," he said, his voice far more serious than David had thought was possible from Beast Boy, "you're way creepy. But that doesn't mean you have to stay locked in your room." The green changeling lowered his head and closed his eyes, before adding something softly.

"You think you're alone, Raven, but you're not."

Total silence followed this line, and David realized he was holding his breath involuntarily. He felt ashamed, hiding in the shadows and eavesdropping like this, but at the same time he couldn't leave. He didn't want to find out secrets or discover unknown truths, he just wanted to see what would happen. Not for mockery's sake nor for leverage, just... to see.

Just as David thought Beast Boy was going to turn and leave, the door suddenly slid open with a soft hiss, and Raven was revealed, standing in the doorway, looking the same as she always did, but somehow entirely different, as though her barriers of self-control and intimidation had been shattered and swept away. She stood motionless for a moment, and then in one movement stepped up to Beast Boy and gave him a giant, almost desperate hug, like that of a person who feared that the thing she embraced was going to disappear at any moment, and leave her completely alone.

Beast Boy was plainly not expecting this any more than David had been, and he looked almost shocked. After several moments, he slowly disengaged himself from Raven and stepped back a pace, total surprise written on his face. "Uh..." he said, plainly unsure of what to say, almost as though expecting something to suddenly spring out and interrupt them, but nothing did. "I..."

Raven looked fairly embarassed, and lowered her head almost in shame at having done something this emotional. "I should... I should go..." she said quickly, interrupting whatever Beast Boy had planned to say, and she turned to go back into her room. As she did so however, Beast Boy seemed to recover from his initial astonishment, and reached out to put a hand on her shoulder.

"Raven," he said as he placed his hand on her cloak "wait... I..."

Raven stopped, and for a second David half-expected her to blast the changeling with some energy bolt. Instead however she slowly turned her head back towards Beast Boy, who now had a look of profound worry. Slowly she reached up and placed her hand atop his, and clutched it tightly, closing her eyes to block off the tears that were forming. And then as Beast Boy stepped towards her and gently put his arms around her in a reciprocal hug of his own, the last of Raven's will and resolve crumbled, and she broke down into tears.

Beast Boy closed his eyes and hugged Raven tight as she rested her head on his shoulder and cried quietly, no showy erruptions or loud sobbing, just the the soft tears of someone who could hold them back no longer. She squeezed him back, wrapping her arms around his chest and clinging to him as though clinging to a liferaft in the middle of a storm. Neither one said a word, it was likely that neither one could, and after a long while Beast Boy slowly lowered Raven down until they were both sitting against the wall, Beast Boy with his arm (somewhat awkwardly, given that she was taller than him) around Raven's shoulders, and Raven simply leaning against Beast Boy, half of her desperately trying to staunch her crying, and the other half just as desperately trying to let it all out. They sat like this together in silence for a long, long time.

But David didn't see that part, for he had already slipped silently away into the shadows of the darkened halls, moving like an automation towards the guest room. Had he seen what he had just seen yesterday, it would likely have blown his mind, but on this crazed, unbelievable day, it was merely a final confirmation of the fact that whatever he thought he knew about the people who lived in this tower had not only been wrong, but totally and compeletely off the mark. It wasn't that he had mis-understood them, it was that he had never understood anything about them at all, these heroes, these gods, these kids. What was happening in this tower was compeltely outside his frame of mind, was an experience so alien to him that it shook him to the core to recall Robin and Cyborg lunging to the attack without a second thought, to recall Starfire transcendant and fueled by indignation and rage, to recall Beast Boy and Raven, standing there...

These five heroes had something here, something unique perhaps, but entirely divorced from the reality he knew, and he felt more than ever that he was imposing on it. That he was interfering with something strange and alien and beautiful and terrible that he couldn't even comprehend much less understand. It wasn't just that they were superhuman, but that they had... a connection, a five-way web of ties that formed a single pattern, both infinitely strong and exquisitely fragile, and with that realization came a wakening. This place, these people, this was not where he was supposed to be. He was a child of the system, of regimen, of simplicity, of the comfortable anonymity that came with being entirely average and decidedly unremarkable, of a thousand things he had taken for granted that simply did not exist here, not of this place. This place embodied everything that he was not, everything he had never had and never known and never felt and never understood, and he knew he could not remain here any longer. He had to go, if only to save his own worldview and sanity from being entirely oblitterated, to say nothing of the risk of actually losing his life in another "incident". As he entered the guest room and got into his bed, he resolved, firmly and completely, that tomorrow would be the last day he would spend in Titan Tower. He would thank them all profusely for their unending kindness and patience, he would pledge to repay them however he could in the future, no matter the circumstance, and then he would leave, and return to his own world. Cinderblock be damned, this place was as dangerous as any super-villain could be, and not merely because of the risk of dragon attack.

It was decided then, tomorrow he would go. Tomorrow he would leave. Tomorrow he would exit the rabbit hole and leave wonderland behind forever. He fell asleep repeating the mantra to himself, taking some slight comfort in knowing that tomorrow it would all be over.

But tomorrow was another day...


	6. In the Presence of Mine Enemies

**Disclaimer:** I own next to nothing in general, and no rights to the Teen Titans in specific.

**Author's Note:** Well here we are again. Having managed to somehow avoid crushing the souls of all those who read the previous chapter with a landslide of text (which I am told by one reviewer that I am no longer permitted to apologize for, and thus shall not), I have returned once more with another installment of this tale to present. Once more, I make no claims to quality, particularly since this chapter is, quite specifically, an experiment of sorts. Rather than dropping a _truly _obscene quantity of verbiage upon you all (and taking another half a week to finish it), I have elected this time to break this chapter's 'tale' in half, something I normally do not do. I am therefore _exceedingly_ interested in any and all commentary you, the readers, have to give on both this chapter and the one to follow it. I therefore beg you to please leave a review of any length or content you like, that I may know the results of this literary endeavor.

One last question I have been asking is whether or not these little author's notes would do better at the end of the chapter rather than before. If anyone has an opinion on this subject, please either leave a review or send me a private message to let me know.

Anyhow, please do enjoy, and I hope this chapter manages in some way to meet the standards you have so loftily set for my meager attempts at writing this story.

* * *

**Chapter 6: ** **In the Presence of Mine Enemies  
**

_"One ought never to turn one's back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half. Never run away from anything. Never!"_

- Winston Churchill

**O-O-O**

David loved crowds.

He knew that wasn't particularly common. Most people got nervous in crowds, even outgoing, energetic types. For those whose personalities leaned more towards introversion and shyness, a large crowd of people was supposed to be an early glimpse of Hell. He could see how somebody who wasn't observant might think that, but to him, a teeming shopping mall, a bustling cafeteria, an airport or amusement park or even just a busy street were like returning home. Hundreds and thousands of people going about their business, running, walking, strolling, standing, sitting, talking, whistling, doing a thousand different things, and all of them paying not the slightest mind to a single unremarkable teen-aged boy wandering through their midst. The energy of a crowd as it swirled and washed around him, the soothing, calming sensation of being invisible in broad daylight, these things were almost palpable, as if he could draw his anonymity around him like a warm blanket, secure, untouchable, safe behind barriers of imperceptibility and indifference. Plenty of people sought solitude by themselves, hiding away alone, fearing to encounter anyone. David knew better. If he wished to be alone, then there was no better place than at the center of a mass of complete strangers, none of whom knew him, none of whom noticed him, none of whom gave him so much as a second glance.

And after the last ten days or so, he really needed to be invisible for a while.

The remains of his cinnamon roll lay on his plate as he sat back in the metal chair of the Bayside Cafe & Grill and watched the crowds passing by. Below the terrace he was sitting on ran a small bike path and pedestrian walkway, and beyond that, the sparkling blue waters of Jump City Bay. Bicyclists, joggers, kids, couples young and old, all passed before him, all of them out enjoying the warm spring afternoon, none of them even conscious of the fact that he was watching them pass. He doubted that any of them would have cared even if they had noticed him. After all, what harm was there in a bit of people-watching?

He glanced back up at the wall clock mounted behind him. 4:07. His bus wasn't supposed to leave until a quarter to five and the bus station was barely a block away, so he had time to sit here and watch the world pass by, to observe the people as they went about their routines, laughing and chatting and talking on their cell phones. It always helped him, sitting there, imagining the stories behind each person, seeing everything and being seen by nobody, not because he was slinking in the shadows, but because there was no reason for anyone to see him, just another quiet, unobtrusive kid, nothing special at all. It helped him to calm down, to unwind, to relax.

Or at least it usually did.

Right now however, his gaze was vacant, his stare fixed on nothing in particular, and try as he might, he couldn't get his mind to unhinge and simply daydream. Instead he kept going back over the events of last night and this morning, trying to make sense of it all. It didn't work. He told himself that there wasn't any answer to be had, that this was simply a series of unconnected events that he had been swept up in, nothing to do with him really, and yet no matter how many times he repeated that to himself, he couldn't bring himself to believe it. He had always liked to think that things happened for a reason, that there was a purpose to everything, and yet now here he was trying desperately to convince himself that it had all been the work of chance, that luck and nothing else had placed him in the middle of the attack on the Center, and thereby brought him to Titan Tower. He wanted to believe it. He really wanted to believe that it had all just been a coincidence, but old habits died hard.

And on top of it all, he kept coming back to what Robin had said this morning...

**O-O-O**

"I think it's a mistake."

David looked down at the granite tabletop as all five Titans stood or sat around him, staring at him. Their stares made him uneasy, and he said nothing. It was ten in the morning on what David had just announced was going to be his last day in the Tower.

Robin sat opposite David, his masked eyes practically boring a hole right through him. When he saw that David wasn't going to contest his previous statement, he continued.

"We still haven't found any sign of Cinderblock or any evidence of who's behind this," said the Boy Wonder, "and until we do, we won't know if you're still in danger or not. I don't think it's a good idea for you to be going back out there by yourself until we've found something more conclusive."

"I... I know..." he said weakly. He didn't like being confrontational; his instincts were to just agree to what Robin was saying, but at the same time he remembered yesterday evening, and he knew he had to get out of this place, even if it meant forcing an argument. "I just... I don't think that Cinderblock's coming back is all. And I think... I think I really should be getting back to the offices before they close my files up permanently."

"You don't know that," said Robin, crossing his arms, "and whatever the paperwork hassle, a couple more days until we finish going through all possible leads can't hurt."

"Besides, man," chimed in Cyborg, "the Center's toast. It'll be a year at least before they can rebuild it, so where're you gonna go?"

"I figured I'd take a bus or a train or something up to the central office - I think it's in San Francisco - and just turn myself back in there. There's other facilities around the state. I mean... if I leave Jump, won't I lose this Cinderblock guy, if he's even looking for me at all?"

"Maybe," replied Cyborg, "or maybe not. Besides, what's the rush? Way you say it, sounds as if you're going back to jail or something."

"Yeah, dude," said Beast Boy, "you can't be in _that _much of a hurry to go back to some orphanage or whatever, can you?"

"It's not 'some orphanage', it's where I live, OK?" snapped David before he could stop himself. The tone was bitter, and coming from David it was so unexpected that Beast Boy fell silent and Raven raised an eyebrow. David closed his eyes as he berated himself for having said that, and when he opened them a second or two later he was subdued again. "... sorry," he said softly, "I... it's been a really weird couple of weeks..."

The Titans exchanged glances as David took a deep breath and let it out slowly, returning his gaze to the tabletop. Beast Boy remained silent for once, but Cyborg took a stab at guessing what David's difficulty was. "If you're worried about that dragon thing," he said, "I'm telling you, that was a fluke. It's not like we do that every day around here. Is that what's bothering you?"

"No," said David, almost automatically. It was a lie, an obvious lie, and he immediately retracted it, "I mean... partly I guess, but... it's more that this place is... just..." He fumbled over the words, and switched tracks in mid-sentence. "I don't want to be in the way any longer is all."

"But you are not located within the way, friend David!" protested Starfire, "Surely we cannot agree to your leaving when such a threat remains!" The alien girl looked to her friends for support, but David merely shook his head.

"That's not what I meant," he said, wishing that he actually knew what he meant. He fell silent again and closed his eyes, taking another deep breath to steady himself and try and force his thoughts into a rational order. When he opened his eyes he spoke in as reasonable a tone as he could manage, given everything that was racing through his head.

"Look, you guys have been... really amazing to me for these past couple weeks, and I'm grateful, I _really _am." He lowered his head and his voice a notch as he spoke with an almost embarrassed tone. "You saved my life back there at the center, you let me stay here just in case I was still in danger, you've all been super-patient and understanding and just generally really cool about everything, and I mean..." He trailed off for a second before raising his head again. "I can't thank you guys enough. I know that... that there's no way really for me to repay you all for what you've done for me, but I would if I could. I mean it."

"We're superheroes," said Robin with just the faintest trace of a satisfied smirk; "that's just what we do. There's no need to thank us. This is our job."

"I know," said David, "but... even so, I know you guys have gone way beyond whatever your job description is, doing all this for me. And... I'm sure you get this all the time, but if there's anything I can do to help you in the future..."

"Seriously, man, it's not a big deal," said Cyborg, "we're just tryin' to help."

"It's a big deal to me," said David, "and... that's part of it." He paused again as he forced himself to return to the real subject under discussion. "But... mostly it's just that this... this whole thing is just way beyond me, you know? And I just... I'd rather just leave Jump and Cinderblock and all of this behind. There's no way to tell if it was me that Cinderblock wanted or not, and you said yourselves that there's been no trace of him at all. I mean I can't stay here forever, can I? And the longer I wait before I go back, the harder it's gonna be to work everything out with the Child Welfare people. I know that... that it might be dangerous to leave and all, but... I just... I can't imagine why Cinderblock would want me in the first place, and even if he had a reason to, I figure it'd be best for me to just go and not come back."

For what felt like a long time, though it could have been only a few seconds, nobody spoke. When Robin finally broke the silence, there was the barest hint of uncertainty in his voice.

"I still think it's a bad idea," said Robin, his tone indicating that he suspected even worse, "but, if you really think this is what you want to do, then we won't stop you." David took another deep breath and released it as he looked up at the masked Titan and nodded. Around him, the other four Titans were watching with various different reactions written on their faces. Starfire's look was concerned, as it almost always was, but more so now, as if she felt along with Robin that this was a terrible mistake, but could not place a finger on exactly how. Cyborg's look was stern, as it almost always was, but understanding, as if he could sense the desperation that was quivering beneath the young teen's fragile exterior and detect David's unspoken plea to be released from Wonderland and return to normal life. Beast Boy's look was unjudging, as it almost always was, a warm smile on his face that masked any doubt he might have felt at this prospect, and seemed to assure David that whatever happened, it would come out alright in the end. Raven's look was piercing, as it almost always was, her dark eyes sizing him up as though trying to peer right through him and see what he was hiding behind his words, an unsettling gaze that caused David to sharply avert his eyes.

And as to Robin, Robin's look was nigh-invisible, as it absolutely always was, his thoughts hidden behind a latex shield, observing everything, revealing nothing. And yet creeping out from behind the mask, David could swear, just for a second, he caught a glimpse of indecision in Robin's stare, as though there were something on his mind he was not speaking of, but what it was, David guessed that he would likely never know. At this point, he was willing to live with that.

There were, after all, some mysteries best left unsolved.

**O-O-O**

For all intents and purposes, that had been the end of the discussion. Sure, the others had continued to try to talk him out of it, Starfire and Beast Boy in particular, but once Robin had assured him that the decision was actually going to be his, all further talk was reduced to mere semantics. David knew he had to leave, knew that he had no choice but to leave, and knew that he had to leave as quickly and unobtrusively as he could. It had taken a long time to convince Beast Boy that this was actually what he wanted to do, and an even longer one to convince Starfire of it, but eventually Robin had tabled the debate as settled. Cyborg seemed to be the most inclined to agree with him, and by the end was actually defending his decision to Starfire and Beast Boy on the grounds that, whatever the risks involved, David had the right to make his own mind up on this matter, another one of the ten thousand reasons David wanted to thank Cyborg, as his own will was simply not up to the task of convincing the Titans individually. Raven had, rather characteristically, said not a single word throughout the whole proceedings. David couldn't tell if it was because she simply wished to see him gone or if there was some other reason for her silence. After what he had seen the day before of her and Beast Boy, he was less inclined than ever to pry. He had noticed her speaking in low tones to Robin about something after the discussion had ended, glancing on occasion in his direction, but he had not been able to hear what was being said - nor had he really wished to.

Once the call had been made, the rest of the morning was spent preparing for David's departure, not that there was much preparation to make, or so David had thought, given that he had arrived at the Tower with nothing. As it turned out however, the others seemed rather insistent that he not be made to leave with the same, and despite his protests, he found he couldn't dissuade them from this final gesture. Beast Boy had made him keep the clothes that he had borrowed to replace the ones he had been wearing when the Center had collapsed on top of him, regardless of the fact that his old ones had long-since been cleaned and repaired. "I won't wear them anyway," Beast Boy had explained with his trademark grin. "Besides, they make you look much cooler." David, who was of the opinion that in fact they made him look rather ridiculous, had tactfully remained silent.

Starfire had insisted that he take with him a generous portion of some substance called "Glar'kneft", a casserole-ish thing approximately the same color as Pepto-Bismol whose composition David was afraid to even speculate about. She insisted it was a traditional Tamaranean pastry given as gifts to those departing, which only made David more afraid to try it, but he could hardly refuse such a gift, and thanked her as best he could.

Cyborg and Raven did not insist on loading him down with anything, but Cyborg had quietly placed a few calls through to the San Francisco offices of the state's Child Welfare Services to ensure that David knew where he was going and how to get there, while Raven insisted on a final "checkup" to make sure that nothing potentially life-threatening had been missed after the incidents at the Center and yesterday on the roof. David didn't know why, but he got a vague sense that there was something Raven was searching for as she performed her divination and healing spells, but what it was, or whether or not she had found it, he did not know and did not ask. Last of all, Robin had taken David aside just before they had loaded up in the T-car for the drive to the bus station, and quietly given him a small money clip with two hundred dollars inside it. This was approximately eight times as much money as David had ever had at any one time, and he first stood stunned for a second, then attempted to refuse it, and finally was forced to simply stammer out another series of hopelessly awkward thanks, painfully conscious of his total inability to repay Robin or any of the others for their generosity. Robin, of course, had insisted that it was nothing, that the Titans had plenty of money, that it was just to see him safely to San Francisco and cover him in case of delays or emergencies, but that didn't stop David from blushing beet red as he slipped it into his pocket. Much as he cursed himself for it, all he had to give back to Robin in return was the locator beacon that Robin had given to him to wear around the tower as a security measure, which he felt he no longer needed. He had almost expected Robin to insist he keep that as well, but to his surprise, Robin did not.

They had all loaded up in the T-car for the drive to the bus station, Cyborg driving as usual, and David noticed as he sat in the back that the bloodstains he had left on the back seat of the car were still faintly visible, red splotches on the upholstered leather. He had said next to nothing the entire ride, in fact nobody had, and it wasn't until they arrived at the bus stop that there had been any talk. There Cyborg had shaken his hand and told him to be sure to call them if anything went wrong on the trip to San Francisco, Beast Boy had clapped him on the back and made him promise to look them all up if he was ever back in Jump City again, Raven had curtly nodded and wished him a "pleasant trip", Starfire had recited an incomprehensible thing that was apparently some sort of formal farewell in her native language, and Robin had assured him that they would let him know if there were any results to their searches, or if Cinderblock was ever caught. He returned their farewells in as gracious a manner as he could, making and accepting promises that he knew would never be kept, thanking them all one last time for their actions. Robin clearly had planned to stick around and wait for David's bus to leave, but right at that moment, the alarm in the T-car had sounded, summoning the five heroes to some new adventure, and given that the bus was leaving in a couple of minutes anyway, the Titans took their leave a bit early. With a parting wave, and a wish for their good fortune in whatever endeavor they were racing off to, David watched as all five Titans scrambled back into the T-car and drove away, vanishing around the corner and leaving him standing before the Jump City bus terminal.

For a few moments, he stared off in the direction that the car had gone, watching the dust swirl across the asphalt in its wake, listening to the sounds of the car's nitrous engine slowly fade into the distance, his thoughts jumbled and blurred, his feelings confused and uncertain. And then slowly, with an air of finality, David picked up the small satchel next to him and turned away from Jump City, walking across the parking lot to the bus terminal to buy his ticket that would take him away from this insane city and its superhuman residents forever, and back to the life that he knew.

It was time to leave Olympus to the gods, and return to the world of mortals...

... of course, the world of mortals had its own hassles to deal with.

The woman at the bus terminal had presented him with the less than welcome news that the bus from Sacramento was late, and that as a result, the next bus to San Francisco wouldn't be leaving for several more hours. Compared with the chaos of the past weeks however, a simple bus delay was almost like a relief, and David had merely bought a ticket without complaint and followed the woman's suggestion that he grab a bite to eat down at the nearby coffee shop while he waited. And so it was that David wound up sitting on a terrace overlooking Jump City bay with an empty mug of hot chocolate and part of a cinnamon roll in front of him, watching the people moving by, watching the waves ripple in against the shore, and sneaking the occasional glance across the wide expanse of water at the giant tower standing atop a lonely island in the center of the bay.

He sat in silence, letting his mind wander, images of the last few days drifting lazily through his head. He remembered the overjoyed look that came over Starfire's face after he had told her (disingenuously) that her Tamaranean Festival Pie (made of eggplant, sour cream, and what David had sworn was motor oil) was delicious, though he regrettably couldn't eat another bite, just like everyone else. He remembered Cyborg's barely repressed laughter as he described in lurid detail the actions that had been necessary to revive Beast Boy during some escapade involving a British hypnotist, and Beast Boy's determined (and loud) insistence that Cyborg was flagrantly exaggerating things. He remembered Robin walking into the common room drenched in seawater and covered with kelp, Raven following behind him explaining that _this_ was why it was a bad idea to sneak up on her when she was meditating on the roof, 'surprise reaction tests' notwithstanding. A smile came across his face inadvertently as he sat and thought, but left abruptly as his mind turned automatically to the reasons he was no longer there: The stunted and cryptic images he remembered from the attack on the center, the sight of the black dragon looming over him, infinitely strong and powerful, ready to consume his very soul, the recognition, pained and slow though it had been, that the five Titans in this tower formed a single unit that he was intruding upon, one that he would never understand...

He shook his head and cleared it, blinking in the late afternoon light. What use was it in dwelling on this experience? It was over. He was leaving. There was nothing more to it. He forced the thoughts and images from his mind as he glanced back at the clock again. 4:32. Time to go. He stood up slowly from his table and took a last look off the terrace across the water at Titan tower, the setting sun framing it in a wreath of fire. With a deep breath he froze the image in his mind, a last and final souvenir of his time in Jump City amongst gods and monsters, and then he reached down to pick up his cup and plate so as to bus them and leave.

But then he stopped.

Initially he didn't know why he stopped. Was it something he had forgotten? He frowned as he mentally checked all of his belongings, paltry though they were at the moment, patting his pockets to see that his money and bus ticket were still there. Everything was in place. So what was this uneasy feeling that had suddenly come over him? Was it the cinnamon roll? That would be a _perfect _end to the day there, now wouldn't it? But no, he didn't feel sick, he just felt... uneasy... like something was wrong but he couldn't tell what. There was a soft shiver on the back of his neck, something on the edge of conscious perception, a sensation that not all was well around him, but what was it? And what the hell was that... sound?

Soft, oh so soft it was, just on the edge of hearing, a low rhythmic sound like a bass drum played miles away. It had not started so much as slowly faded into audible range, like the soundtrack to a movie, and as David looked around for the source of it, he realized that he could not only hear it but feel it, a soft pulsating feeling like a heavy heartbeat flowing through him, as though a stereo with too much bass volume were being used in the immediate vicinity. He listened for a moment, trying to pinpoint where it was coming from, and then slowly his gaze followed the sound's direction out off the terrace into the waters of the bay once more. Was it coming from the boats on the water? The island? Titans' Tower itself? None of these things would have surprised him, but as the sound grew clearer, and the sensation stronger in his chest, he realized that it was coming from the water itself... from under the water.

David's hand slowly gripped the guardrail of the terrace without him noticing, as he stared out into the water and watched the last of the sun disappear behind Titans' Tower. With the glare abruptly removed, David could see, far off in the water, a small wave approaching the shore. A bare ripple, it moved nonetheless distinct from the other waves lapping against the shoreline, moving slowly and steadily, less like a wave than the wake of a boat. An icy chill filled David's veins, even though he did not know why as he felt the sound growing in intensity with the wave's approach, to the point where he could hear the mug on his table start to quiver and the windows of the diner behind him begin to rattle.

Now others were noticing the sound and the wave, waitresses and patrons and children playing in the park below the terrace, all stopping and casting glances at one another and staring out into the water as the wave began to build and the sound continued to amplify. It was loud enough now to be clearly heard, a steady "thud", like a pile driver or hydraulic ram. Almost without thinking about it, David opened his mind up in the way he knew how to do but not how to describe, watching the world around him dissolve into molecular components, searching through the water looking for something, anything that didn't belong, relying on sense rather than sight to tell him what was going on. It was only a moment before he spotted it. Ahead, deep in the dark water, moving towards the shore with an imposing, unceasing stride, a solid mass in the middle of the liquid water, hulking and ponderous, a mass made of carbon and silicates, of cement and sand, a composite of ash and concrete that David knew that he knew but that he was having trouble recognizing. It took him several seconds to piece it together, but suddenly the realization of what this material was struck him like an artillery shell.

... cinderblock.

"Oh my god..."

The wave parted, and slowly first the head and then the torso of a dark, monolithic figure broke the surface of the water. The figure was huge, towering, and uniformly dark grey, water running off of it like a storm gutter as it slowly waded towards the shore. Red eyes flared out of the figure's head, boring a path straight through the scenery and the terrified onlookers, straight up at the boy standing frozen with shock and horror on the terrace of the nearby coffee shop. Slowly the figure raised its arms, thick, powerful arms with hands balled into fists, and opened its mouth as it let out a wordless, formless roar of rage and power, loud and unmistakable enough to send civilians fleeing in every direction, screaming as the thing emerged from the water. The monster ignored them, staring directly into David's eyes before extending one arm towards him, a single massive finger pointed like a spear at his chest, and it shouted a single terrible word in a harsh gravelly voice David had hoped and prayed and almost managed to convince himself that he would never hear again.

"_DEVASTATOR!_"

The cry boomed out across the shore like a cannon report, thunderous and earthshaking, overwhelming the panicked shouts of tourists and sojourners, and sending an ice-cold dagger of fear driving straight into David's heart. His mouth fell open, but no words emerged, no sound at all, his voice strangled and silenced by the abject horror that boiled up from within and claimed him for its own. And then as Cinderblock raised both fists and stomped out of the water completely, across the bike path, and up towards the terrace itself, David did the only think that his terrified psyche would permit or even consider. He ran.

He ran blindly and desperately, sprinting across the terrace around the overturned tables and clambering over the railing separating it from the restaurant's parking lot. His foot caught on the railing as he jumped and he fell sprawling onto the sidewalk, but he scrambled back to his feet and took off as fast as he could run, the sounds of screaming and splintering and shattering ringing in his ears as the living nightmare behind him smashed a path straight through the coffee shop in pursuit of what was now unquestionably its sole prey. There was no thought or plan in David's mind, no calculation of how he would lose this thing or escape from it, only pure adrenaline-fueled panic commanding him to flee and countermanding all else, and so he ran, tearing across the parking lot and turning down an alley, even as the loud, regular crashes that he knew now were the monster's footsteps seemed to follow him. He heard its low growls as it followed him relentlessly, overturning dumpsters, knocking down light posts, smashing straight through anything and everything that separated it from its target.

The end of the alley was barely twenty yards ahead, and beyond it, David could see a large, open street. Desperately he ran as fast as he could, listening to the sounds of the monster chasing him. He knew it was gaining. He expected any second to feel its rocky hand on his shoulder, but he couldn't look back, he couldn't bring himself to do anything but run. If he could make it to the street he might be able to find someplace to hide, perhaps jump in a car or duck into a building, something, anything to escape the monster behind him. And so he ran as fast as he could, his lungs on fire, now barely a dozen steps from...

A trash can flew at him from behind and struck him in the back with enough force to fling him off his feet and out onto the sidewalk. Garbage flew everywhere as David slid to a stop on his side, laying stunned for a second as Cinderblock approached relentlessly. David groaned, shook his head, and tried to stand back up, but a stabbing pain shot through his back as he did so, and he slipped and fell once more, landing on his back with a yelp. He managed to sit up, with difficulty, as Cinderblock bore down on him, towering above him like a giant even as cars on the street screeched to a halt and collided with one another, the drivers fleeing at Cinderblock's appearance. Cinderblock ignored them. "Find Devastator..." he said, as though repeating something drummed into him, "Get Devastator..." David's breath came in ragged gasps as he tried to slide away from the monster, but Cinderblock stepped forward, pinning him up against a parked car, and reached down to grab him.

"Find Devasta..."

_BAM!_

A hail of stone fragments flew in every direction as Cinderblock's arm jerked back from the young psychokinetic, who was painfully sitting up against the car, one hand bracing himself on the concrete sidewalk, the other extended rigidly towards Cinderblock. The animated battering ram took a step back, its voice silenced for the moment, blinking in what appeared to be shock as it stared, not at David, but at its own mangled hand, the thumb of which was now missing, having been blasted to bits and scattered all over the street. For a moment, neither David nor Cinderblock seemed capable of movement, David sitting stone still, stunned that his desperate counterattack had actually had an effect, Cinderblock blinking stupidly, his gaze shifting from his hand to David and back to his hand again, as though unable to fully associate the kid before him with the pain and injury he had just suffered.

Slowly, painfully, David grabbed hold of the side mirror of the car he was sitting against and hauled himself to his feet. He still could not believe that he had actually managed to hurt the monstrosity before him, but the realization that he had was beginning to sink in, and with it, his fear, still holding him in a grip of ice, began to give way before another sensation, a white hot sensation that he had never before felt, a smoldering, indignant fury that this... this _thing_ was attacking him, trying to kill him or worse, that he had done nothing to it or to anyone else and yet here it stood, punishment for a sin he had never committed or even known of. It was not a matter of heroics. He did not feel a sudden obligation to save the city or bystanders or even himself though some selfless act of gallantry. His fear did not subside so much as flow into this new feeling, meld with it and combine to form a mixture of urgency, outrage, and terror that forced him to push down the pain in his back and raise his hand again towards Cinderblock, even as the creature's expression darkened and a low growl emitted from it.

"_LEAVE ME ALONE!_" David screamed at Cinderblock, his muscles tense and shaking, and he narrowed his tear-streaked eyes and opened his hand as he pressed at Cinderblock with his mind once more. The giant roared in rage and pain as a fist-sized piece of its chest quivered, cracked, and then exploded at David's unspoken command, showering him with another rain of small stone chips and leaving a divot the size of an apple gouged in the concrete hide of the towering fiend. _"JUST LEAVE ME ALONE!" _Cinderblock's eyes were wide with astonishment and shock, but the mighty behemoth was not the sort to be repelled by words or shouts or even detonations of this magnitude, and he turned back on David with a look of rage and wrath that had not before been present. The insect had hurt him, but it remained an insect, and he would crush it in revenge for the pain it had caused him.

"GRRRAAAAAAAARRRGHHHH!" bellowed Cinderblock with enough volume to shatter glass, and he charged, kicking at David with his foot, missing narrowly as his target dove for the ground with a stifled shout, and crushing the car he had been leaning against like a tin can. David rolled over and managed to scramble to his feet again, his anger overwhelmed once again by his fear, and he ran for his life down the street away from the monster, ducking around cars and trucks as best he could even as Cinderblock, now fully enraged, overturned and tore through the same obstacles in his bloody desire to revenge himself on the kineticist. Before David could even think of what to do now, of where to run or hide or stand, there was the squealing of tires and suddenly, from up ahead, a black and white police cruiser with sirens blaring shot around the corner and came to a stop in the middle of the street. The doors to the cruiser flew open as the car screeched to a halt and the driver jumped out, a shotgun in hand, even as his partner climbed up into the doorwell of the passenger door and aimed a large revolver at the approaching monstrosity. David stumbled towards the cop car and collapsed against it as the driver shouldered his shotgun and pumped a shell into the chamber. "JCPD!" screamed the driver to Cinderblock, "FREEZE!" but Cinderblock did not freeze, did not even hesitate, kicking a fire hydrant over as he stomped towards both David and the police.

The driver opened fire, his partner following suit a second later, and David cried out as the gunshots nearly deafened him, but the bullets had no effect, and Cinderblock roared as he snatched up another car with his good hand and threw it straight at the police cruiser. David ducked down instinctively, and the instinct saved his life as the sedan Cinderblock had thrown passed barely an inch overhead before smashing into the police car, sending both vehicles flying down the street like rubber balls and colliding with a jackknifed gasoline tanker that sat in the middle of the road where its driver had abandoned it at the first sight of Cinderblock. A single spark was all that it took. With a cataclysmic blast, the tanker exploded, disintegrating itself, both cars, and much of the street it sat on, and sending flames shooting hundreds of feet into the air. The blast wave rolled over David like an ocean breaker, and the thunder of the blast echoed down the street as bits and pieces of burning debris rained down across the area.

Several seconds passed before David slowly opened his eyes and got up off the ground. A black pall of smoke billowed upwards from the burning tanker, completely blocking the street behind him. Ahead of him, Cinderblock stood defiant and unbroken, his cruel features twisted into a smirk, as if he was pleased at the havoc he had wrought, to say nothing of the fact that his prey was now cornered, all avenues of escape cut off by the explosion and fire. David glanced around to see that one of the cops, the driver, lay crumpled against another car on the side of the street, while the other was nowhere to be seen. He turned back to face Cinderblock even as the giant slowly began to move towards him, and he backed up before its advance, trying to force himself to think of something, anything to do to keep it at bay. His foot tapped against something hard and metallic, and he glanced down to see the second policeman's revolver laying in the street next to him. He stared at it for a second, then back up at Cinderblock, and then snatched the revolver up from the ground, pointing it awkwardly at the abomination, even as it stomped closer.

It was a joke really, a weapon of almost comedic impotence against the supervillain before him, wielded by a terrified kid who had never before fired, held, or even seen a gun up close, but he had no other choice but to try, as his powers were clearly insufficient to stop or phase Cinderblock, and in any event he was far too scared to make any use of them. "Stay _back_!" he shouted through exhausted tears, the revolver shaking in his hands as he said it, but Cinderblock ignored him, and so he braced himself as best he could and squeezed the trigger. The Magnum's gunshot startled him enough to nearly drop the weapon, and the recoil staggered him like a punch to the chest, but the heavy round bounced off of Cinderblock's arm as though made of rubber, and the juggernaut did not so much as shudder. Taking several steps back, David raised the handgun again and fired it, this time striking Cinderblock in the chest, but once more the bullet had no effect at all. With Cinderblock bearing down on him, fists raised, bellowing incoherent cries of violence, David pointed the weapon forward yet again, clenching his eyes shut as Cinderblock filled his vision and squeezing the trigger one final time.

_BOOM!_

David felt a fresh shockwave strike him and bowl him over backwards, landing him on his hands and knees. He felt the heat of the roaring flames behind him and the heat of something else before, and he opened his eyes and gasped as he saw Cinderblock stagger back away from him, a cloud of fire and smoke erupting from the monster's chest, which looked as if it had been blasted open with a bazooka. A massive smoldering rent had been torn in Cinderblock's rough surface, and the gargantuan supervillain was roaring, not in rage now but in obvious pain and astonishment, as it backed up several paces. For a second, David glanced down at the revolver still clutched in his hand, wondering if it was even possible, but his question was answered a second later as three more explosions burst all over Cinderblock's hide, knocking the stone monstrosity onto its back. David looked up to see a fusillade of green bolts and blue beams of energy scream overhead and into Cinderblock, followed by an entire four-door sedan, cloaked in a black shroud and hurled at the battered colossus like a cruise missile. And as David tried to rationalize _this_ new development, a brief shadow fell over him as someone leaped over the roaring fire behind him and landed barely half a dozen yards ahead with the grace of a circus acrobat. Someone clutching a handful of razor-sharp steel boomerangs shaped like birds of prey between his fingers. Someone dressed in a red and yellow and green suit that reminded David vaguely of a stoplight.

Someone wearing a mask...

"Robin!"


	7. The Point of No Return

**Disclaimer:** Through sickness and health, good times and bad, as long as I live, I am almost certainly never going to own the Teen Titans.

**Author's Note:** Welcome, my infinitely patient and unfathomably wonderful readers, to another installment of my story. I do not wish to pad my word-count any further with rhetoric and repetition, but I feel an explanation is in order for this one. I intended to post this chapter nearly a week ago, but two things interfered. The first was illness, specifically a terrible ear infection that has left me almost deaf (though fortunately only temporarily so). I should be right as rain in a few days, but it did put a damper on my capacity to write.

Secondly, and probably more importantly for our purposes here, this chapter is... strange. It originated of course merely as the second half of the previous chapter, but in writing it, it has grown prodigiously, and become something else. I do not know what to make of it now, as the finished product is a very different beast than what I had originally intended to write. This is not necessarily a good thing, indeed I must beg your indulgence with me, as I truly intended to produce something other than what I have written (and something smaller too, though I'm not allowed to apologize for that). I beseach you all heartily to leave a review with your opinion, not merely to satisfy my ego (indeed, review with flames and anger if you wish!), but because I simply do not know what to _make _of this thing I have created. I pray fervantly that it meets with your approval, though I know not if it will. I know only that the process of writing it was unique in my experience, and now the chips must fall where they may.

So please read at your leisure, and I do hope you enjoy this latest chapter. Until next time, and good fortune to you all in all your endeavors.

* * *

**Chapter 7: The Point of No Return**

_"We walk into a trap we bait,  
With bated breath, attend the end so carefully prepared,  
And dare not move nor change our course  
Though pain await."_

- Alstair Cockburn

**O-O-O**

David scrambled back to his feet, still clutching the useless revolver in one hand as Robin stood resolute ahead of him, facing the tangled ruin of cars and dust that Cinderblock had fallen into. After only a second or so, the sedan that had landed atop the gargantuan monster was knocked aside like a toy, and Cinderblock rose from the ashes once more, his surface pitted and burnt, but his eyes still flaring with hate and his strength undimmed by the barrage that had flattened him. Robin's gaze remained fixed on Cinderblock as he called back to David in a firm, commanding tone that seemed to exude confidence, concern, and calm all at the same time.

"Are you all right?"

David did not have time to reflect on the fact that this was at least the eightieth time one of the Titans had had to ask him that in less than two weeks. "I..." he started to stammer, "... I think so!" In fact he was considerably less than 'all right'. His ears were ringing, his entire body ached and throbbed, particularly his back from the impact of the trash can, and he was covered in scrapes, burns, bruises, and minor lacerations from the flying debris and various spills he had taken. How this condition had morphed into "all right" was beyond him, but he didn't have time to reflect on that either.

"Good," said Robin, as he pointed his finger at Cinderblock. "I'm gonna need your help with him."

David was certain he hadn't heard Robin correctly. "You're gonna need _what_?" he exclaimed, as if Robin had just asked him to lift up a cathedral with one hand, "what about all the oth..."

"There's no time!" shouted Robin in a tone that brooked no argument, though David had no idea what it was that there was no time for. He held up the birdarangs in his right hand. "Can you set these off when I tell you?"

"... yes?" said David uncertainly, his rational mind having taken a leave of absence to consider the inconsiderable. What the hell was going on here? Where were the others? The blasts and bombardment from a moment ago couldn't possibly have come from anyone _but_ Cyborg, Starfire, and Raven, so why in the heck was Robin out here alone, needing _his_ help of all people's?

"Then get ready," said Robin, still facing Cinderblock, "he's coming."

He was indeed. Cinderblock, now angry beyond the point of what little conscious thought he could manifest, screamed an unearthly roar and charged straight at Robin and David together, his thunderous footfalls leaving basketball-sized craters in the pavement. David froze, transfixed, a deer caught in headlights, but fortunately for him, Cinderblock had locked onto the nearer target, and Robin had no such handicap. The Boy Wonder sprung like a grasshopper, leaping up into the air and spinning around to fling all three birdarangs like ninja stars, striking Cinderblock in both shoulders and in the forehead. All three throwing weapons drove into Cinderblock's hide and stuck into him like pins in a pincushion, but Cinderblock ignored them, swatting at Robin with one hand and missing as the Titans' leader extended a long metal staff in his left hand and cracked the juggernaut in the side of the head with it, hard enough to chip stone. Cinderblock recoiled, stunned for a moment, then raised one foot and stomped at Robin, who nimbly flipped backwards, evading the blow. Landing on his feet with his staff held in-hand, Robin dropped into a crouched ready position as he shouted out to David, who was still standing dumbly in shock at the display before him.

"David! _Now_!"

The cry shook David out of his daze, and he turned his stare back to Cinderblock and the three bladed objects that were sticking out of him. Ignoring the roars and the crackling flames, David tried to clear his head to focus on all three birdarangs at once. It was not an easy feat. Controlling the molecular motion of one thing was hard enough; three at once was like trying to play the piano while juggling bowling pins. He pressed down the energy of one, and another slipped loose, forcing him to divert his attention to it and release one of the others. Cinderblock meanwhile ignored him and everything else, advancing with measured, steady strides towards Robin, who fell back deliberately and cautiously. Seconds ticked by as David fought furiously to keep the energy under control, to prevent it from slipping out of the compression he was erecting, but it always did, again and again. He could of course have set them off one at a time, but he retained enough lucidity to know that this would be useless. Only a coordinated blast stood a chance of harming something like Cinderblock, and so he pressed and pressed some more, directing his attention back and forth, trying to push them all together. Robin was rapidly running out of room to retreat into, the burning oil tanker blocking his escape, and Cinderblock moving to corner him from in front. Closer and closer Cinderblock moved, neither noticing that the birdarangs embedded in him were growing colder, nor caring, as he bore down on Robin and raised both fists high in the air, looming over Robin like a gargoyle brought to life by some foul magic, but an instant before the monster could bring them crashing down on Robin's head (or rather _at_ Robin's head, as it was unlikely Robin would have remained there long enough to be struck), two of the birdarangs exploded, followed a split second later by the third.

The smell of cordite wafted through the street as Cinderblock staggered back under the weight of the combined explosions, large fissures running down his face and arms, yet still the monstrosity would not yield or break. Whirling about, he casually tore a mailbox from the ground, flinging it at David, whose instincts were not sharp enough to dive for cover in time. Fortunately, Cinderblock had not taken the time to aim his throw, angered by the blasts that had just shaken him, and the mailbox missed David's head by bare inches.

Robin leaped into the attack once more, flinging another handful of birdarangs, this time self-detonating ones, into Cinderblock's back, staggering the giant yet again, as David crouched behind the truck and watched. Stunned that he had managed to set off all three birdarangs, and even more stunned that the blasts had actually hurt Cinderblock, David tried to push down his flailing emotions and the aching pain that throbbed all over his body as he sought about for something to try, something to do, and in his semi-instinctive state he hit upon an idea that, had he only been thinking clearly, he never would have tried or done.

Cinderblock was facing Robin, swiping at the acrobatic teen like an elephant swatting at a fly as Robin struck him again and again, buying time for David to do... what exactly? David was at a loss. He couldn't distract Robin now by asking what he should do, and he had no idea what he could possibly do that stood a chance of _stopping _that thing. No idea that is, until he suddenly remembered the revolver still held in his hand. He looked at it for a moment, and a germ of a plan struck him. The revolver was not powerful enough to so much as phase Cinderblock, but it was made of solid, pure stainless steel... just like the birdarang casings...

He should have thought it through. He should have realized what would happen, but he was caught up in the moment, balanced precariously between a desire to flee and a desire to do _something_, and he didn't take the second to think about it. Instead he stood back up and ran out from behind the truck, rearing back and hurling the revolver as hard as he could through the air towards Cinderblock. As he did so, he raised his now-free hand and pointed it at the flying handgun. After three detonations at once, a single one on an object the size of the revolver's chamber (the largest single piece of steel within it) was almost easy, and he rapidly squeezed in the energy to the breaking point, his gaze and hand following the revolver as it arced through the air and plunged towards Cinderblock. Robin saw it coming, flying through the air, and instantly deduced what David was doing. His eyes went wide and he turned to scream a warning, but it was too late. The revolver slammed into Cinderblock's side and bounced off, only a second before David released the energy and blew it to smithereens.

The handgun went off like a grenade, and at ultra-close range it had a definite effect. Cinderblock lost his balance in mid-punch, staggered, and fell onto his side. David felt a wild rush of adrenaline surge through him in elation as Cinderblock fell, only to feel it recede just as quickly, replaced with stone-cold horror as the two remaining bullets loaded into the revolver went off simultaneously, each one ricocheting off Cinderblock, the ground, and the walls of nearby buildings, an instant before Robin gave a cry and spun around as though hit in the arm with a baseball bat, falling onto the ground clutching his shoulder.

"_Robin_!"

David watched in horror as Robin fell, an expanding red stain forming on the sleeve of the Boy Wonder's uniform. A frozen chill washed through him as he realized what he had done, followed immediately by a crushing, gripping tightness in his chest and stomach, as though all his insides had been tied into knots. He shouted incoherently, clutching his hands to his head, clenching his eyes shut, screaming at himself, at Cinderblock, at fate, at the world, at the panic and rash idiocy that had caused him to do something that monumentally foolish, as though doing so could dispel or negate what had just happened. How could he have been so stupid as to set off a _loaded gun_?

He was over-reacting. He should have seen that the bullet had barely grazed Robin, knocking him off balance, and that Robin was already scrambling back to his feet. He should have known that a shot to the shoulder would not, in any event, have disabled someone like Robin, and that this was hardly the time for hysterics. But to think in these terms was well beyond him by now. A thousand raging emotions were clouding his judgment, and all he wanted to do, all he felt that he _could _do now, was to curl up into a ball and lay dead on the ground. His legs buckled and he fell to his knees, and he might well have sat there until Cinderblock walked over to step on him, save that when he opened his eyes he saw Cinderblock, standing up once again, bending over and lifting a car into the air with both hands, hoisting it up above his head and turning slowly towards Robin. And in that instant the horror of what he had just done was replaced by the horror of what Cinderblock was about to do.

He felt his vision tunnel in on Cinderblock, felt the world slow down as the looming monster lifted the car free of the ground, and in the second snap-decision he had made in as many minutes, he suddenly realized that he had to do something _right now._ He had to stop Cinderblock this very instant, stop him and stop him permanently, or else Cinderblock would crush Robin like a grape, and it would be his fault, and no-one else's. Sound, pain, emotion, fear, everything seemed to melt away as he saw Cinderblock and only Cinderblock, and without even really knowing what he was doing, he raised a trembling, exhausted hand towards the monster and pointed it straight at the car in Cinderblock's hands. He didn't see what else was happening. He didn't see the black energy shield snap into being around Robin as though a switch had been thrown, strong enough to repel anything Cinderblock chose to throw at it. He didn't see the hulking figure leap off a rooftop overhead and land between Cinderblock and Robin, its sonic canon extended and charged, nor did he see the figure take aim at Cinderblock's head. He didn't see a small, wiry person materialize from nowhere behind him and transform seamlessly into a rhinoceros, scrambling over the pavement to charge at Cinderblock, and he didn't see the green flashes overhead as bolts of energy began to slam into the area around the concrete monolith. In short, he didn't see that all he had to do was wait and watch as the other four Titans tore into Cinderblock, that Robin was already perfectly safe, that it wasn't necessary for him to do anything at all.

He didn't see any of that. All he saw was Cinderblock, the car he had hoisted over his head, and most importantly of all, the full gas tank that lay within it...  
_  
KABOOM!_

With an apocalyptic roar, the car disintegrated in Cinderblock's hands into a hail of flying parts even as the explosion of the gasoline tank tore Cinderblock's neck back, snapping his head about like a Pez Dispenser, before bodily flinging him off his feet and chucking him into the street. A ball of fire and a cloud of black smoke mushroomed into the air as flaming fuel spewed in every direction, and bits of fender, pieces of engine, and burning fragments of rubber and steel bounced and pinged off of every surface, while the deafening blast echoed down the street, drowning out all else. David had been knocked over backwards by the force of the explosion, shielding his eyes from the fireball and debris with his arm, and in the echoing silence that followed it, David slowly and unsteadily managed to sit back up, half-expecting Cinderblock to rise once more and attack.

But the walking statue was past attacking.

Cinderblock lay on his back on the ground, one hand shattered as though crushed by a trash compactor, his arm lying helpless at his side. His body was covered in deep cracks and fissures, large swatches of rock gouged out of it and strewn about, and he gave a low moan as he struggled to rise once more, and failed to. David noticed on the edge of his vision other figures moving about, some flying, some walking, some crowding around Robin, some moving towards him, but he could not tear his gaze away from the fallen giant, as if in fear that to do so would invite it to regenerate itself and resume the assault. Cinderblock's head turned sideways, and he stared straight at David with a malevolent glare that would have melted armor plate. For a second or two, Cinderblock and David stared at one another, Cinderblock's eyes filled with malice, David's with apprehension, as Cinderblock slowly raised his one good arm and pointed a finger straight at David.

"Devastator..." said Cinderblock in a low, guttural growl, "get... Devastator..." And then Cinderblock's arm fell back to the ground, and as David watched, unblinking and uncomprehending, a series of blood-red tendrils seemed to emanate from the broken pavement beneath him. Before David or any of the Titans could so much as react, the tendrils swirled around Cinderblock, fusing into a solid shroud obscuring the juggernaut. For a few moments the shroud roiled and bubbled like a boiling cauldron, before it suddenly seemed to recede, seeping back down into the cracks in the pavement and vanishing. When it was gone, to David's and all of the Titans' shock, Cinderblock was nowhere to be seen, as if the tendrils had dissolved and digested him, and withdrawn underground, leaving nothing behind but an empty crater amidst the ruins.

The crackling flames behind and the geyser of water from the severed fire hydrant before both hissed like a badly-tuned radio, mixing with the distant sounds of sirens and the ambient noise of people moving around nearby, but David couldn't focus on any of it. He sat mutely in the middle of the street, covered with dirt and scorch marks from the flaming fuel that had been cast about so liberally just moments ago, the jacket and shirt Beast Boy had given him now torn and streaked with oil and asphalt. He sat there in a daze, his gaze vacant and blank, staring at the spot that Cinderblock had occupied a moment ago, as if unable to believe that Cinderblock had just vanished, that he was still _alive_, or that any of this had actually transpired. He heard voices, but he could no more respond to them than he could stand up. Even the pain in his back and the headache that he felt forming up inside his skull seemed numbed by the shock of everything that had just happened, and it could have been a minute or an hour later that he felt, distantly, someone walking up behind him, and telling him that it was time they left. They helped him up, they walked him to what must have been the T-car, they sat him down inside it, and yet he had no idea which one of the Titans it was that had done so, for his mind was no longer processing the images his eyes took in rationally, and all he could do was sit there, breathing slowly, his hands trembling ever so slightly, and stare off into space, like someone who had just watched the last rescue ship vanish over the horizon.

**O-O-O**

Robin tried to avoid Cyborg's accusing stare as Raven continued to mumble her magic words next to him. He was sitting on the medical table in the basement of the tower, facing the semi-robotic teen, who was standing impassively before him with his arms crossed, a look on his face that indicated something Robin truly did not wish to deal with now.

"I told you we all shoulda gone in together." said Cyborg, as he watched Raven magically stitching Robin's shoulder back together, repeating her meditative mantra quietly over and over.

"I had to find out for certain," said Robin, forcing his voice to remain calm. Cyborg's disapproval only served to remind him how upset Starfire was with him over this incident, and that was a reminder he didn't need. "I knew I could handle it myself for a while, and I needed to see if he was in on..."

"Oh come _on _man!" exclaimed Cyborg with clear exasperation at Robin's explanation. "Don't start giving me that! Like you couldn't see what was going down when we got there and found a war zone? What'd you think? Cinderblock and him were just having a game of tag?"

"_You _were the one who said we should let him go, remember?" snapped Robin back at Cyborg.

"No, _I_ was the one who said it was up to him what he wanted to do," shot Cyborg back, "and that's got nothing to do with you running off to play lone ranger again! What if that bullet hadn't been a ricochet, huh? What if it'd gone off right into your face? You think Starfire's angry _now_? Imagine what she'd do to you if you _really _got hurt,

Robin heard Raven's mantra becoming sharper as she grew more impatient with the two heroes' argument. Cyborg must have noticed too, as he shook his head and lowered his voice from a tone of anger to one of disappointment. "We _agreed_ on this man! You're the one always going on about how we've gotta work together better and all. No more of this 'I'm the only person who can risk it' nonsense! We're a _team_."

Cyborg was right, Robin had agreed to stop this sort of thing after the time he had been forced to become Slade's apprentice. He still refused to believe he had done the wrong thing in that incident, but that was neither here nor there, and he forced himself to calm down for Raven's sake if nothing else. "Look, I had to see for myself what he would do in that situation. I wouldn't have been able to do that if I'd let you all take down Cinderblock immediately. It was a calculated risk. Plus, I had to figure out if it was a setup."

"It _was _a setup," insisted Cyborg. "Why do you think we got called to a damn false alarm on the other side of the city right then? He didn't set us up, someone set _him_ up. Someone called us away so that he'd be alone when Blockhead came after him."

"I know that," said Robin darkly, "but I had to be sure who was setting who up. That's why I had you all stay back and cover me."

"And was that all you were trying to find out?" asked Raven suddenly, her hands still glowing blue as she repaired the bullet wound.

Robin was quiet for a few moments before replying. "No," he finally said with emphasis, but he did not elaborate, and Raven narrowed her gaze slightly as she returned to her work. Cyborg fell equally quiet, as if he could guess what Robin meant, and the next few minutes were spent in silence, before Raven finally stood up and announced in a flat tone that she was done. Robin rubbed his shoulder where the bullet had struck him, but could find no trace of the injury. "Thanks," he said to Raven, and Raven nodded curtly, her gaze cool and piercing, as though she too suspected what Robin had meant by his answer, and had her own thoughts on the matter which she did not intend to make plain.

Robin let Raven maintain her mysteriousness for the moment as he jumped off the table and put his shirt back on. "Where is he now?" he asked Cyborg.

"Upstairs with BB and Star," replied the giant Titan. "Star and I gave him a once over while Raven was getting you set. He's gonna be pretty sore for the next couple days, but he's all right."

"How's he... doing?" asked Robin.

Cyborg crossed his arms, clearly upset once more. "How the hell do you think he's doin'?" he said, "He's in shock. He's wiped out, he's terrified, he nearly got killed about six times today, and I don't think that thing with the gun helped any." He paused and glared at both Robin and Raven, clearly anticipating some sort of reaction. "And before _either _of you say anything, it is _not_ a damn act!"

"Nobody's saying it's an act, Cy," replied Robin evenly, raising an eyebrow at Cyborg's uncharacteristically strong reaction. Cyborg paced over to one of the medical machines and began punching buttons on it.

"Kid oughta be catatonic by now after everything he's been through..." remarked Cyborg without turning around. Robin and Raven exchanged glances, before Robin took a step towards Cyborg.

"Cyborg," Robin asked firmly, "are you OK? What's going on here? You said he was going to be fine. Why are you so upset about this?"

Cyborg let out a slow sigh and turned around to face Robin and Raven as he shook his head slowly. "You grew up with the Batman, right?" he said, "and Raven, you come from some other planet? You've been dealing with this kind of thing since you were little kids. It's… different for him, all right? I mean, one day you're going to school, you're dealing with your life, you're getting ready for a test or for a big game or a date, and then all of a sudden you're in the middle of the Twilight Zone. You've got supervillains coming out of the woodwork after you, you've got weapons or powers you don't know how to use, you don't know if you're some kind of monster or if the whole world's gone nuts or anything else."

Neither Robin nor Raven replied to this, both acutely aware that Cyborg was no longer speaking solely about David. Cyborg, left to speak freely, continued.

"But that's not so bad," said Cyborg, "I mean it's weird and it scares the hell out of you and all, but it's not the worst part. The worst part comes later, after you've calmed down and there's nobody shooting at you anymore. It comes when you start to think again, when you've got time to turn it over in your head, and that's when you realize that what just happened is how it's gonna be from now on. There's no way back. That's what hits you the hardest. There is _no_ way back. You're not what you were before, you're something else now, and you can't ever get back to where you used to be. You're never gonna be who you thought you were. That life's gone. You realize that, and it just messes you up."

Cyborg trailed off, as if he suddenly remembered that he was addressing someone else rather than just venting steam to the empty room. Robin and Raven said nothing, and he shook his head and turned back around to face them. "Look, I'm not tryin' to say that you guys had it easy going through what you went through, I know better than that. But you two at least knew that you were gonna be different than everyone else from the get go. Same with the others. Starfire's some kind of alien princess. I don't think she even knows what normal _is_. BB was running with the Doom Patrol when he was what? Seven? I know y'all went through some heavy stuff, I'm not trying to make like you didn't, but this is different. And I know what it's like."

He turned back to the medical computer and resumed his work, apparently not interested in embellishing further on his own past experience. After a short time had passed, Robin finally broke the silence. "So what's it like?"

Cyborg stopped working again, and once more didn't turn around as he sighed softly. "It's like you don't know anything all of a sudden. It's like you're in some other world that you never heard of, and you're stuck there, and everything you had before is all gone, least that's how it was for me. I had a family before the accident, I had friends, a girlfriend, I was a big man around my school, captain of the football team, you know the drill. When it happened I lost _all _of that, _all _of a sudden, overnight. It took me a _long _time to get over it. I got a real bad attitude about it, started doing things I shouldn't have done. I quit school, I stopped going out, got mad at the whole world. This kid... I don't know. It doesn't look to me like he's got much to lose. He's got no family, I doubt he's much of an athlete, and obviously there's nobody too interested in what happened to him or else the police would've gotten calls. Plus his powers didn't just show up yesterday. Who knows, maybe that makes it easier, least I hope it does. You can't lose what you don't have. He's not like me... so I don't know what he's gonna do, how bad it's gonna be for him."

Cyborg sighed and finally turned around. "But I saw the look in his eyes when we carted him back here, and I know what's going through his head right now. It's not something I'd wish on anyone, but there's nothing he or anybody else can do about it right now, just something he's got to find a way of dealing with."

"But you got over it, right?" asked Raven suddenly. Robin glanced at her as he maintained his silence, turning several things over inside his mind.

Cyborg gave a sort of hollow chuckle, as if he wasn't sure himself that he had. "Yeah," he said, "I did, eventually."

"So what happened?" asked Raven. "How did you manage to pull through?"

Cyborg did not answer immediately, thinking quietly for a second, and then a soft smirk appeared in the corner of his mouth and he smiled a bit. "I met you guys," he said finally, and neither Raven nor Robin needed to ask what he meant by it, for both of them knew what meeting the other Titans had done for them. Robin decided that it was time they got back on track.

"Well whatever he's going through now, we can't help that, or at least not right now. What we can do is decide what to do with him now, and that's not something the three of us can decide alone." As the other two nodded in agreement, Robin slid the communicator out of his pocket and opened it, letting the static resolve into a picture for a moment before speaking.

"Starfire? I need you to make sure David will be OK by himself for the next twenty minutes or so, and then you and Beast Boy meet us down in the evidence room as soon as possible."

Beast Boy and Starfire both nodded over their respective communicators. "We shall be down presently," said Starfire slightly more curtly than normal. Star had barely said a word to him since they returned, and he knew why. While she was not prepared to challenge his tactical decisions in the field, she was mortified that he had chosen to put himself in danger rather than let the team cooperate in taking Cinderblock down as a unit. Robin could only console himself with the knowledge that Starfire never held a grudge. "What will we be doing within the room of evidence?"

Robin glanced back at Raven for a moment before he replied. "Having an argument…"

**O-O-O**

"Look, I know this is a different situation," said Raven with an exasperated tone, "I'm not trying to say that it's all a trap, even though it might be. I'm just saying there's just something about this that really bothers me. And we're not doing ourselves or him any favors by just pretending that everything's OK."

The five Titans stood, floated, and sat in various spots scattered around the dimly-lit evidence room, a room Cyborg and Beast Boy had until recently referred to as 'the Slade shrine', at least until Slade's demise at the hands of Terra had made collecting more evidence about him a moot point. Robin stood at one end of the room, watching the other Titans debate the issue back and forth.

"There's _plenty_ about this that bothers me," replied Cyborg, "but it's not like he can leave again anyhow. We know Cinderblock was after him all along. We know somebody with a lot of juice put Cinderblock up to it, and that they were able to pull Cinderblock out from right under our noses after the fight. Whether or not we try this, he can't go back to San Francisco or anywhere else. He's got no place else to be. Plus…"

Cyborg trailed off, but Robin wished to hear where he was going. "Plus what?"

"… plus, just look at him. I mean, like I said, I know what it's like to be where he is, but we _all_ know what it's like to be scared and confused and alone and everything, don't we? Is that something any of you'd want to face again?" A quick canvas of the other Titans' expressions indicated that nobody did. "And I mean… he did all right back there in the street, you know? I mean he'd have gotten squashed like a bug if we weren't there, but when Cinderblock backed him into a corner, he hit him back hard enough to make him feel it, and when you jumped in man," he gestured to Robin, "he didn't just run and hide and let you handle it, he tried to help you out. I know he didn't do a great job; he coulda blown your head off with that gun, but… I mean he's never _done_ this before, and you _saw_ what happened after he shot you. He nearly had a stroke on the spot, and then he blew that car apart 'cause he thought Cinderblock was gonna crush you with it. It wasn't 'til after Blockhead called it quits that he went all shell-shock on us."

Cyborg paused to gauge the reaction he was getting. "Same with that thing on the roof yesterday," he said. "He didn't have to blow that tank. Hell it'd probably have been smarter if he hadn't. All he did was piss the damn thing off. But he gave it a shot. He was scared to death, but he still gave it a shot. I know he's a civilian, and that we don't know much about him except what he tells us, and I remember what happened with…" Cyborg visibly hesitated, and Robin forced himself not to glance at Beast Boy, "I remember what happened just as plain as you do, but that don't change anything, far as I see it. He's not a bad kid. He's quiet and closed off and scared and way too damn green, no offence BB, but he's _not_ a bad kid, and whatever's behind all this, we ought to back him up however we can until we know what the hell's going on. Least that's how I see it."

As Cyborg finished his speech, Starfire turned to him, Raven, and Robin in turn with a confused look. "Friends, I fear I do not understand the purpose for our discussion. Surely we are not considering permitting friend David to go off on his own again after what happened this afternoon?"

"No," said Robin, "we can't do that, especially not now. What we have to figure out is what to do with him now that it looks like he's stuck in Jump City for a while, and how we can make sure that no more attacks happen, or if they do, that they can be handled."

Starfire still did not fully understand. "Do with him? Do you mean what sorts of activities we shall engage in to make his stay here more enjoyable? I would be happy to prepare a traditional…"

"No Star," interjected Beast Boy rather suddenly. "We're not talking about that. We're talking about Terra."

A dead silence fell over the entire room as Beast Boy spoke the one name they all had been performing feats of verbal gymnastics to avoid. All eyes turned to Beast Boy, who was crouched atop a chair in the corner, his expression considerably more serious than it normally was. He met the stares of the other Titans with his own in return, as if silently daring them to contest the statement he had just made.

"We _are_ talking about her, aren't we?" asked Beast Boy rhetorically. "That's what this is all about. It's not about David and it's not about us, it's about Terra, right, and what she did, and how we're all afraid that's what's gonna happen again?"

Nobody answered. From where he was standing, Robin could see that Starfire's look was filled with concern at Beast Boy's tone, and that, far more subtly but with no less intesity, so was Raven's, while Cyborg seemed to have suddenly discovered a fascination with the floor tiles. Robin didn't know what his own expression looked like, but he doubted it was anything close to as composed as he would have hoped. "Beast Boy…" he said evenly.

"It's the truth Robin," said Beast Boy, his tone not exactly angry but not exactly not angry either. "We've all been thinking about it, including me. Pretending that she didn't exist isn't gonna help, so let's just say it, OK?"

"It's not... only her," said Raven uneasily. "There's a lot going on that..."

"Yes it is!" insisted Beast Boy, standing up and turning to face Raven. "Would we even be talking about this if it wasn't for Terra? We've helped out lots of people way more dangerous than he is without thinking twice about it!" He extended one hand and began ticking off the various incidents from off the top of his head.

"We trusted Thunder and Lightning even after they worked for Slade against us. We made friends with Wildebeast and Hot Spot after that thing with the Gamemaster. We've raced off to help Aqualad every time he called for it. Why is this so different? Because we don't know his background? Because we think that someone might be using him to set us up? We still don't even know what Thunder and Lightning _are_, and Slade _did_ use them to set us up, but that didn't stop us! But now we're about to throw David out because he didn't have references with him when we pulled him out of the rubble?"

Raven's temper, never particularly long where Beast Boy was concerned, flared at the implication. "We're not going to throw him out!" she shouted. "Nobody's saying that!"

"Well then what _are_ you saying?" asked Beast Boy, no less upset, "because that's what it sounds like to me!"

Robin cut in to avoid the eruptions he was afraid might be coming if Raven actually got angry. "She's saying," he said, casting a quick glance at Raven to indicate that she should let him handle it, "the same thing that we were all discussing before this happened. Cinderblock was the wrong choice to send against the Center, and he was the wrong choice to send today, at least if the object of the attack was either to kill David or to capture him. So either the person who sent Cinderblock isn't very bright, which I don't believe, doesn't have any other options but Cinderblock, which I also don't believe, or that wasn't the objective, which _both_ Raven and I agree on." He insisted on this last phrase to forestall any more argument. If Beast Boy wanted to get upset, he could get upset at him. "We can't be sure, but if I had to guess, I'd say Raven was right all along. Whoever's behind this wants David to be here at the Tower, and attacked him because he was leaving."

Robin half-expected Beast Boy to round on him with more angry accusations of being overly paranoid, or even accuse him of being bitter about being shot a few moments ago but instead the green changeling said nothing for a few moments as his eyes fell, and he sat back down slowly on the stool he had been using, pulling his knees up to his chest, and Robin knew that he wasn't thinking about David at all when he finally replied.

"So then what does that mean?" asked Beast Boy, "What are we supposed to go to upstairs and tell him?"

Robin glanced up at Starfire and Cyborg, who were both watching him silently, already certain of what he was going to say, before he cracked a tiny smile and answered Beast Boy.

"We tell him that he's welcome to stay here for as long as it takes to figure out what's behind all this, and that we _are_ going to stop whoever set this up and attacked him, no matter what it takes."

Beast Boy raised his head sharply and his jaw nearly hit the floor at Robin's unexpected about-face. Cyborg smiled incredulously at the reply, and Starfire beamed a broad grin in Robin's direction, something Robin found made it hard for him to concentrate on much else. Though she was seated behind him, out of sight, Robin could practically feel Raven's surprised stare through the back of his head. No doubt she would have questions to ask of him later.

"What?" exclaimed Beast Boy in honest astonishment. "But you just said that's what whoever did this wants us to do!"

"I know what I said," said Robin, "but if we know that this is what they want, then we can use it against them. If they want David to be here at the Tower, then us keeping him here might make lull them into making a mistake. We don't have any other leads, and after today, I don't think we're likely to find any just by looking. We have to make whoever's doing this feel safe enough to take a risk. We need to make them come to us. Plus, there's always the chance that we're wrong, and that Cinderblock _was_ trying to capture him. In that case, whatever we might suspect, we don't have a choice but to help him to the best of our abilities." Robin crossed his arms as he glanced at each Titan in turn. "Right?"

Cyborg also crossed his arms and smirked confidently as he leaned back against a desk. "Right," he said

Starfire grinned radiantly again , her anger forgotten or at least tabled, and landed almost weightlessly on the ground in the corner she had been hovering above. "Right," she said.

Beast Boy smiled as he turned to Cyborg, then Starfire, and then back to Robin as he straightened up a bit and nodded. "Right," he said.

Raven took a long, slow breath, floating in a cross-legged seated position behind Robin near the entrance. She seemed torn between wanting and not wanting to say something. When finally she spoke, her voice was its usual monotone, but with a vaguely funereal and uncertain sound to it, as though this were a prison sentence rather than a declaration. "Right," she said.

"Right," repeated Robin. They might not all be happy about it, but they were all in agreement.

"I do have a concern though," said Starfire. "Friend David attempted to leave us this afternoon of his own free will, not because he believed that we were going to force him to. It is still hard for me to understand human behavior, but I believe he was… scared of what happened last night, and of the thought that if he remained here he would be attacked again by another monster or supervillain, yes?"

"Looked that way to me," said Cyborg.

"So now that he has been attacked within the Tower and attacked when he attempted to leave it, and now that our plan, if I understand it, is to wait and see what his assailant does next, how are we to convince him to agree to this? And if he does, how are we to ensure that he is not killed or seriously hurt if the attacker should strike again? We can certainly protect him to a point, but even with our aid already he has nearly been killed three times, even if it was not the attacker's goal to kill him. As he is a… civilian… and unable to defend himself against such things, will he not be scared of such attacks continuing, even if we pledge to defend him?"

Robin nodded as he uncrossed his arms and smiled slyly again. "Actually," he said, I had a thought about that too…"

**O-O-O**

The common room was dark and quiet as Robin entered it, the overhead lights extinguished and only a single table lamp illuminating a small corner of the large open space. Outside the gigantic bay view windows, Jump City was cloaked in darkness and rain, as the storm that had blown in shortly after the Titans' return to the tower lashed at the world outside. Inside the rain was barely audible as a soft patter against the shatterproof windows. There was no movement and no sound from within the room, and but for a small shape silhouetted against the wall by the light of the table lamp, the room might have been thought empty.

Robin waited a moment or two and then crossed the common room, the carpet muting the sounds of his metal-soled boots. David was seated in a small chair facing the windows, an untouched cup of what had once been hot chocolate sitting on the table next to him, and Robin could tell as he approached that his eyes were unfocussed as he stared off into space. David had one hand on his temple as though he were trying to suppress a headache or simply support his head. Perhaps he was using his powers to watch the molecules of water and air dance around one another outside, or perhaps he was simply still in the daze he had been in when they brought him back. Robin wagered it was the latter.

"David?"

David gave an almost imperceptible start as Robin spoke his name, and he turned his head and looked up, clearly not having heard Robin approach. He said nothing, but instead stood up as he looked at Robin with trepidation and some degree of guilt in his eyes, though apparently the actual fear had passed some hours ago.

"Have a seat," said Robin, and David did so, even as Robin also sat down in another chair nearby. "Are you all right?"

David clearly had to think for a moment, but nodded slowly. "Just a headache..." he said hesitantly as he glanced at Robin's formerly-injured shoulder. "Are… you?"

Robin rotated his arm a bit. "I'm fine," he said confidently. "It was just a graze. Raven fixed it."

David let out a soft sigh of relief. "I'm… I'm really sorry about… I don't know what I was…" he trailed off as he balled his right hand into a fist and shook his head. "That was so _stupid_..."

"It's okay, really," said Robin firmly but not too firmly. "Was that your first time handling a gun?" The young teen raised his head again and nodded. Robin smirked a bit. "I figured. Don't worry about it. Given the circumstances, it could have been a lot worse."

David adopted a puzzled look. "… how?" he asked. "I shot _you_."

"You hit me with a ricochet," said Robin, "you could have actually shot me, or yourself. As it was, you hit Cinderblock a few times."

It might have been the wrong thing to say, reminding David of what disasters could easily have happened, but fortunately the young kineticist merely lowered his head and smiled just a bit, albeit nervously. "… lot of good that did," he said sarcastically, and he turned his head away for a bit, not staring at anything in particular. Robin let him sit quietly for a moment, and then was about to speak again, when to his surprise, David asked a question.

"So, I… I was wondering something…"

"Yes?"

"How… how much longer were you gonna wait before setting off those ninja star things yourself?"

Robin smirked again and chuckled a bit. "You could tell?"

David nodded slowly without looking at Robin. "I had to… look inside them in order to blow them up," he explained. "They were… crammed full of TNT, and some other putty or clay stuff I couldn't…"

"C4," said Robin, "for the shaped charge."

David nodded again as he turned his head back towards Robin. "They had electronics in them too. Detonators I guess?" Robin nodded. "So you… I mean you could have blown them up any time you wanted, right?"

Robin smiled and nodded, sliding a small remote trigger out of his belt. "Essentially, yes."

"So why'd you tell me to blow them up if you could have done it just by using that?"

"Simple," said Robin, "I wanted to see if you could."

David was confused. "But what if… what if I couldn't? I mean I've... never tried doing more than one thing at the same time. How much longer were you gonna wait?"

"About another eighth of a second," said Robin truthfully. Indeed he had been literally in the process of depressing the trigger himself when David had finally set off the birdarangs, though the small chip inside the detonator had recorded proof that it actually was David that had blown them up, and not a twitch of Robin's finger.

David let out another long exhale and he shook his head. "Is that… why you went in alone? Why the others stayed back?"

Robin nodded. "I had them cover us in case something went wrong. I went in myself to make sure that I could control the situation."

"But..." frustration of some sort was beginning to leak through David's words and mannerisms, his hands clenching the armrests of the chair. Robin didn't need to be empathic to tell that he was upset by all that had happened, though afraid to show it. "But... _why_? Why go through all that? Why not just have everyone come in? I mean... no offence or anything but... wasn't that dangerous? I know you're... you know... _you_, but... if something really bad had happened... you were by yourself."

Robin folded his arms and sat back. "It was a risk," he said, "but risks are part of the job. I had a few different reasons for wanting to do it that way. I knew that if all else failed, the team could handle Cinderblock without a lot of trouble, and I wanted to see if I could get Cinderblock to reveal something, maybe another shout or just something from his actions. I wanted to keep the collateral damage down as much as I could. Besides," he smirked a bit, "I wasn't by myself."

David looked puzzled for a moment, before he realized what Robin had meant. He seemed to think it was a joke, and laughed a bit nervously. "... right," he said almost sadly, and looked back down at the carpet.

Robin waited a few moments before continuing. "Mostly though, I wanted to see what you'd do."

This remark brought David's head up once more. "What do you mean?"

"Cinderblock had you backed into a corner. I wanted to go in and make sure he didn't actually pound you to a pulp, but still give you an opportunity to do what you thought you should do in that kind of a situation." Robin folded his arms and sat back, staring calmly at David with a practiced eye. "You can learn a lot about someone based on what they do under pressure like that."

To Robin's surprise, David actually winced. "Great…" he said with a pained tone. "So that was some kind of test? What for?"

"Not a test," said Robin, "more like a controlled experiment. Mostly controlled anyway. And it wasn't 'for' anything but information."

Robin watched as David clenched his hands together tightly and balled them into fists. He shook his head once again before leaning forward, gripping the armrests again, and speaking in a plaintive tone that was almost frantic, with fear and even anger creeping around the edges, as his repressed frustration and confusion finally began to come into the fore.

"Information?" he said, "What information? What did you want to find out? That I didn't know what to do? That I panicked? What, did you think I was gonna be able to just jump in and help you save the city? I've only told you guys about _fifty_ times, I'm _not one of you!_"

David stood up and paced over to the window, his fists clenched. "I'm not a superhero! I'm not some kind of alien or wizard or kung fu master or whatever you all are! I don't _know_ how you guys do what you do! Cinderblock came out of nowhere and I just… I didn't know what else to _do_ but run!"

"It was the right thing to do under the circumstances…" insisted Robin, but David turned and shook his head.

"It _wasn't_ the right thing to do, OK? I know that. I knew it when I did it! I'm not stupid. I just… I couldn't think of anything _else_. And then after you showed up… I… I thought if I knocked him over with that revolver that… god I don't know _what_ I was thinking. I don't know _if_ I was thinking."

"I told you already, don't worry about the gun, seriously. Besides, you wound up taking Cinderblock down yourself."

David gave a sort of hollow, bitter laugh. "By accident," he said.

Robin raised an eyebrow. "You accidentally blew the car up?"

"I didn't blow the car up," he said, "cars are way too big and way too complicated. I blew the fuel tank up."

"… which caused the car to explode and nearly blew off Cinderblock's arm," said Robin, "I'm not seeing the accident here."

"The accident is that I could just as easily have killed you or myself instead!" exclaimed David. "I don't turn the energy that I compress into some kind of weapon I can aim. I turn it into a _bomb_. It blew Cinderblock's arm off because he happened to be holding it just right when it went off. What if he'd thrown it already?"

"I could have avoided it," said Robin, confident that he could indeed have done so.

"And if it had blown up five feet over your head?" demanded David. If the blast nearly tore off Cinderblock's arm, what would it have done to you, or to me, or to whoever else it happened to hit? You have _no_ idea how easily I could have screwed that up. One slip, one mistake, and God knows what would have happened."

"But you didn't make a mistake. You timed it right. Cinderblock took the blast."

David laughed incredulously. "And what? You think that I did that because I'm some kind of expert at this sort of thing? You think I've practiced setting off gas tanks in the hands of walking statues? I've never done a gas tank before! I've never done _gasoline_ before! Everything I set off, every different kind of metal or liquid or chemical, all of them are different. All of them take different amounts of time, different kinds of effort, different reactions. I got _lucky_. _You_ got lucky. I guessed at how gasoline might work and it did. And if I'd guessed wrong or it had taken longer..." he trailed off and shut his eyes for a second. "There's a reason I don't just _use _this power, okay?"

Robin crossed his arms and narrowed his gaze slightly, guessing at what David was getting at. "You hurt someone?"

David lowered his head and slowly shook it from side to side. "No," he said softly, "but I came close enough a couple times to…" he hesitated, shaking his head again to clear it of whatever memory this was conjuring up, "… to realize a long time ago that it wasn't a toy. It's just... I don't know what it is... but it's dangerous and I don't like messing around with it."

Robin nodded slowly and stood up. There would be a time later to delve into this if it proved necessary, but for the moment they had more important matters to discuss. "Look…" he said, "I know this is all really overwhelming to you right now, but you have to understand, sometimes these things just happen. I'm not saying you did everything perfectly, but given the circumstances, you did the right thing by running and then by trying to back me up."

Robin honestly expected those words to suffice. David _had _largely done the right thing after all. However instead of calming him down, Robin's speech only caused him to shake his head again.

"Really?" he asked in a very rhetorical manner. "And those two cops… the ones whose gun that was… what happened to them?"

Robin didn't answer immediately.

"They're dead, right?" insisted David. "Cinderblock killed them when he threw that car?"

"One of them's in the hospital," said Robin, as though this made it better. "The doctors think he has a decent chance of making it…"

"So then one of them might live. The other one's dead. Half of that street's in ruins. If that was the _right_ thing to do, I don't want to know what would have happened if I'd done the _wrong _thing."

"If you'd done the wrong thing, you'd also be dead or captured," said Robin, "and _Cinderblock_ did all that. Cinderblock killed those policemen and caused all that damage. It wasn't your fault. You did what you had to do."

David turned to Robin with a look of almost disbelief on his face. "Forty people died two weeks ago because I got transferred to this city. One more, at least, just died this afternoon because I decided to leave here. Tell me something, am I supposed to _care_ whose fault it is?"

Robin fell silent a moment as David continued.

"I _know_ it wasn't my fault. I'm not trying to say I caused all or whatever. I didn't go out there planning on getting attacked, but I got attacked anyway. I know that if I hadn't run, then maybe something worse would have happened, but I don't think that makes what happened all that great, do you?"

He collapsed back into the chair he had been sitting in and covered his eyes with one hand, pressing his other fist down against the arm of the chair. Robin let him sit for a moment, trying to judge when would be the right time to say what he had to say.

"It's not… gonna stop... is it?" asked David in a voice that was now thin and weak, and he looked up at Robin with a beaten, defeated look. "Not… ever. They'll keep coming, won't they? Cinderblock or whoever else? Keep attacking?"

Robin nodded. "Maybe," he said, "we're not really certain what the objective was. They might have been trying to prevent you from leaving, or capture you, or even just get to us through you. But… chances are this isn't the last we're going to see of them."

David didn't reply to that, having already clearly come to the same conclusion. Robin sat back down in his own seat, and as he did so he noticed that the door to the hallway was open, and the others were slowly entering, floating, standing, or crouching in various spots along the back of the room and in the kitchen.

Robin turned back to David, and he saw that the young teen still had his eyes covered with one hand. He rubbed his eyes and breathed sharply several times through his mouth, and when he lowered his hand, his eyes were red and streaked with tears.

"I don't want to die…" he said weakly and without looking up, "and I don't want to kill anyone." His voice trembled and his hands shook. "What am I gonna do?" he asked nobody in particular.

Robin spared just a moment to glance back at the other four Titans, before he sat back down opposite David and leaned forward, speaking as plainly and as earnestly as he could. "You're not going to die, and you're not going to kill anyone," he said, "you'll stay here with us, for however long it takes us to figure this out and put a stop to it, once and for all."

David looked up hesitantly at Robin. "Cinderblock escaped," he said, "how are you supposed to figure this out and stop it?"

Robin smirked. "Let me worry about that."

David took a deep breath. "… stay here…" he said in a hollow voice, clearly still uncertain about the prospect.

"That's right," said Robin. "The way I see it, there's no place else you can go. They found you once within hours of you leaving the tower. Even if you managed to escape the city, they'll probably be able to follow you outside it." David audibly gulped and clenched his eyes shut, trying to stop from shaking. Robin continued.

"But… if you stay here, we can make sure that they can't get at you. Not at least without something a lot nastier than Cinderblock. I know that you're still… nervous about what happened yesterday, and I can't guarantee that nothing else is going to happen around here, but this _is_ the safest place in the city, and we _can_ stop Cinderblock and whoever sent him given enough time."

David slowly opened his eyes, and only now did he seem to notice that the other Titans had filtered in. Robin turned to see the others hovering around the periphery of the light from the flickering table lamp, and watched as they slowly moved in around himself and David both. None of them said a word, and all of them, even Raven, had concerned expressions of various sorts.

"And there's one more thing," said Robin as David turned back towards him.

"What's… that?"

"Like I said, I can't guarantee anything. Whoever's behind this might attack the tower itself. There could be an unrelated emergency or incident. You might get caught up in something. Given that, I think it might be a good plan for you to learn a thing or two about how to defend yourself."

David's gaze became puzzled, and he blinked once or twice at Robin. "… defend myself?" he asked, as though this were a novel idea. He glanced up at the others, still confused. "You mean… like fighting?"

"Partly," said Robin, "but not just fighting."

"What… what else then?"

"Your powers… can you control them?"

David clearly didn't understand. "What do you mean?"

"Do they ever go off by themselves? Do you ever _actually _blow things up by accident?"

"By themselves?" David seemed appalled at the very idea. "No… I mean… god no! That would be… that would be really bad right?"

Robin glanced at Raven out of the corner of his eye. Raven looked puzzled as well by what David was saying, but she kept the reasons for her puzzlement to herself.

"So then, the reason you're hesitant to use them is because you're afraid you'll make a mistake with them and hurt somebody?"

David sighed. "No… look… my… my powers are just… they're not… I just don't _like_ using them. They attract a lot of attention, they're dangerous, and all they're good for is destroying things."

"Maybe," said Robin, "but they're also the reason you're still alive, and they're probably linked with whatever is behind all this. Not to mention, they're your best chance at defending yourself if something _does_ happen."

"… so what are you saying?" asked David guardedly.

"I'm saying you need to learn how to use them properly."

David looked as though Robin was suggesting he take up brain surgery as a hobby. "How?"

"Practice," said Robin, "and training."

"Training?" David's voice faltered, as if he truly could not believe what he was hearing and wasn't sure he wanted to know any more. "Training… for what?"

Robin smiled, a vague sense of deja-vu striking him as he answered. "For whatever might happen."

The psychokinetic boy needed a moment to digest all that he was hearing. He looked as though someone had just informed him that he was departing immediately to become an official in some faraway country. He looked at each of the other Titans in turn, his mouth open, his eyes filled with something like wonder. When finally he turned back to Robin, he could barely speak.

"Why are you doing this?" he asked Robin in an almost remorseful voice that was barely above a whisper. "It could be… weeks… months before anyone finds out anything. You don't even know me. Why are you willing to do all this?"

"Dude," said Beast Boy in a friendly, but relatively calm tone, "we're superheroes. This is what we do."

David looked at Beast Boy for a moment, and then shook his head slowly. "No," he said, "this isn't what you 'do'. I mean you help people, I know that. You stop crime and protect people and fight villains… but this is… way above and beyond, and I know it and so do you. So why… what did I do to deserve all this?"

"'Deserve' has nothing to do with it," said Raven evenly.

"We all got our reasons man," said Cyborg.

"We are not willing to let you come to harm through inaction," said Starfire.

"But mostly," said Robin, "as much as I'm sure you can't believe it… we all know what this is like."

"… and we're not gonna make anyone face it alone," said Beast Boy as he placed a hand gently on David's shoulder.

David lowered his head and exhaled slowly and nervously as the Titans wordlessly glanced at one another. When he finally raised his head again, he looked at each one of them in turn with tears in his eyes. Last of all he turned back to Robin, averting his eyes slightly from the masked Titan's gaze. He seemed to be at a total loss for words, but finally and awkwardly, he managed to stammer out two soft words that he had been using liberally ever since he arrived at the tower, but never with as much depth of meaning behind them as now.

"Th… thank you."

A soft smile crossed Robin's face as he sat back and watched David lower his head and try not to cry, even as Beast Boy sat down on the arm of his chair and started talking about various things they could do over the next couple of days, a foil as always to the horrors that lurked outside. Cyborg stood nearby, occasionally commenting on Beast Boy's proposed rule changes to Stankball, and Starfire happily assured David that all would be well within moments, and that there was no longer any reason to "partake of the sadness". Robin was gratified to see that she periodically cast a smile his way. He hated to see her upset, and he knew that his being shot today had upset her. Raven as always was more reserved, and hung back in mid-air on the periphery of the light. Robin turned his head to her, and she met his gaze as emotionlessly as ever, yet there was clearly worry in her eyes, but worry about what, he would have to determine later. He considered taking her aside to ask now in fact, but she seemed to sense this, and shook her head to indicate that it could wait for another day.

Turning back to the others, Robin watched silently as Beast Boy and Cyborg, quickly deciding that it was probably time for a distraction, pulled out the Gamestation and started up some four-player cart racing game, which they were now explaining the rules of to David (while simultaneously arguing about some house rule with one another). Starfire was holding one of the controllers gently, having accidentally crushed the last one she had attempted to make use of. Video games normally weren't Starfire's thing, but it was clear she was making an effort to take David's mind off what had happened today. Robin watched the kineticist for a moment as he awkwardly took the controller Cyborg handed him, and wiping the tears out of his eyes, began to select a racer as Beast Boy pointed out the benefits and drawbacks to each.

Robin couldn't be certain of course, but somewhere in the young teen's eyes, buried beneath the fear and doubt and gratitude, he thought he caught just a glimpse of what might have been hope. What the hope was of, Robin of course couldn't tell, Raven was the empath, not him, but if he had to guess, he would say it was the hope that despite everything, despite all evidence to the contrary and all the violence and death of the last 48 hours, that things just might turn out all right after all. Maybe, just maybe, he was going to be okay.

Maybe...

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**Author's Note:** Nothing here but a simple reminder please to review this chapter with any and all criticisms, flames, words of praise or hatred or anything else that strikes your fancy. It is by your reviews and commentaries that I am able both to proceed and to improve my writing, and anything, even the merest word, is to me a jewel beyond price. Thank you.


	8. The Catalyst

**Disclaimer:** My name is not Inigo Montoya. You did not kill my father. Do not prepare to die. I do not own the Teen Titans.**  
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**Author's Note:** Well met and welcome once again. Despite all rumors to the contrary, I am alive, and my illness has passed me (mostly). In consequence, I have composed another chapter to submit for your approval. Though I'm certain you get tired of hearing this, this chapter, like all the others, turned into something very different than what it originally was supposed to be, but I'm begining to realize that such is the nature of this exercise. I've reviewed and editted it many times, and I simply don't know if it is of any quality whatsoever, or ought to be consigned to the proverbial ash-heap, and for that determination, I humbly beseach your opinion. Please, leave a mark of your hatred or approval via the review mechanism on the bottom, and now that I am well again, I shall be able to respond to them both in kind and with further chapters in a much more regular fashion. Thank you.

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**Chapter 8: The Catalyst**

_"Their coming was like the falling of small stones that starts an avalanche in the mountains."_

_ -_ J. R. R. Tolkien, "The Lord of the Rings"

**O-O-O**

The man in gold frowned as he pressed the play button on his remote control for the fifth time, watching in undisguised disgust as the image on the television showed Cinderblock lifting a car and throwing it into a police cruiser a dozen yards ahead. Nearly decapitating a terrified teenaged boy who dove to the ground, the enormous missile smashed through the police car and into a jack-knifed gasoline tanker which promptly exploded with enough force to shake the image, despite the fact that the CCTV camera which had filmed this recording was three full blocks away from the epicenter of the blast.

"If all you're going to do is play that footage over and over, then I've got much better things to be doing."

The man in gold shook his head. "You will go when I give you leave to go," he said directly. "Until then, you will remain here and answer for this disaster."

The tall man shrouded in darkness standing behind the man in gold did not so much as move, and his voice was as calm as the eye of a hurricane as he replied.

"You wished for the Devastator to be prevented from leaving Jump City. I prevented it. How is that a disaster?"

"How?" asked the man in gold as he turned around, incredulously, he pressed another button on the remote, and the footage on the television rewound to the instant where the boy on the screen was diving for the ground, a flying automobile passing barely two inches over his head. It froze on that image as the man in gold shook his head. "Your instructions were to ensure the boy's survival," he said. "Does that look like ensuring his survival to you?"

The tall man merely shrugged. "He survived."

"He survived by pure, stupid luck!" roared the man in gold, pointing an accusing finger at his counterpart. "He nearly had his _head_ torn off because of your bungling!"

The darkened figure did not move, nor even change expression, save perhaps for raising his eyebrow slightly at the accusation. "_My_ bungling?" he asked, with mock disbelief. "Forgive me, but I missed the part in that recording where I was involved at all."

"You were responsible for ensuring that he was prevented from leaving with as little risk as possible! Your agent lost his head and tried to kill him!"

"He was only my agent," retorted the taller figure, still standing where he was before, "because you insisted on someone that could not be traced back to us. I believe your words were 'someone who might do this on his own accord'?"

"… which Cinderblock _was_!" interrupted the man in gold, "until he lost his head and started saying 'Devastator' to anyone with ears!"

"And exactly whose fault is that?" sneered the tall man. "I warned you, _both_ of you, against that fool. I told you he stood a risk of going berserk if confronted with resistance. Cinderblock has the mind of an overcooked eggplant. _Tell_ me you did not actually expect subtlety!"

"I expected you to do your job and control him, as you assured us you could!"

"I assured you that I would make every effort to…"

"And if all we wanted was 'every effort'," said the man in gold, "then I would have handled this matter myself. But as it happens you came highly recommended for this sort of thing. We _did_ expect a degree of subtlety from you in maintaining control of your agents. Perhaps our expectations were… unfounded?"

The last word was an obvious threat, but the tall man did not appear perturbed by it. "Forcing me to use Cinderblock or any other one of the monsters you pre-selected is like asking me to perform brain surgery with a meat axe. I told you who I wanted for this operation, but you refused."

"We have already discussed that," said the man in gold. "Cinderblock and the others will deflect attention away from the possibility of our existence. Using your 'friend' will present difficult questions to our enemies, questions we do not wish them to ask at this stage of the plan."

"You were the one who assured me that there was nothing the Titans could do to stop us."

"There _is_ nothing they can do!" snapped the man in gold, "Nothing at all! It is already written!"

"In that case, why are we so concerned with secrecy? Or is your confidence flagging?"

"Stop trying to deflect the blame! This entire matter reflects poorly on you. I suggest you do what you have to do to clean up your act!"

"Then give me what I need to do this job _properly_!" said the tall man with a somewhat contradictorily short tone. "If you want this plan of yours to work, then you have to _stop_ thinking solely in terms of who has the largest arsenal of thugs. Leaving that boy with the Titans carries a serious risk in its own right…"

"… the risk is nonexistent, and even if it were not, it is unavoidable. Besides, there is nothing that they or he can do to…"

"If that were so, then you would not have asked me to serve you in this," insisted the tall man. "Now let me finish. Leaving him with the Titans carries a serious risk, and what we need is a field agent that can think and act independently, and can serve to bind him in place without the need for displays of violence that are both attention-grabbing and dangerous. Neither of us are suitable for such work, for obvious reasons, and anyone lunatic enough to theoretically attack the Titans by themselves is completely unreliable. We need someone specific."

The man in gold groaned softly and shook his head. "All right," he said, "let's assume I agree to this insanity. How would we control such an agent?"

"Normally you couldn't," said the tall man, "but in this case there should be no difficulties, especially for our employer, as I explained to the both of you some time ago. Given the alternative to working with us, I would say we're unlikely to be rejected."

"But what guarantees do we have that this won't result in another near-catastrophe?"

"If you want guarantees, find another line of work," said the tall man evenly. "But what choice do we have at this point? We know what will happen if we employ Cinderblock again, and we need a field agent to make certain the process goes smoothly. We've tried the direct approach, and it has worked... tolerably. Now it's time to use the indirect approach."

Slumping back into a chair, the man in gold sighed and nodded. "Very well," he said, "I will... arrange to have it done. I assume you will wish to be on-hand for it?"

The tall man seemed to smirk. "Absolutely," he said, "I wouldn't miss it for the world..."

The man in gold raised a wary eyebrow and looked up at the tall man. "I do hope you aren't conflicted in your priorities," he said with a warning tone. "I know of the history between you two. We are not going through this merely to provide you with some form of amusement."

With a soft chuckle, the tall man shook his head slightly. "Perish the thought," he said, "but this is merely to provide us with the field agent we require. Nothing else is important at this stage."

The tall man turned to go, but before he had taken more than a couple of steps, the man in gold called after him. "If this works," he said, "then be assured we will remember it when the time comes to repay those who have served loyally."

The tall man paused and stood motionless for a moment, but did not turn around.

"You had better."

**O-O-O**

The wind swirled across the roof of the tower, bearing with it the smell of fresh paint from the repairs recently performed on the roof and the water treatment system. Starfire recalled friend Cyborg's comment that, according to his calculations, they had already replaced every single piece of the tower at least once since they finished it, and would likely continue doing so, since the villains and madmen they fought seemed to target their home for attack every other week. Fortunately, Robin apparently had near-unlimited funds at his disposal, and the leaders of the city were very accommodating with the permits of construction.

Starfire sighed happily and turned a little pirouette in mid-air before touching down on the tower's roof. Grinning gleefully, she paused and took a deep breath, reveling in the glowing warmth of the bright sunny day on her skin (the first sign that summer was finally arriving again), the delightful feel of the soft ocean breeze in her hair (a perk of living this close to the sea), and the heavenly scent of the chemical paint fumes wafting off the roof next to her (which for some reason the others did not seem to enjoy as much as the first two).

Indeed, it was one of those rare, magical days that periodically appeared where it seemed like could go wrong at all. The weather was gorgeous, the sky a brilliant azure blue matched only by the glittering bay below upon which the surfers of wind and boats of sail darted back and forth. Much as she occasionally missed the stark, rugged landscape of Tamaran, a day like today made it feel as though the entire planet was trying to re-assure her that she had made the right choice in deciding to stay here on Earth, not that she often felt otherwise. This planet, unfathomably strange though it might be, was where her friends were, and leaving it would mean abandoning them, which was in any case out of the question. Even so, there was something about days like this that made her decision sit easier. It was one thing to believe that everything would work out for the best; it was another to see it happen.

There was a sound like a gunshot from near the base of the tower, echoing across the bay, and a small puff of brown smoke rose from the rocks that ringed the island Titans Tower was located on, but Starfire did not flinch or react with surprise. Instead she turned back and peered over the edge, looking down at her friends Cyborg and Beast Boy, who were standing outside the tower along with their guest, the young man named David who could destroy things violently with his mind and who had somehow acquired the enmity of several of the more loathsome villains in the environs of Jump City. Cyborg had a box of small orange ceramic discuses open on the ground next to him, and was holding one of them in his hand, while Beast Boy was standing several dozen paces away on top of a rock with another box at his feet and a discus in either hand. David was roughly midway between the two Titans, with small bits of smashed orange ceramic laying scattered on the ground around him.

Starfire smiled as Cyborg explained something to David (she was too far away to hear what he was saying), and then gently tossed the orange discus into the air over David's head. David extended a hand towards it as it flew overhead, and it seemed to wobble slightly in its flight before it crashed into a white rock and broke into three pieces. A moment later, one of those pieces exploded with a loud bang, causing a large colony of seagulls perched nearby to burst into the air, squawking angrily at having been disturbed. Several of the seagulls swooped down at David who yelped loudly enough for Starfire to hear it, and flailed at them ineffectually with his hands while Beast Boy and Cyborg both doubled over with laughter. Giggling at the ridiculous scene as she turned away to walk back into the tower, it was not until then that Starfire noticed that she was not alone on the roof.

"Raven?" asked Starfire, surprised to see her gloomy teammate sitting quietly on the edge of the roof, and she walked over towards the sorceress, who was sitting with her legs dangling over the edge, a large, hardbound book open in her lap. She was watching the three figures below silently, and her expression, as ever, was grim and motionless. "It is a wonderful day, is it not?"

Raven did not appear to have noticed Starfire landing, and gave a soft start as Starfire addressed her. "Er... hi, Star," she said almost uncertainly, "yeah, it's a real nice day." Raven picked the book back up out of her lap and held it up to read more, taking a pencil out from behind her ear as she did so and making a quick note in the margin with it.

Curious, Starfire bent over slightly and peered at the title of the book Raven was reading. "'A Study of Comparative Metahuman Characteristics and Abilities'," she read aloud, "'by Doctor Jason Garrick.'" She paused for a moment as the title struck a familiar bell. "I believe this book belongs to friend Robin, does it not?" she asked, "I have seen him reading from it before in the room of evidence."

"Robin let me borrow it," said Raven without looking up, underlining a word with her pencil.

Starfire leaned in a bit further to read the chapter heading of the section Raven was browsing. "'Natural Telekinetics and their Variants'," she said puzzled, "are you conducting research of some sort on behalf of friend David?"

"Um... kind of," said Raven as she lowered the book and turned her head to face Starfire. "How was the patrol?"

Starfire did not resent the change in subjects. "Everything was wonderful," she said happily. "There was a snatcher of purses at the park who endeavored to evade us, but Robin overturned him with his staff and retrieved the stolen receptacle of wallets and makeup. Then later we came upon a large number of families visiting from a place called The France, who asked us to repeatedly write our names on pieces of paper for their children. And then finally, as we were returning to the tower, I asked Robin if he wished to come to the Mall of Shopping with me this afternoon, and he agreed to! He merely has to apply more of the ooze to his head, and then we shall be off!" Starfire floated a few inches off the ground with excitement as she said the last words, prompting Raven to raise an eyebrow.

"Ooze?"

Starfire landed quickly. "Is... that the improper term?" she asked.

"I think you mean hair gel," said Raven

"Perhaps," said Starfire, refusing to let a mere word dispose of her jovial mood, "but whatever the name of the substance Robin must partake of, once the application is complete, we shall be ready to go!"

Raven smirked slightly, "Well... have fun," she said as she turned back to her book.

"We shall certainly endeavor to have much of the fun," replied Starfire confidently, before taking a seat next to Raven and adopting a more confiding tone. "Indeed, I feel that Robin is in great need of the fun recently. I had... hoped that after the death of Slade he would feel less need to confine himself within the room of evidence, but..."

Starfire sighed whimsically, prompting Raven to chuckle without looking up. "That's like expecting Beast Boy to grow a brain," she said, "Robin's just like that."

"I know," said Starfire, "and I do not wish to change the way which he is. But I do wish that we could see more of him at such times as these. I fear sometimes that he still seeks to take on more responsibility than anyone is capable of managing, even when he claims that he will no longer do so."

Raven smirked. "You're still mad at him over Cinderblock?"

Starfire smiled at her friend. "I was never angry with Robin, merely upset that he had taken such an un-necessary risk."

"Was that why you caved in the elevator door while you were yelling at him?" asked Raven, causing Starfire to blush.

"I was… intending to make a show of being more angry than I truly was, so as perhaps to make him see how upsetting such actions are. I fear I may have… overdone it?"

"You knocked it forty feet into the common room."

Starfire smiled nervously. "It was lighter than it appeared to be. I only wished to make a loud noise."

Raven shook her head slightly as she circled another sentence in her book. "Well it worked."

"Perhaps…" said Starfire. She remained silent for a moment before a sudden thought came to her. "You do not suppose that Robin agreed to go to the Mall of Shopping merely because he believed me to still be angry, do you?" she asked Raven worriedly. "I would not wish to..."

"I don't think Robin needs an excuse to hang out with you, Starfire," said Raven evenly, prompting Starfire to adopt a puzzled expression.

"I… do not understand."

"Well look how often he pairs up with you on patrol."

Starfire remained confused. "Patrols are assigned by lottery," she said, "there is no 'pairing up'."

"Really?" asked Raven facetiously. "When was the last time either of you two went on one without the other?"

Starfire paused for a moment to think. "Well…" she said, "there… was that time some weeks ago after we defeated the Rancid Johnny."

"You mean while Robin had his arm in a cast and couldn't go out?" replied Raven. "And didn't he drop in on the patrol anyhow just to 'make sure things were okay'?"

"Oh… um… yes…" said Starfire. "I suppose before that it…" She trailed off again, trying to force her memory back. "I… I do not remember the last time," she finally confessed.

Raven said nothing, but continued to read silently.

"Do you… are you suggesting that Robin has been arranging this purposefully?"

"Either that or you two should start playing the lotto..." said Raven.

Starfire did not know what the 'lotto' was (some type of game?), but she did not ask, preoccupied with considering the implications of what Raven had said. Why would Robin, a champion of justice and fairness, intentionally subvert a system he himself had established for the fair assignment of patrols? It would not of course be unlike Robin to take on more than his own fair share of the work, but why did he constantly wind up on the same patrols that she did? Not that she resented patrolling alongside Robin, indeed she looked forward to it, but...

She sat in silence, looking off into the distance as Raven continued to quietly read her book, and suddenly she wondered if she was the only one who hadn't noticed this. Shaking her head, she resolved to ask Robin about it as soon as he arrived.

Several more explosions sounded from far below as Starfire and Raven both quietly sat, Raven apparently engrossed in her textbook and Starfire simply marveling at the beauty of the bright summer day. Torn between wishing to express how wonderful she was feeling and not wishing to disturb her friend Raven's studies, Starfire merely hummed a light, airy tune, which Raven apparently took no notice of. Several minutes went by before Starfire decided finally to ask what the 'lotto' was, and how it was played, but when she turned back to Raven, she noticed something that caused her to fall silent.

Raven was still sitting with the book held up, motionless and apparently concentrated, and yet from where Starfire was sitting, she could read the title of the chapter Raven was on, as well as see the marks she had made with her pencil in the text. Nothing about this was un-usual, save that the title and markings were the same ones that the book had sported nearly five minutes ago when Starfire had first arrived. Raven hadn't made a mark or turned a page in all that time. Starfire was about to ask if Raven was having difficulty with some aspect of her research, when she looked up at her friend's eyes, and saw that Raven wasn't even looking at the book. She was staring over the top of it, down at the three boys at the foot of the tower, with a gaze that was as piercing as an Eridanian Thunderhawk's.

"Raven?" asked Starfire.

Raven seemed to jolt back to reality, and turned her head to face Starfire's. "Yeah?"

"Why... are you reading this here?" she asked.

"Oh," said Raven as she quickly turned the page of her book. "Robin and I wanted to see if there was anything we could find that would tell us more about what David can do, and how his powers work. Robin's been so busy that I volunteered to do a little of the reading for him."

"No..." said Starfire as another explosion went off below, echoing across the bay, "that is not what I meant. Why are you reading this... here? On the roof? Do you not normally wish for peace and quiet in such times? With Friends Cyborg and Beast Boy assisting Friend David with his explosions, is it not... distracting?"

Raven clearly hesitated, a very uncharacteristic reaction that puzzled Starfire even further. She had assumed Raven was merely overseeing the boys in their activities, but Raven did not reply with that. Instead she blinked once or twice and slid the book down a bit as she stumbled for an answer. "I... got a little tired of my room is all. I thought a change of scenery might help."

"Of course..." said Starfire, trying to keep the concern out of her voice. Raven was a secretive person at all times, which normally bothered Starfire not in the least. As she had once explained to Beast Boy, Raven was complicated, and there was much about her that they were not meant to understand. Normally she would never have given Raven's reply a second thought, but Raven's gaze had none of the usual calmness that was her trademark, no sign of apathy or disconcern. She was focused, clearly focused on what was going on below, but Starfire could not tell why.

Starfire turned her eyes back to watch the three figures on the rocks below. Originally Cyborg and Beast Boy had been throwing the orange ceramic plates into the air over David's head, and David was attempting to cause them to explode as they flew, without much success it appeared. At present however, Cyborg and Beast Boy had apparently gotten into some form of argument over something, which had degenerated quickly into both Titans hurling the discus-shaped objects at one another as fast as they could, all the while uttering prophetical claims about how they were going to "kick the butt" of their counterpart. Beast Boy quickly got the better of it, mercilessly pelting Cyborg with a hail of orange disks, all of which shattered against Cyborg's metal surface without so much as shaking him, while Cyborg was unable to hit Beast Boy with so much as a single disk, as the smaller, more acrobatic teen shifted in and out of various animal forms, nimbly avoiding throw after throw. David had ducked out of the line of fire behind a small tree, and was watching the two battle when one of Beast Boy's errant shots struck him in the side of the head, nearly knocking him over, though the disks appeared fragile enough to cause no harm. As Cyborg ran out of disks to throw, Beast Boy laughed and resumed his human form, posing and gloating triumphantly at having defeated Cyborg in this impromptu contest. His triumph was short lived however as David, still rubbing the side of his head where he had been struck, smirked and extended one hand out in the general direction of Beast Boy. A moment later, a geyser of water erupted out of the sea behind Beast Boy and drenched him in a soaking and very unexpected downpour. Such was the surprise written on Beast Boy's face at having been unceremoniously dunked while still on dry land that Cyborg doubled over with laughter, and Starfire herself nearly fell off the tower. Beast Boy blinked several times in astonishment before his mischievous grin re-appeared, and he snatched up another swarm of discusses and bombarded David with them, knocking the psychokinetic to the ground in a barrage of orange ceramic fragments.

"Is it not odd that friend Cyborg calls those orange discuses 'pigeons of clay'?" asked Starfire. "They do not resemble the pigeons found in Jump City. Are there other types of pigeon that take that shape?"

Raven did not even reply this time, staring so intently down at the three boys that it did not appear she had even heard Starfire's question. Down on the ground, Beast Boy, having recovered from the impromptu tidal wave, walked over to David with a broad grin and extended a hand to help him up off the ground. David took Beast Boy's hand and slowly got back up, brushing a shower of clay fragments from his clothes and hair, none the worse for wear it appeared. As Cyborg walked over to the other two, David said something inaudible to which Beast Boy laughed out loud and replied in an animated fashion, clapping David on the back with one hand as he did so, causing both Cyborg and David to laugh as well before all three began rooting through the wreckage of the pigeons of clay, looking for any unbroken ones with which to continue the lesson.

Starfire watched all of this transpire, and shifted her glance carefully back and forth between Raven and the scene on the ground. To her surprise, the more relaxed the three boys became, the tenser Raven seemed to be. By the time Beast Boy was helping David to his feet, Raven was gripping the edges of her book hard enough to wrinkle the pages and Starfire could feel the roofing panels they were sitting upon starting to vibrate.

"Raven?" she asked cautiously, "is something upsetting you?"

Once again, Raven seemed to suddenly remember that she wasn't alone on the roof. That was worrisome in and of itself. Raven was not commonly forgetful.

"I'm fine..." said Raven quickly. "Nothing's wrong."

"Forgive me, friend Raven," said Starfire more directly, "but you do not appear at all to be fine. You seem worried about something. Can I not assist you?" Raven didn't answer immediately, and Starfire followed her gaze back down to the base of the Tower, and to the specific person she was watching so intently. "Is something the matter with Beast Boy?"

"What?" asked Raven suddenly. "Of course not. Why?"

"You have been watching him with great intensity for some time," explained Starfire, "as though you anticipate him coming to harm. If that is so, then you must tell me what you are watching out for, that I may assist you in..."

"I'm not anticipating anything Starfire," said Raven shortly with a tone of what sounded like disgust. "I just... it's nothing, okay? Nothing's going to happen. I'm just over-reacting to some things. Nothing to get excited about."

Starfire was more confused than ever. "To... what things are you over-reacting?"

"It's _nothing_," insisted Raven with what Starfire thought was far too much vehemence. She put the book down and slowly stood up, glancing down at the others one more time. The three boys had switched roles, with Beast Boy now using some sort of long plastic sling-arm to hurl the clay disks into the air for Cyborg to destroy with expertly-placed shots from his cannon of sound. After a few throws, Beast Boy handed the sling over to David, who managed to throw his first disk straight into Cyborg's chest plate; however with a bit of practice and instruction as to how properly to snap his wrist while using the sling, David was soon flipping the disks through the air tolerably well. It all seemed perfectly innocuous to Starfire. It plainly did not to Raven.

"I need to go," said Raven suddenly, turning to walk back down into the Tower with some degree of haste. "Could you give the book back to Robin when you see him?"

"Certainly, Friend Raven," said Starfire, standing up as Raven walked away. "Are you absolutely certain there is nothing that I can..."

"I just need to clear my head," said Raven evenly without turning back. "There's nothing wrong."

"You do not sound convinced of that."

Raven paused at the top of the stairs. "I'm not," she said, and then she walked quickly down the stairs, letting the door click shut behind her.

Starfire sighed and turned back to face the edge of the roof, sitting down once more next to the large reference book and watching the boys below. Beast Boy was grinning broadly and cheering both David and Cyborg on as the pace of the throws increased, and David was smiling as his accuracy improved and he looped the orange disks through the sky with more and more confidence. Eventually, Cyborg stepped back to the other two and began speaking some sort of instruction to David, who began tossing the disks high into the air and detonating them near the apex of their flight, or at least that appeared to be the plan. The reality was that more than half of the disks crashed back to earth before they could be destroyed, but then they were merely practicing... though Starfire wasn't particularly certain what was being practiced. She resumed humming softly, her tune punctuated periodically by echoing explosions as she glanced around, waiting for Robin to arrive. As she did so, her gaze fell upon the book Raven had been reading, still laying open on the page she had lately been studying. Largely out of boredom as well as a vague interest in seeing what sorts of things Raven had been looking into, Starfire reached over and picked the book up.

Starfire could read English perfectly well, she had learned it along with the spoken language when she had first met Robin, but this book was a reference work, filled with technical language and terminology she did not understand. It was clearly written by and for those with an understanding of something called 'meta-physiology', a term Starfire had never heard before. To her relief, it appeared even Raven had difficulty with a work this technical, as the margins and line breaks were filled with hastily scribbled question marks and other indications of confusion written in pencil. Most of the book was taken up with an extremely complicated explanation of the physical and medical roots of various superpowers, not the most captivating of reading material, and Starfire was about to put the book aside when she came to a paragraph written in a slightly more general tone, and more importantly, one which Raven had circled several times in pencil, in addition to underlining various key phrases.

"As we have seen," read the text, "the extremely broad family of kinetic powers has more in common than might be apparent from external observation of the effects of such abilities. Kineticists, of whom Telekinetics are merely one subtype, share an overdeveloped neural pathway network within the neo-cortex, granting paranormal control over external objects and molecular structures. The universal and well-recorded **instability** of all known kineticists is due to this centering of the power's control mechanism within the neo-cortex, the center of emotion and sub-conscious thought, while more stable metahuman abilities typically are controlled via the frontal, temporal, or occipital lobes (see chapters 5-18). In consequence, with no known exceptions, **kineticists cannot "learn" to manifest their powers, merely to control the manifestations that they sub-consciously produce**."

Another disk exploded at the zenith of its flight, prompting cheers from Beast Boy and congratulations from Cyborg, even as Starfire read on.

"While manifestation times and mechanisms commonly differ according to para-psychological archetypes, all kineticists share the consequences of **highly potent, uncontrolled eruptions of kinetic power**, prior to mastery of the mechanisms of control by which these powers are commonly harnessed. Untrained kineticists are **extremely dangerous**, disrupting the physical laws that surround them **randomly and with great frequency**. This is particularly true of so-called RPMV (Restricted Pathway Manifestation Variant) Kineticists, meaning those whose powers grant **control over one or a small number** of states of matter, **molecular properties**, or physical processes, rather than general telekinetics. Well-known RPMV archetypes (though all RPMVs are extremely uncommon) include Aquakinetics (water), **Geokinetics (earth/stone)**, Pyrokinetics (fire and rapid oxidation), Cryokinetics (temperature extremes, particularly extreme lows), Aerokinetics (gases, atmospheric or otherwise), **Psychokinetics (molecular stability/instability)**, Ferrokinetics (heavy metals), and even such extreme aspects as Balistokinetics (physical acceleration) or Gravikinetics (gravitational forces)."

Underneath this paragraph was the word "Terra" written in Raven's handwriting and underlined three times, with an arrow drawn to connect it to the word "Geokinetics". Starfire understood. Terra had been cursed with awesome powers well beyond her capacity to fully control, even with Slade's 'assistance'. What Starfire did not understand was what all this had to do with Friend David, whose powers were obviously much less potent, and had so far not exhibited any sign of being out of control.

"In summation, kinetics of all stripes, but particularly of the rarer RPMV sort are **among the least reliable and most collaterally dangerous forms of metahuman capabilities**. This is under no circumstances an indictment of the many kineticists to be found among the metahuman community, and is merely intended to point out the fact that only the most skilled wielders of kinetic powers, recipients of many years of **difficult and intensive training**, can hope to fully master their own powers without risk of kinetic eruptions during high-stress moments. Kinetic powers are marked by **incredible potency, matched only by their extreme volatility**, and **untrained** kineticists are among the more **dangerous beings on the face of the earth**, tragically often without even meaning to be. Fortunately, untrained kineticists are also **among the least subtle** of the metahuman archetypes, and their frequent eruptions of raw kinetic power will almost always **quickly bring them to the attention of the relevant authorities**."

Starfire lowered the book slowly, completely mystified by what she had read. None of this made any sense. What the book was describing could not have been further from a description of David, who even now was struggling to find the power to cause fragile ceramic plates to explode. She wondered if her confusion was due to her imperfect understanding of the language the book was written in, only to find that beneath the article in question Raven had written in crisp, printed letters the words "does not add up", with half a dozen arrows pointing to various phrases in the preceding text. The only other intelligible note was written at the very bottom of the page. There, Raven had simply written "**Beast Boy**", and circled his name hard enough to carve a furrow in the paper, though why she had chosen to write Beast Boy's name was, of course, a mystery.

"Starfire?"

Starfire turned around with a start similar to the one Raven had exhibited a moment ago, to see Robin standing on the rooftop behind her. She set the book aside and smiled as she stood up.

"Robin!" she exclaimed happily. "Are you ready to undertake the journey to the mall of shopping?"

"All set," said Robin with a smile, gesturing at the book. "Is that the book Raven borrowed?"

Starfire nodded. "Raven asked that I return it to you. She said that she had to consider things but that nothing was wrong."

Robin nodded back before walking over and picking the book up. "Good, we'll drop it off before we leave. She just asked if she could help with the research a bit. Did she say if she found anything"

"She did not indicate one way or the other," said Starfire, still uncertain as to the meaning of the notes Raven had jotted down. "No doubt she will speak to the rest of us if she makes a discovery."

"Probably," said Robin as he extended a hand towards Starfire. "At any rate, are you ready to go?"

Starfire smiled again and took Robin's hand as she took one last glance at the three figures down below, who now seemed to have finally run out of disks to destroy and were slowly making their way back towards the tower. "Very much so," she said, and she turned away and walked with Robin back towards the Tower's roof stairs. Whatever the mystery and confusion surrounding Raven's research and David's powers, it did not change the fact that this was a perfect day, and no matter what tomorrow had in store, today she was going to the mall of shopping with Robin. Part of her wondered whether Robin's presence was what gave her this warm feeling that the day felt perfect, or whether it was something else, but most of her didn't care. It was a perfect day, and it seemed as if it could not get any better.

"Friend Robin?" she asked.

"Yes, Starfire?" replied Robin.

"Have... you been conspiring to defraud the lottery for your own personal benefit?"

"..."

Looking at the priceless expression that came over Robin's face and trying not to laugh, Starfire realized that even the most perfect day could always get better…

* * *

**Author's Note:** As always, your reviews are priceless insight into how I can improve on the above work. Please leave any opinion you have, no matter how long or short, nor matter if it is flame or hatred or bountiful wonder. Thank you very much for reading, and I shall hope to see you all for Chapter 9.


	9. The Shadow of the Past

**Disclaimer:** Still don't own 'em...

**Author's Note:** Good day once again to all of you, and I do hope you will bear with me. The chapter I have to present to you today is one which I do not hold out much hope for. Indeed, I fully expect to hear angry remarks about the liberties taken below, but it cannot be helped. On occasion, a chapter simply writes itself, and this is one such occasion. I present it to you now, in the hopes that some may find it acceptable, though I would not dare call it likely. It is a work whose process of creation was labored and long, and yet seemed to me to be generated from a wholly external source, as though I were merely transcribing things I had no hand in.

I hope you like it, but if you do not, I ask only to know what aspect was not to your liking. Please, send me a review, even with the most horrid of flames. The fact of the matter is that with a chapter like this, I simply do not know what to think.

* * *

**Chapter 9: The Shadow of the Past**

_"Those who cannot learn from history are condemned to repeat it.__"_

- George Santayana

**O-O-O**

There were few things in the world that Raven despised as much as being treated like an irrational child.

She stood in the darkened control booth overlooking the training room with one hand on her temple, trying to ward off the headache that was threatening to surface, a large reference book clutched in the other, and a look on her face that left no questions as to her mood or state of mind. Before her stood Cyborg, looking equally implacable, arms folded across his chest as he looked down at Raven with an expression of mixed concern and displeasure. The muffled sounds from training room below barely filtered into the booth, giving the two Titans an uninterrupted chance to speak their piece.

"Goddamnit Raven," said Cyborg, not yielding an inch, "_don't_ tell me that everything's okay. It ain't, and you're weirding me and everyone else out!"

Raven forced down the frustration that was boiling up inside her. She had _thought_ that Cyborg knew better than to push her like this! "I've told you a hundred times already," she said with a tone that usually sent the others scurrying for the nearest bomb shelter, "there is _nothing_ wrong! _Quit_ hounding me!" She punctuated her statement by ostentatiously turning back to the window of the control room, a clear signal for Cyborg to go away.

"Hounding _you_?" demanded Cyborg, obviously either not getting the signal, or more likely not caring to act on it, "Last time I checked, Raven, you were the one hounding me and BB. Or did you think I didn't notice you up on the roof yesterday?"

Raven groaned. "So what if I was on the roof? It's quiet up there."

"Not while we're skeet shooting it ain't!" said Cyborg, "and it's not just yesterday. Every time BB or I grab that kid to go do anything you go all surveillance on us, dragging that damn book around like you're trying to catch him red-handed with something. Even _Starfire's_ noticed, so why don't we drop the act talk about what your deal is?"

Raven crossed her arms and lowered her head slightly, silently cursing herself for being so obvious with something this unfounded. Down below, Robin was standing in the center of the training room, arms folded, eyes invisible as always behind his mask. A dozen feet in front of him stood David, who was presently doubled over with his hands on his knees breathing heavily, his face flushed with exhaustion. Blackened cinders and fragments of rubber and brick lay scattered about him, and there were scorch marks adorning the walls and floor.

"It's nothing," she said hollowly.

Cyborg sighed and shook his head. "It's not nothing, Raven," he said before walking over to the window next to her. "Whatever it is has got you being all paranoid and acting strange. It's got you doing all kinds of research about stuff none of the rest of us can even pronounce, and it's got you tailing that kid like he's a bank robber and you're the damn cops."

"You don't bother Robin when he does those things," said Raven.

"Yeah, because Robin's like that. If it was Robin doing all this, nobody'd say anything about it. But you're not Robin, and this isn't like you at all." Cyborg lowered his tone a notch and smiled knowingly at Raven. "C'mon Raven, you _know_ I'm not trying to get all up in your business, you know I don't do that. But Starfire doesn't know how to ask, Robin's not gonna do it, and Beast Boy's afraid you'll put him through a window just for bringing it up."

Raven managed to smirk at Cyborg's last comment. "And how do you know I won't do the same to you?"

Cyborg smirked right back. "I wouldn't fit."

"Don't bet on it..." said Raven, but the menace was gone from her words, and she made no effort to carry out her implied threat. Cyborg folded his arms as Raven leaned against the window of the control booth and took a deep breath, both of them watching the two figures below in silence. Robin was holding his staff in one hand, and behind him sat a table piled high with all manner of junk culled from the Tower's basement. David had raised his head, but still stood doubled over, catching his breath, and Robin was currently lecturing him on some subject or another. Raven didn't move as Cyborg reached over and flipped on the intercom switch, flooding the room with the sound of Robin's voice.

"... enough to be able to blow something up. You have to learn to do it at a moment's notice. Whoever you're facing won't give you time to sit there and think about it. The less time it takes, the more options you have. There's not always going to be a water or gasoline tank nearby."

David seemed to wilt slightly, and he coughed a few times to clear his throat. "How?" he gasped between breaths. "I can't... I can't just... it takes _time_. I have to concentrate on it and..."

"You don't have the luxury of time when Cinderblock or someone worse is coming after you," said Robin, "you have to learn to act instinctively. Things can happen in combat in the blink of an eye, and if you can't react in time..."

Without giving the slightest hint of prior intent, Robin suddenly lunged forward, drawing a birdarang from his belt in a single swift motion and flinging it like a softball straight at David. Even to Raven, Robin's motion was so fast as to be a blur. To David it must have looked like Robin had just teleported. He gasped, cringed, and jerked backwards as the birdarang flew past his head and embedded itself in the wall, precisely as Robin had intended it to.

David let his breath out in a ragged exhale, and turned to see the birdarang sticking out of the wall next to his head. "Jesus..." he whispered in a stunned tone, and he turned back to Robin with his eyes wide.

Robin stood up straight again and regarded David with a practiced eye. "If you want to be able to defend yourself," he said, "you're going to have to learn how to stop something like that."

David looked at Robin as though he had grown a second head. "You mean... dodge it?"

Robin smirked as he slid another birdarang out of his belt. "I mean blow it out of the air."

Up in the booth, Raven shook her head as she watched the lesson continue. "This isn't right..." she said darkly.

Cyborg sighed, switching the intercom back off. "It's not easy," he said, "but I mean, the kid's gotta learn how to not get turned into hamburger if Blockhead or someone else comes after him, or if he gets caught up in something."

"That's not what I meant," said Raven, prompting Cyborg to turn his head to her and raise an eyebrow. Raven gestured at the scene below with her hand. "There's something wrong here. This isn't how it's supposed to work."

"Raven, what are you talking about?" asked Cyborg. "What's wrong with this?"

Raven closed her eyes sharply and groaned before beginning her explanation. "Look," she said, "he's kinetic, right? You know what that means?"

"It means he affects objects around him with his mind," said Cyborg, who was familiar enough with mechanics to follow her this far. "What's your point?"

"Kinetic powers are tied into your emotions," she said, "you feel a strong emotion, anger, fear, surprise, whatever, and your powers just 'go off', subconsciously. They lash out at whatever's around them. That's what makes them so dangerous; you don't have any control over what they're doing, not without a lot of practice and work."

"Okay..." said Cyborg "so..."

"So does that look like a lack of control to you?" she asked, pointing down at David. "You take an untrained kineticist and scare him half to death or surprise him like that, and his powers should be ripping the tower apart. He should start just detonating everything in sight without even meaning to, but he's not. Why not?"

"Wait a minute," said Cyborg, "are you telling me you're upset because he's _not_ blowing the tower to pieces?"

Raven clenched her fist and resisted the urge to blow something up herself. This was why she didn't want to explain her suspicions. "You don't get it," she said, "it takes _years_ of training to learn how to control kinetic powers. Remember Terra? She was a geokinetic. She'd had some kind of training I think, but not much, and she was so terrified of losing control that she went running to Slade just to try and get a handle on it. And she'd been using her powers for a _long_ time before we met her. My powers are partially telekinetic, that's why I have to keep my emotions under control. You've seen what can happen when I lose control."

Cyborg lowered his eyes at that, and Raven sighed. She was not trying to generate pity, merely to explain. "This kid has better control over his powers than _I_ do and I've been practicing how to control them since I was four," she said evenly. "So if he's never had any training at all, then why _didn't_ he blow that birdarang out of the air? If Robin had done that to me back before I learned how to control my powers, I would have disintegrated it... and him... without even meaning to."

Cyborg glanced at Raven with a hesitant look for a moment, but Raven ignored it. After a moment's pause, Cyborg ventured an explanation.

"Not everybody's powers work the same, Raven," he said. "Beast Boy doesn't have any trouble controlling 'em. Starfire doesn't either. Maybe David's just... different, you know?"

Raven shook her head. "No..." she said, "Starfire's an alien. Beast Boy's a changeling of some kind. Neither one of them are kinetic." She held up the reference book in her hand. "I've been doing research. All kinetic powers work the same way. All of them are subconscious and have the same control problems, no exceptions." She smirked as she lowered the book. "That's probably why so many of them end up as villains. Easy, personal power that you don't even have to learn how to use. Just pick a target and 'boom'."

'BOOM!' The control booth shook slightly as the brick Robin had pitched into the air was torn in half by an explosion, a large piece of it bouncing off into the corner of the room. David lowered his hand and smiled at Robin, but Robin's implacable gaze quickly wiped the smile of the young kineticist's face.

"You were supposed to completely destroy it," said Robin, "not just break it in half."

"You said you wanted me to do it as fast as I could," replied David. "I figured if I just snapped it, it would be enough to..."

"If I'd thrown it at your head," said Robin, picking up another brick, "then it still would have hit you. You need to completely take it out. Try again."

Robin threw the next brick up into the air, and Raven was prompted to shake her head again. "Besides," she said, "that's not the only thing wrong."

"What else?" asked Cyborg uncertainly.

"Kinetic powers are very, very strong. They start out strong and they stay that way. Terra could cause an earthquake by _accident_. She plugged that volcano and turned herself to stone just by releasing her powers completely. The hard part with kinetics isn't generating enough power, it's controlling the power you generate." She pointed down below again. "I just don't see that kind of power here. Kinetics are supposed to have loads of power and no control. This kid has almost no power and total control. It doesn't make any sense."

"So... maybe he's not a kinetic?" suggested Cyborg, as though explaining the obvious.

"He _has_ to be a kinetic," insisted Raven. "Nothing else makes sense. I even detected traces of it when I scanned him that first time. There's no way to generate these effects _without_ kinetic powers. If he's not a kinetic, then I guarantee you nobody's ever seen anything like him before."

Cyborg shrugged. "Why can't that be?"

"Because that _doesn't just_ _happen_!" exclaimed Raven in frustration. "You don't just come across a brand new type of superpower that nobody's ever heard of before! I've been researching this for days, there's _nothing_ like it anywhere else. Superpowers are rare enough by themselves, you know how rare an entirely new _class_ of superpowers is? And this one just happens to walk through our door? With no verifiable background and a bunch of super-villains attacking him for no reason? How many coincidences are we going to ignore before they stop being coincidences, Cyborg? Either David is the greatest natural kinetic in the universe, or he's not what he says he is."

"He hasn't _said_ he's anything," said Cyborg forcefully. "You're the one coming up with all this evidence."

"Of course," said Raven in a voice dripping with sarcasm, "I forgot. He's just some poor scared kid who doesn't know anything about all this, right?"

Cyborg could also play at that game. Without skipping a beat, he replied in an equally sarcastic voice, "No, you're right," he replied without skipping a beat in an equally sarcastic voice, "he's actually a criminal mastermind who's only _pretending_ to not have any training, he's such a good actor he can fool you and everyone else here, and he let himself get beat to pieces and almost killed about five times because..." he glanced up at the ceiling and rubbed his chin as though trying to recall the reason. "Why was it that he let himself nearly get ripped apart again?"

"You asked me what I was worried about," snapped Raven, turning back to the window. "If you don't want to know, don't ask!"

"Raven," said Cyborg calmly, shaking his head, "this is crazy. David's not a plant. He's not out to get us, I'm _sure_ of that!"

"You were sure of that with Terra, weren't you?" asked Raven without turning. The dead silence that followed told her that her comment had hit hard enough.

"As I recall," said Cyborg, "so were you."

"Yeah," said Raven, "which is why I'm not making the same mistake again."

"But remember what Robin said?" asked Cybrog, now clearly frustrated himself. "Why would anyone send us a plant like this? No back-story, no records, a whole packet of mysteries just begging for someone to ask questions about... it doesn't make sense! If someone sent David here, why wouldn't they make up a background for him that held water? Why wouldn't they try to make him fit what's in that damn book of yours? They gotta know we're still suspicious after what happened with Terra, so why do it like this?"

Raven paused before replying. "Maybe because it worked."

The response brought Cyborg up short. "What?"

"It worked, or it's working," said Raven. "If someone did send him here as a plant, then they succeeded. He's planted."

This was clearly too much for Cyborg. "Now hold on just a second Raven, that ain't true at all! We've all been making damn sure that he doesn't have access to anything..."

"Great Azar..." exclaimed Raven in disbelief as she whirled around to face her half-metal teammate, "wake _up_, Cyborg! You think this is just about access codes and door locks? Terra didn't have 'access' to your security systems, and she managed to make a pretty good mess of them, didn't she? He's here, in the tower, and he probably will be for weeks if not longer. Beast Boy and Starfire are already trying to make friends with him, our fearless leader down there is actually teaching him how to _fight _better, and _you_'ve been letting him work on the T-car! He doesn't _need_ codes. He's already _got_ fifty different ways to hurt us. We _gave_ him that!"

Cyborg looked almost stunned at the vehemence of Raven's outburst, and he defended his security measures as best he could. "Raven, it's not like I give him a blow torch and tell him to have fun! We've got tracking bugs on him all the time, we've usually got someone with him, and he can't get into important places like the evidence room or the computer..."

"He can detonate things with his _mind_!" she exclaimed. "You think a locked door is gonna stop him?"

"And what, we're not gonna _notice_ if he blows a door down?"

"By that point it could be too late. Besides, he doesn't _have_ to blow a door apart in order to get at us! What if he slips something into the T-car? Or the refrigerator? Or an air vent? A bomb, a booby trap, a toxin... for god's sake there's enough chemicals under the kitchen sink to kill us all in a dozen different ways. It doesn't matter _what_ kind of security we set up, or _how _much surveillance we put him under, if he's living at this tower, he can hurt us! Maybe kill us!"

Obviously, Cyborg could barely believe what he was hearing. The giant Titan was staring at Raven as though she had suddenly transformed before his eyes into someone else, and when he replied, his voice was as serious as Raven had ever heard it.

"Okay, Raven... now you're starting to scare me."

Raven scoffed. "How do you think I feel?"

"That's not what I mean, and you know it," said Cyborg with intensity, bending over and putting his hands on Raven's shoulders as he spoke urgently. "This is _insane_! I've never heard this much paranoia out of _Robin_, let alone out of you! What the _hell _is wrong with you? You never reacted like this even with Terra."

"Maybe I should have..." muttered Raven.

Cyborg refused to be knocked off topic. "Maybe, but you didn't, and as far as I can see, this kid's never done anything to you. Hell, you two've barely said ten words to each other since he got here, and you _know_ he's scared to death of you. So _what _is your problem Raven? This is _not_ like you at all!"

Raven glared up at Cyborg for another moment, before closing her eyes and forcing herself to take a deep breath. She lowered her head and stared at the ground almost guiltily. "I know..." she finally said. Cyborg stood back up slowly and crossed his arms once more as Raven continued. "I'm exaggerating and it's... crazy and paranoid and whatever but... there's something about this... this whole thing." She trailed off and turned back to the window, watching David continue to try (and mostly fail) to detonate an assortment of objects that Robin indicated or threw into the air. "I just... I have this really _bad_ feeling about all this, and about this kid and I... _can't_ help it. I keep waiting for him to let in a legion of robots or ambush us with some super-villain. I mean we know _nothing_ about him..."

"We don't know a whole lot about you Raven..." said Cyborg gently, "... or really about any of us. But we're not sitting here waiting to turn on each other are we?"

"No..." said Raven. "Look, I don't have an excuse Cyborg. I know you're right, and this is all insane, and that he's probably exactly what he looks like he is. I know it doesn't make any sense for him to let himself get killed, and I know I should be thankful he's not blowing things up left and right by accident because we don't need two of us doing that... I know this is all crazy... but I can't let it go. It's just... I keep feeling like there's something going on here that we're not seeing. Something really, _really _bad." Raven sighed and closed her eyes. "But I don't know what."

Cyborg smiled and put a hand on Raven's shoulder. "So why don't you let bird-boy there do the worrying? That's what he's good at, and we really don't need two people doing _that_ either."

Raven shook her head. "... because Robin's not worrying about that at all."

Cyborg raised an eyebrow. "What? What do you mean? Of course he is."

Raven glanced up at Cyborg and then returned her gaze to the two figures below. "What are they doing down there?"

"Robin said he was gonna start showing David how not to get his butt kicked," said Cyborg, "that's what it looks like to me..."

"Yeah... except they've been at it for three hours solid now."

Cyborg chuckled. "Well, you know Robin," he said, "he thinks the word 'break' oughta be illegal."

"Doesn't that seem a little much?"

"We do three hour sessions all the time," said Cyborg with a shrug. "Nothin' odd about that,"

"... yeah, but we're all trained superheroes. This was supposed to be a sideshow."

"Robin doesn't know how to do a sideshow, Raven," said Cyborg, "you know him. He's Mr. 110."

Raven shook her head. "Maybe," she said, "but that's not what this is. They've been practicing with David's powers this whole time. No hand to hand, no evasion training, just superpower endurance."

"A power like his, that might be useful for staying alive..."

Raven frowned at Cyborg. "When was the last time someone threw a rubber ball at you in a fight? They spent forty-five minutes on those. Before that it was rolled up newspaper. I know David's not a professional, but I think he already knows how to defend himself against the Jump City Tribune."

Cyborg smirked at the joke, but scratched his head for a moment. "Now that you mention it, that is kind of a weird thing to spend all that time on."

Raven folded her arms and stared down at the training room. "Not really..." she said in a monotone, "Learning how to use my powers for prolonged periods was the first thing I started on when the monks of Azarath were training me..."

It took Cyborg a few seconds to process what she had just said, but when he realized what she was implying, his human eye opened wide and he turned to her with a look of disbelief. "Wait a minute..." he said, "you don't mean..."

"Yeah," said Raven, "I do."

"But... no... no way Raven, that don't make any sense at all!"

"It does if you know Robin..."

"I _do_ know Robin!" insisted Cyborg "He's more suspicious than you'll ever be! You saw what he got like after Terra switched sides!"

Raven nearly laughed in surprise. "You think that was suspicion?" she asked incredulously. "That wasn't suspicion, it was _guilt_."

"Guilt?"

"How can you possibly not know this?"

"Not all of us are empathic Raven," said Cyborg with an annoyed tone, "what are you talking about?"

Raven groaned. She hated playing psychoanalyst, but Robin's behavior only made sense with a proper appreciation of his personality, so she tried her best.

"Look... what I'm about to tell you... you can't tell anyone. Not a word. Not to Beast Boy, not to Starfire, not even to Robin himself, okay? This is private and a lot of it's just guesses, and I don't want to start anything."

"My lips are sealed," said Cyborg, "now let's hear it."

"All right." Raven took a deep breath, and began explaining as best she could.

"Robin... feels responsible for all of us. Not just because he's the leader. I mean, you've seen how he acts like he's everybody's father sometimes. You guys all laugh at him for it, but that's who he is. It's why he keeps doing such stupid things to try and keep us out of harm's way. It's part of what makes him such a good hero."

"Yeah, he's pretty gung-ho about that sort of thing," said Cyborg. "Go on."

"So when Terra... turned, Robin felt responsible for it. Like it was his fault that she betrayed us. That's why he got so upset afterwards. We were all really upset ourselves, and we were more worried about Beast Boy so nobody really said anything to Robin about it, but he and I talked a couple times and he told me that he kept thinking that if he'd just had more time to train her, or paid closer attention, or maybe even just met her earlier on, that he might have been able to stop her from doing this. Teach her how to... I don't know... control her powers better or just be a better hero or who knows what."

"But that's crazy," said Cyborg, "Robin did everything he could with her, we all did. She didn't even tell us that she couldn't control her powers, and then one day she stabs us right in the back."

"I know that," said Raven. "Even Robin knows that, I think, but he's just like that. You've seen how he blames himself whenever one of us gets hurt or whenever a crime happens, right? It's the same sort of thing."

"All right... so what's this got to do with David?"

Raven smirked and shook her head again. "Don't you see? Here we are, barely a month later, and here's this new kid, who shows up all of a sudden with powers he's never used and a bunch of mystery villains chasing him all over the city. He's got no outside ties, no family, nothing to hold him back, and he's never done anything at all like this before." Raven paused as she watched Robin continuing to pitch bits of brick and masonry into the air to be blasted apart in mid-flight. "So I don't think he's trying to teach David self-defense at all. I think that's just an excuse. I think he's trying to prove something to himself."

"What's he trying to prove?"

Raven sighed. "All of us... you, me, Beast Boy, Starfire, we all had our powers and at least some training before we ever met Robin. We've gotten better since then of course, but... you know... we were already pretty good. We stopped the Gordanians without any extra practice or help from anyone. David though, he's a blank slate, brand new. I think Robin's trying to prove that he can actually take someone with no training, a civilian, and turn them into a superhero."

"But, Raven... it takes more than just powers to make a hero. You know that. Hell Robin knows that better'n anybody!"

"I didn't say it made any sense," said Raven, "but if that's not what Robin's up to, then I don't know what he's doing, because he's _not_ just showing him the self-defense ropes."

Cyborg whistled softly and shook his head. "That's..." he said, trying to find the words and failing, settling finally for a simple "damn..."

"Yeah," said Raven.

"But why?" asked Cyborg. "Why would he do that? Who's he trying to prove this to?"

"I don't know," said Raven, "maybe Batman... maybe himself... who knows. It doesn't matter. The more I watch, the more I'm sure that's what he's doing, even if he doesn't know it yet. Power endurance training isn't any use unless you keep it up for a long time, and even then, all it does is get you ready for the _real_ training."

"Shouldn't... I mean shouldn't Robin have told the rest of us? Shouldn't we be talking about this?"

"Oh, I imagine we will be..." said Raven, "once Robin actually admits to himself that this is what he's doing. Until then he's probably going to tell himself that he's just 'preparing' David for whatever comes his way, and that this is just temporary. Robin can be... remarkably blind sometimes. Besides, the _real_ fun's gonna be when _David _realizes what Robin's doing."

Cyborg shook his head and stepped back from the window. "You guys are _all_ insane, you know that?"

Raven smirked. "You hang out with us..."

"Hey, I ain't sayin' I'm any better," said Cyborg, "but this is just nuts. Robin's trying to build new heroes without realizing it, and you've caught paranoia disease from him. Next thing I know, Beast Boy's gonna come walkin' in here reading a book!"

"I think that might destroy the universe," said Raven with a wry smirk.

Cyborg said nothing for a few moments, and they watched as David continued to struggle to detonate object after object. By now, the young psychokinetic looked like he was on his last legs, ready to pitch over unconscious at any moment. Raven's eyes narrowed as she studied his gestures, his expression, his bearing. Everything _looked_ normal, just another worn-out kid... so why did it _feel_ so damn ominous?

"Well I gotta get going," said Cyborg finally. "But look... Raven... we'll deal with whatever Robin's thing is when we get there, but you've got to _try_ to stop imagining that David's out to get us all. I've got instincts too, and I don't think he's anything except what he looks like he is. I think he's a scared, shy, civilian, and that's that."

"But then how do you explain his powers?" asked Raven, "How do you explain the control that he has over them? That's not the mark of a scared civilian, it's the mark of a practiced expert! How do you explain all the coincidences?"

"I can't explain it," said Cyborg. "And maybe you're right, maybe there's something fishy going on but... I just don't buy it. I know what happened with Terra, and I know I thought the same thing about her... but I don't buy it anyway."

Raven sighed as Cyborg turned and walked out of the control booth, the doors sliding shut behind him, leaving her alone. She rubbed her temple, trying to focus her calm and approach the situation rationally, but as always, as she went over the facts in her mind, she felt an alarm bell ringing deep inside her mind. She knew Cyborg was probably right. She knew that she was likely imagining the danger, but she remembered that, whatever she had claimed while facing the geokinetic in the cavern, she had fallen for Terra's act, and the consequences of that misplaced trust had almost killed them all. The holes in David's story, the powers that shouldn't have been possible, the motives and actions of Cinderblock which made no sense, the unknowns that flooded this whole situation from every side, all these things stood out like red flags, commanding her attention, forcing her to wonder. Just who was David, and what was his purpose here in the tower. Was he a victim of circumstances beyond his control? Was he a mere puppet, being manipulated against his will or even without his knowledge by forces unknown? Or was he actually part of the conspiracy itself?

The door to the training room slid open, and Beast Boy sauntered in just in time to completely spoil David's attempt at concentrating on his last target, a piece of granite, which smashed into the floor at Robin's feet and shattered into a million pieces, not from superpowers but from gravity. David flopped over onto the ground, completely spent, and Robin finally decided that they had had enough for the day. Beast Boy and Robin spoke briefly (the intercom was still off, so Raven couldn't hear what they were saying, before the green changeling walked over to help David back to his room, as the young teen appeared ready to pass out from the effort of using his powers so much. As Beast Boy took David's hand to help him up off the floor, Raven narrowed her eyes, and subconsciously began to press harder against the glass with one hand, her powers causing it to tremble slightly.

Why did it feel like she was watching the prelude to an execution?

**O-O-O**

One thing Raven knew from experience was that everything had its limits, even meditation.

Two hours of failed attempts to find her calming center had left her even more aggravated and confused than before, and in her frustration, she had managed to knock her door off its slide rails again with a sudden burst of dark energy. It took ten minutes of mentally beating the rollers back into shape before the door would slide open and shut properly, and once it was fixed, Raven decided that she needed something to calm herself down if she was to have any hope of attaining a meditative state.

The kitchen was dark and empty, which was no surprise given that it was nearly midnight, and Raven quickly brewed up a strong cup of herbal tea and sat down, sipping it slowly and trying to clear her head. It wasn't working. Whatever she did, no matter how hard she tried, her thoughts kept being dragged back to the conversation she'd had with Cyborg earlier that day. Why couldn't she let this go? She didn't like prying into other people's secrets any more than she enjoyed having her own pried into! Robin was paranoid enough for all of them and perfectly effective at sorting out mysteries, so why couldn't she just let _him_ deal with this?

And as always, the answer came back, 'Because Robin's not dealing with it. Because nobody is. Because nobody else sees the danger.'

And why was that exactly? If she was the only person who saw danger, then why couldn't the others be right and her wrong?

'Terra.'

Terra... goddamn Terra. Terrahad been dead for more than a month and a half and the traitorous blonde bitch was _still _dominating her thoughts and everyone else's. Nobody was acting rational around here, certainly not her, and it was all because of Terra!

She snarled and cursed silently and knew that she wasn't being fair. Terra was more than a traitor. She had told Beast Boy as much not two weeks ago. She knew she should be forgiving her. Death expiated all sins, particularly her kind of death, but the parallels were too close, the sting too recent, to just push it aside. Or was it? After all, Beast Boy had taken the worst hurt by _far_ from Terra, and was he sitting around acting suspicious? Of course not, he was dragging David off every five minutes for some crazy stunt or another! How in the hell did he _do_ that? How could he _not_ be suspicious that he was being set up again? After a blow like Terra's betrayal, how could he possibly bring himself to trust an _outsider_ again?

He couldn't possibly be so stupid as to not _see _the danger. He was inconsiderate and juvenile and had _no_ common sense at all, but he wasn't stupid. And Terra _had_ hurt him. Badly. Worse than he knew maybe. That much was obvious. So how could he be acting like this? How could any of them?

She needed more tea...

A second cup was followed by a third, and would have been followed by more had she not had combat training tomorrow, and thus needed to get at least _some_ sleep. She was no closer to a solution on any front, and her suspicions had not calmed down at all, in fact her quiet reflection had only served to embolden them further. She clenched her hands into fists as she strode back to her room, shaking her head as though trying to fling the paranoid thoughts out of her mind by force. By all the gods, why couldn't she just _let this go_?

And right about then she realized she was in the wrong part of the tower.

Had she actually been so distracted that she made a wrong turn? Obviously so, as she was plainly not where she had meant to be. Instead of turning left and heading up the stairs to her room, she had continued on straight down the hallway, winding up in a different section of the tower. To her right was the gym, to her left, a series of storage closets filled with piles of useless junk, and directly in front of her stood... the guest rooms.

Well this was just peachy.

It was bad enough to have her emotions loose and personified inside her head, was her subconscious now also trying to manipulate her? Times like this made Raven feel awfully crowded inside her own head. How the hell had she wound up here of all places? Part of her wanted to shrug off the wrong turn and return to her room, but shrugging things off had gotten her nowhere so far. Perhaps her subconscious was right. Perhaps it was time to clear the air a bit. Perhaps instead of trying to 'forget about it', she should be trying to go straight to the heart of the matter... whatever that was.

After all, if all else failed, David wasn't the only one who could blow something up...

Slowly she approached the guest room door. It was closed of course, and no doubt locked. Was David even awake right now? Cyborg had mentioned something about him not sleeping well. She walked up to the door and listened quietly. Sure enough, there was the soft sound of someone shuffling about inside. The sound moved back and forth. Pacing. Raven couldn't help but smirk. So she wasn't the only one worried...

Steadying herself, she raised her hand and knocked on the door softly but firmly. Instantly the pacing stopped, and Raven heard the person inside inhale sharply in surprise. She stepped back from the door slightly, composing herself into her usual emotionless, rigid form. A few moments later, the door unlocked with a click, and slowly slid open partway, revealing David standing behind it. Raven said nothing as David blinked once or twice, obviously having not expected to see her. "... Raven?" he asked after a few moments, doing an admirable job of keeping the nervousness out of his voice.

"Is this a good time?" she asked.

"For... what?"

"We need to talk."

David turned slightly paler and gulped audibly. "Talk?" he asked, as though the word contained some hideous implication. "... about what?"

"Can I come in?"

Raven didn't need to be empathic to sense the fear in the younger boy's eyes, but both of them knew that there was nowhere to go, and so David slowly nodded and slid the door open fully. "S... Sure..." he said, stepping to the side to let Raven in. Raven walked into the room, and David slid the door shut again, though Raven noticed that he didn't lock it, perhaps preparing an escape route? Perhaps trying to put her at ease? She shook her head as David turned back. She had to stop second-guessing everything or this wasn't going to work...

"What... uh... what can I..."

Despite herself, Raven couldn't help but be a bit bemused by David's nervous bumbling. "Well you can offer me a seat," she said with a smirk.

"I er... of... I... please... have a seat?" he asked, as though asking a favor. Raven shook her head and sat down in a chair, as David did the same of the side of the bed. "S... sorry..." he said, "I just... this is... your guys' tower and all... I thought..."

"I have a few questions for you," she said, getting straight to the point.

"Er... questions?"

"Concerns, actually."

"Um... okay..."

"Have you ever had any formal training in your powers?" she asked

"No..." said David. "I... no, I told you guys that. I barely ever used them before Cinderblock attacked."

"Really?" she asked. "That's strange..."

"Why... is that strange?" asked David guardedly.

"Well... you don't usually see someone that new with that much control over their abilities is all."

David looked puzzled. "What do you mean... 'control'?"

"A lot of people's powers... they manifest before they learn how to control them. The powers start going off by themselves, doing things subconsciously. It usually takes a long time, years even, before someone with powers like yours really gets control of them."

"... oh." said David, perceiving that there was an implied challenge in those words, but not what it was.

"When did they first show up?"

David thought for a moment. "I think... I was seven maybe? It wasn't all of a sudden. I just... realized that if I stared at something long enough and thought about it real hard, I could make it look like a whole bunch of dots... like a... a connect-the-dots picture or something, but a whole lot more complicated. It wasn't until another year or so that I figured out how to start manipulating the energy and make it freeze or explode..."

"Okay..." said Raven, "... that's also a little weird."

By now David was definitely worried, and not just in a general sense. "... what's so weird about that?" he asked, "I mean... other than the obvious..."

"Superpowers show up in one of two ways," explained Raven. "Either you're born with them, or you acquire them later on. You ever been blasted by cosmic rays? Ingested experimental chemicals? Maybe had a magic spell performed on you?"

David blinked. "... no?"

"So then you were probably born with these powers..."

"I... guess... maybe..."

"The thing is? That's not possible either."

This one definitely caught David by surprise. "Why not?"

"Because if you're born with superpowers they either manifest immediately from birth, or they wait until much later, usually around age eleven or twelve or so. They don't just start up earlier than that." She crossed her arms and leaned back in the chair. "Ever."

"What... what are you saying?"

Raven sighed and smirked at David. Now was the time to draw it out.

"I'm saying you're not very good at this."

Raven's empathic sense told her that David was confused, scared, and clearly becoming more than a little tired of cryptic questions. "I'm not very good at what?" he demanded sharply.

"At making these stories up."

That was the bombshell. The cards were now laid on the table, and the purpose of her little visit was made clear. Now she would see where he chose to take it. Not surprisingly, his first reaction was shock.

"You... you think I'm _lying_?"

"I didn't say that, but your story _is_ completely impossible, at least according to every study of meta-human physiology ever done," she said evenly. Let him try to refute that.

He didn't try, a wise move with her literally holding the evidence in her hands. "My _story_?" he demanded with a hint of actual outrage in his voice... a very compelling hint, she had to admit. "It's not a _story_! It's the truth!"

"So you say, but that doesn't change what all the studies have shown."

"I don't _give a damn_ what the 'studies have shown'!" said David. "Why the hell would I lie to you about this?"

"Oddly enough, that was going to be my next question," said Raven calmly.

"I'm not stupid, okay... I know you can read minds! Why would I lie to someone who can do that?"

"Maybe because you know that I don't read them without asking first..."

"Well are you reading my mind now?"

Raven frowned. "What did I just say?" she asked.

"This is crazy!" exclaimed David, unintentionally mimicking Cyborg from earlier in the day. "I mean... what do you think I am if I'm not what I said? I _showed_ you that I can blow stuff up! I've been here for a couple of weeks now and I haven't blown anything away by accident! Doesn't that maybe mean that I am what I say?"

"Maybe," said Raven, "or maybe you actually _have_ had training in this sort of thing. Training enough to make it look like you're brand new at this. Maybe you're here by yourself. Maybe someone put you up to it. Maybe I'm wrong and this is all just a mis-understanding, but you've got to admit, it looks pretty odd..."

David opened his mouth to make further protests, but Raven suddenly stood up, cutting him off, and a torrent of words poured out of her mouth unbidden.

"Look," she said darkly and seriously, imparting her point with her finger pointed at David. "I'm not saying you're lying and I'm not saying you aren't, but I want to make something very clear to you. If you are who you say you are, and I'm just making things up, then fine. You were right and I was wrong, and I'm sorry. But if you're not, if you _are_ lying to us, and this is part of some plot to hurt Beast Boy again... then _god help you_, because one of us _will_ smoke you out! If you're playing us, if you're not what you claim to be, I will _make _you regret it!"

David looked beyond stunned, beyond scared. He looked like a rabbit confronted with a hunter's shotgun, like he was staring at the headlights of an approaching express-train. He stared up at Raven with wide, unblinking eyes, and instantly, Raven knew that she had gone _way_ too far. She had meant to clear the air between David and her suspicions of him, not scare him half to death and accuse him of being in league with the very forces that were probably trying to kill him. Silently kicking herself, she slowly backed down.

"Just... keep it in mind..." she said weakly as she turned to leave. Robin was going to kill her for this. What the hell was she thinking? Maybe Cyborg was right. Maybe she _was_ going...

"... why do you care?"

Raven froze. She hadn't expected David to say anything, except maybe to yell at her for having unjustly accused him of all these things (if it was unjust, that is). She turned back to see David, still sitting on the bed, looking up at her with shock and fear still radiating from his person, but also a strange sort of calm... something she had not seen before.

"What?"

"I'm... just curious," he said. "Why do you care about that so much?"

Raven's self-reproach was placed firmly on hold as she reacted in disbelief. "Are you actually asking me why I care what happens to my friends?"

David leaned forward, as though trying to delicately approach a dangerous predator (which might not be too far from the truth). "Okay..." he said, "... except you didn't come in here talking about 'your friends'. You came in here talking about Beast Boy. About how I was going to 'hurt Beast Boy', somehow, right?"

Raven was about to respond with an emphatic no, when she suddenly realized that was exactly what she _had_ said, and without meaning to. She was so surprised by this that she didn't immediately come up with an answer.

"So... why Beast Boy, of all people?"

"I..." stammered Raven, caught off-guard. "You've... been spending an awful lot of time with Beast Boy."

"Yeah..." said David guardedly, "... but I've been spending even more with Cyborg."

"Cyborg can take care of himself," replied Raven without thinking.

"And Beast Boy can't?" asked David, slowly standing up.

Raven shook her head and grimaced. How had this conversation gotten away from her? "Look, I... I mis-spoke. I didn't mean to say Beast Boy. What I meant to say was..."

"Yes you did," said David.

"I... what? How do you know what I meant to say? Are you psychic now?"

"I don't need to be psychic." said David as he walked over towards her, now pointing his own finger at her accusatorially. "You got pissed off at me, and you started talking without thinking about it and that's what you said and that's what you meant to say, okay? I'm not dumb, and I know how to read people pretty well. If you're gonna crucify me because what I told you doesn't match whatever's in that book of yours, then can we at least agree on what you said?"

Raven could not think of what to say, and so said nothing, folding her arms as David walked over to her and spread hands out, palms up.

"So... what is it? Why are you so worried about Beast Boy? Because I know you aren't stupid enough to actually think I'm going to just suddenly attack all five of you guys, alone or separate. Any _one_ of you could mop the floor with me without _trying_ to, and you know it, and so do I! So what gives?"

Raven didn't know what to say to all this. Why _had_ she brought up Beast Boy? She could think of a reason or two maybe but...

"Beast Boy is a good friend," she said evenly, forcing her voice to stay calm. "He's been through a hell of a lot recently, and I don't want to see him get hurt by you or anyone else. That's all."

"Really?"

"Of course!" replied Raven in a mildly offended tone.

David slowly took a deep breath, and turned away from Raven, walking back over towards the back of the room. He shook his head as he did so as he made an offhand comment.

"... could'a fooled me."

The next few seconds were a blur.

A flash of movement, a good hard shock, and suddenly Raven realized she was holding David by his shirt collar up against the wall, and her eyes were sparking with raw power. She held David pinned against the wall with one hand, her other hand still holding the book, and black energy was crackling from both.

"How _dare_ you!" she snarled at David, her voice swollen with anger. "You don't know _anything_ about me, _or_ Beast Boy! Don't you _ever_ insinuate that I don't care about my..."

"Raven..." said David in a scared, desperate voice that was barely above a whisper. "Let go of me... _now._"_  
_  
For a moment, nobody moved, and it was only then that Raven realized that the bare metal floor underneath her booted feet was starting to get cold...

Slowly, carefully, Raven released David's shirt and took several steps back. Now that her anger had passed in a flash, she had time to realize just what she had done... she had lost control. For a moment there, she had actually lost control, and the realization filled her with horror and revulsion. By Azar... what had she done?

David seemed no less affected. His eyes had fear a-plenty in them, as well as the afterglow of an adrenaline rush. One hand was pointed at the ground, and held rigid, as he slowly and carefully released the pent up energy he had begun compressing inside the steel floor. Only when the steel had returned to normal did he collapse onto the bed, his hands trembling, glancing nervously up at Raven, who this time _knew_ she had gone way too far. Neither one moved or said anything for a moment, both shaken up by what had almost happened.

"Look," said David finally in a tense and nervous voice... "I did _not_ sign up for this... I don't _know_ any of you people or what's going on here, or what happened before I got here. I'm pretty sure I don't _want_ to know. But... _don't_ threaten me! And _don't_ come at me like that! _Ever_!"

"I…" There was no excuse and Raven knew it, and she lowered her head guiltily. "I'm... sorry," she said. "I... remember what I said about control? That was... that was it."

"It's okay..." said David with a long sigh as he slowly calmed himself down. Raven got the sense that both of them wished to forget that that had just happened. Suddenly he chuckled hollowly, as though in the midst of all this, something was funny. "Besides, if we fight then _you're_ gonna have to explain to everyone else why I'm dead," he said. Despite everything, she smirked at the line, and after another minute or so, David looked up and spoke.

"Look... I know... you guys have enemies or whatever," he said. "I know you've got to be careful, and that you care about your friends and Beast Boy... but... I mean... I don't even know what you think I am. I don't know what I _would be_ in order to threaten you. You say you're worried about Beast Boy, but Beast Boy can turn into a _dinosaur_! I saw what he did that time on the roof with the dragon! You think I could ever threaten _that_? What am I gonna do? Stub his toe?"

Raven shook her head and sighed. "David, if you are what you say you are, then maybe you don't realize it, but powers like yours... they're _very_ dangerous, even to us. I'm not gonna go into what you could actually do to us, because I don't know, and maybe you don't know either, but it's happened before. We've had people turn on us, people we thought we knew, and we only survived because we got lucky. In a position like ours... we just have to be extremely careful, even if some of us forget that sometimes. I'm sorry I accused you and... everything, I don't usually do this. Normally Robin's the one who's extra-careful about these things but, Robin's... got other things on his mind."

She walked over to the bed and stood in front of him as he lowered his head. "We want to help," she said, "and I know you... probably... had nothing to do with this and are just trying to figure out what's going on, just like the rest of us. Plus, like Cyborg said, you're not a bad kid..."

David looked up, raising an eyebrow, obviously not having heard that particular line before.

"... but," said Raven, continuing, "we don't know anything about you at all, other than what you tell us, and even if it's the truth, your story sounds like something someone would make up to try and get at us. We don't know your background. We don't know what your powers are like, or where they came from. We don't know why Cinderblock's after you, or even _if_ he's after you, or if he's trying to get at us _through_ you or whatever. We just don't know. And there's no way for us to know..."

"Can't... I mean... can't you read my mind or something? I mean... if I gave permission?"

She shook her head. "It's not that simple. Doing that could be extremely dangerous, to you as well as to me. There's no magical way out of this. And on top of everything else…" she sighed, "... you showed up at a very strange moment, and all of us are a little more on-edge than we should be."

David sighed and lowered his head again. "... so what do we do?"

"I don't know," said Raven. "You say you are who you say you are, fine. Now I have to figure out if I can believe that, given everything. That's my problem."

"If it means you're going to throw me into a wall again, I'd say it's both of our problems."

She groaned. "I'm sorry about that, I shouldn't have done that. I just... I have a hard time trusting people. There's nothing to be done about it." She turned away, ready to get out of here and go back to her room. After a night like this, she would need some rest. "Have a good night," she said, a she walked towards the door.

"... Raven?"

Raven stopped. "Yes?"

When David didn't reply immediately, Raven turned around, and to her surprise saw that the young teen had his hands folded in front of his face, breathing deeply and heavily, as though steadying himself for something important. For a moment Raven wondered what _else_ he could possibly have to say that was so worrisome...

... and then he dropped an atom bomb.

"My name's... not David Foster."

* * *

**Author's Note:** Please leave behind a review containing your honest opinion, long or short, angry or extatic, as every review is, to me, a priceless gem, permitting me, with luck, to improve. Thank you all very much for reading, and I hope to see you for Chapter 10!


	10. A Lie Agreed Upon

**Disclaimer:** Surely everyone here knows that I don't own the Teen Titans by now, right?

**Author's Note:** Hello again everyone. I have some important things to say before we begin this chapter. Firstly, I want to thank each and every one of you who has been supporting me in this endeavor of mine with reviews and criticism of all sorts. Without you all, I don't know how I could continue to do this. You are the most amazing readers anyone could possibly ask for.

Secondly, I am still working out a new schedule for writing this, but I find my best results (in terms of viewership) seem to come when I post a new chapter on Friday afternoons. If anyone has insight as to this process, I would be most eager to find out your thoughts. I have been trying to post a new chapter either every week or every other week, but it is often difficult to keep to such a schedule, what with everything else.

Finally, and most importantly, this chapter below caused me _no end_ of grief to write. Some chapters nearly write themselves (such as Chapter 9), others are torturous processes that take agonizing hours to inch forward. This is one of the latter. Accordingly, I am as always terrifically interested to know what you all think. To add to that, this chapter is based upon research and guesswork I conducted in regards to various governmental systems which I personally have little contact with (you'll see what I mean when you read it). I _believe_ that the result has been reasonably accurate to reality, but there is a chance of course that it is not. If any of you come across segments that read like complete tripe or inventions of a deluded mind (assuming it doesn't _all _read that way), I am, of course, eager to hear of it.

So anyhow, thank you all for stopping by once more, and I hope you enjoy this chapter.

* * *

**Chapter 10: A Lie Agreed Upon  
**

_"Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,  
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,  
And then is heard no more: it is a tale  
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,  
Signifying nothing."_

- William Shakespeare, "MacBeth", Act V, Scene 5

**O-O-O**

It took a lot to surprise Raven.

Nearly two years of being a superhero, combined with Raven's rather unique upbringing had, if nothing else, equipped her very well for dealing with unexpected and unwelcome surprises. To some she appeared almost jaded, but whether or not that was true, she was usually very good at rolling with whatever punches came her way, and at least with not letting what astonishments she _did_ experience disturb her outward visage and temperament. She was used to anticipating the worst, and reacting to events, even spectacularly weird events, with a certain degree of aplomb. Certainly the facade cracked occasionally. Learning that her friends had been willing to stay by her side in a ruthless battle engaged within her own mind had been a shock, as had discovering that Terra had betrayed them all, however much she liked to claim that she had seen it coming, to say nothing of course of the more recent events with Malchior. On the whole however, Raven was not one to let mundane shocks disturb her inflexible emotional control. After all, even Malchior's ruthless betrayal hadn't incapacitated her for long.

"My name's... not David Foster."

_This_, however, was a surprise.

It wasn't that she hadn't suspected David of anything, indeed she had been prepared to imagine him guilty of collusion with all manner of enemies real or imagined. She had detected the holes in his story long before the others, save perhaps Robin who kept his own council. She had been watching him for weeks like a detective gathering evidence, researching, examining, investigating, second-guessing, to the point where she had wondered if she was going mad, if she was turning _into _Robin. She had tried to shrug it all off as paranoia, but always it came back to her, the unbidden thoughts, whispering in the back of her mind that this boy was dangerous, was a threat, was out to get her, that the evidence was staring her in the face and that she needed to act. Indeed, she had even suspected that David's _name_ was fake, as the coincidence of a boy in foster care being named Foster seemed far too neat to be plausible. The revelation that it wasn't his real name was not at all a surprise.

The fact that he had decided to tell her this, deadpan, without a trace of threat or implication in his voice, as she was in the process of leaving his room, not half a minute after she had finished apologizing for nearly attacking him... _that_ was a surprise.

Raven pivoted around in a single fluid motion, her hands encased in auras of translucent darkness. Whereas before her emotions were barely in check, now she forced them aside, masking her surprise at the revelation behind her professional, emotionless gaze, the same one she used when confronting a criminal or villain. Even so, there was a grim look in her eyes as she stared down at him like a predatory bird. Her fists were clenched tightly, energy channeling through her as she faced the now nameless teen-aged meta-human who was still sitting on the edge of the bed, his hands folded in front of himself, casting occasional nervous glances up at Raven as though uncertain if she was about to flay the skin off his bones. Still he did not retreat, not that there was anywhere for him to retreat to, as if, having triggered this confrontation, he felt he needed to try and see it through.

"Your name's not David Foster?" Raven's words were cold and icy, with a feral edge behind them that augured nothing pleasant.

'David' seemed to wince at the words, and he did not look up, but merely shook his head, almost guiltily. "... no."

"So you _did_ lie to us... you lied to _all_ of us," said Raven with anger building, a smouldering anger that was far more dangerous than any momentary eruption. David, or rather the boy who had called himself David winced and seemed almost to shrink at the loaded menace in her words.

"I wasn't... I wasn't lying... exactly..." he said unconvincingly.

"You told us that was your name!" snapped Raven. "You told us it was your name and you _lied_!" She spat the final word out as though it was a mouthful of poison, and the psychokinetic shuddered as she did so before replying haltingly.

"It's not that simple..." he said almost resignedly, and he lowered his head until he was staring at his shoes, his hands still clutched together and trembling.

"It _is_ that simple." said Raven darkly. "If your name isn't David Foster, then _what is __it_?"

David took a slow, deep breath, and then looked up at Raven. To her surprise, his expression was not one of fear (well... not _entirely _one of fear), but sadness. He wasn't weeping or tearful or even particularly upset, just... wistfully sad, as though there was a memory here he had no wish to dredge up.

"I don't know."

Raven paused, and stood blinking silently for a moment, her train of thought derailed by confusion at David's reply.

"What?"

"You heard me," he said as he lowered his head again.

Raven inclined her head slightly, as if having trouble believing what she was hearing.

"You don't _know_ what your name is?"

David shook his head slowly, saying nothing.

"What, you're amnesiac now?" scoffed Raven sarcastically. The comment caused David to bring his head up sharply with a flash of outrage she could feel empathically. No sooner had it appeared than it subsided, but it left him staring at her intently, a sharp unspoken warning that this was not a matter for which he was prepared to tolerate sarcasm. He pronounced his words very carefully, his voice level and flat enough to match anything Raven could put out.

"I never got a chance to learn it."

For an instant, the two meta-humans stared at one another in silence, and then David lowered his eyes again and sighed. Raven said nothing, but stared at him thoughtfully, her eyes narrowed. Whatever the truth or untruth of David's statement, there was no deceit in David's look and tone, and his moment of outraged anger had been genuine enough. Most likely he believed what he was saying. She took a deep breath of her own as she lowered her charged fists, dispersing the energy that was flowing about them. It was time to finally get the full story. Whether or not she believed him, she needed to at least hear what his story _was_.

"What happened?" said Raven coolly, forcing herself to be calm and reasoned, or at least to sound it.

David sighed. "It's kind of a long story," he said in a hollow voice, and he glanced back up at her to see if she wanted him to continue or not. She did, but first she wanted to clear something else up.

"Why are you telling me this?" she asked.

David shrugged. "You wanted to know the truth, right?" he said. "This is it. If any of my records survived the attack, then this is what you'd find in them. I figure you guys'll find something eventually? Better you hear it from me first."

Raven crossed her arms. "As you wish..."

"It's _really_ not that big a deal," he said evenly, shaking his head. "It's not a bunch of dark secrets. It's just..." he trailed off for a second before finally shrugging. "... just bad luck."

Raven nodded slowly, sensing the buried emotions behind David's words, a confused jumble that revealed nothing in particular save that it was considerably more of a 'big deal' to him than he was letting on. With a wave of her hand, she telekinetically pulled a chair over and sat down. "All right then," she said, "let's hear it."

"Like I said, you'd find all this out anyway," he said, "and... I'm sorry if it's boring. I mean compared to what you guys..."

"Just tell me what happened," she said, cutting him off. David obviously hadn't yet realized that having an 'interesting' past was not at all a good thing.

David took a deep breath and let it out slowly before beginning. "My parents died a real long time ago," he said evenly.

"What happened to them?" asked Raven.

"An accident," he said.

Raven narrowed her eyes. "An explosion?" she ventured. That would certainly explain his reluctance to make use of...

To her surprise, David reacted with momentary confusion, before suddenly realizing what she meant and shaking his head. "No," he said, "no this was way before I could do any of that. It was a car wreck..." he closed his eyes and paused for a moment, and Raven waited for him to continue.

"Do you know Interstate 5?" he asked without looking up.

"Vaguely," she said. She didn't possess a driver's licence, and would have had little use for driving even if he had possessed one. "It runs up the West Coast, right?"

David nodded, his eyes still closed, and when he spoke, it was in a hollow monotone that betrayed only a little of the sadness behind the words. "We were driving north," he said, "right where it enters the Central Valley from the mountains, between Los Angeles and Bakersfield, near a town called Grapevine. It was real early morning, late spring, water on the road..." he shook his head and sighed. "We were in a car, I don't know what kind... my parents were in the front seat. I was in the back... in a car-seat. I was probably asleep."

He paused again. Raven, who had an idea where this was going, said nothing, and simply let him continue.

"There was... no traffic on the road, too early for that. But it was foggy out. They get this stuff down there called 'tule fog'. Some kind of inland fog that settles down in the valley in the mornings. I guess they couldn't see it coming, not that it would have mattered."

"It?"

"A tractor-trailer," said David, "coming the opposite way. The driver was... up on meds or something, sleep-deprived. Long-haul truckers do that sometimes. He braked when the fog got thick but the road was wet. The truck swerved, he overcompensated and lost control. His truck jumped the divider and..." he looked up at Raven and sighed again. "We hit him head-on. They died instantly. I survived."

Raven nodded slowly. "Were you hurt?"

"Not really," said David. "The driver of the truck... after he finally stopped he ran back to see if anyone was alive, and managed to drag me out of the car before the fuel caught, made sure I was okay until the Highway Patrol arrived."

"I see..." said Raven, not sure what else she should say to such a thing.

David sighed and shook his head slowly. "It's just one of those things, you know? Just another highway accident. Like I said, nothing exciting. Besides, I don't even remember the accident. It was that long ago." He remained silent for a moment. "Anyway, you wanted to know why I didn't know what my name was..."

"Wait," said Raven, "what's that got to do with your name?"

David raised his head once more with a confused look. "I didn't know it."

"How could you not know your own name?"

"This was more than twelve years ago," he said, "I was eighteen months old, maybe twenty. How much do you remember from when you were one and a half? I couldn't even talk yet."

"Okay..." said Raven, "but what about ID?"

A weak smile crossed David's face, as though the concept were funny. "ID? What ID?"

Raven frowned. "You know, identification? Your parents drivers' licences? Anything?"

David shook his head and chuckled, before leaning forward towards Raven.

"Raven, have you ever seen what happens to a car that gets hit head-on by a fifty-ton semi-truck at highway speeds?"

Raven remained silent.

"My parents weren't just killed," said David with a calm, descriptive tone that came very close to covering up the emotion underlying his words, "they were pulverized. The front half of the car was flattened like a tin can. I only survived because it collapsed around part of the backseat. There was gasoline spilled everywhere, sparking wires. The car was already on fire when the truck driver pulled me out. By the time the fire department and the cops got there... there was nothing left. No driver's licences, no registration, no credit cards, not even a license plate. With all the chemicals spilled all over the place, they couldn't even get a DNA sample. Hell, I don't even know if they _were_ my parents. They could have been guardians or kidnappers or anything else."

"But what about other records? Things not in the car?" asked Raven. This couldn't possibly be right. People didn't simply lose their identities like this. The theory that he might be making the whole thing up, or had been coached to say these things was beginning to lose cohesion. Surely nobody would invent a story this ridiculous. He didn't know his name because of a traffic accident?

"Like what?"

"I don't know, your birth certificate? Hospital records?"

David smiled almost knowingly, as if this was some kind of ironic joke fate had played upon him. "And where would those be? Safety Deposit Boxes? Banks? Hospitals? Which ones? What city? What state? What _country_? Where do you go to find the records?"

"Well didn't the police or the social workers look?"

"Of course they looked!" exclaimed David. "They looked for _months_! They searched missing persons databases, they checked rental car companies, they looked everywhere. They didn't find a thing. How would they? I wasn't in any computer system they could find, by fingerprint or anything else."

David stood up and began to pace back and forth, his hands nervously wringing, trying not to sound as upset as he obviously was. "There was this... this policewoman. Officer Garcia. She was one of the first ones that got to the accident scene, and she sort of felt sorry for me I guess or... anyhow... she kept looking for any leads, any evidence at all, for _years_, just as... you know a hobby or a part-time thing or whatever. Every few months, she'd come to whatever facility I was in and tell me all about this lead and that piece of evidence and this database and that record, and how she was sure that everything was going to be cleared up soon and that they'd know who I was and who my parents were 'any day now'. I believed her until I was about five, and... then I just sort of pretended to, like she was telling me Santa was going to come get me." He sighed again. "It didn't matter anyway. There wasn't anything to find."

Raven listened to all of this with equanimity. Her empathic sense was detecting a mishmash of confusing emotions emanating from the young psychokinetic, which was to be expected, she supposed. Her guess was that this was not the first time he had told this story to someone, but it didn't sound rehearsed. An old pain that faded with time but never fully vanished. A sort she knew well.

"If you don't know what your real name is, where did you come up with the one you gave us?"

David stopped pacing and sat back down on the bed. "The only thing I remembered at all from before the accident was 'David'," he said, "I don't know where I heard it or why I remembered it, but... I sort of vaguely knew that name from somewhere. When the social workers finally sat me down and asked me if I knew what my name was, apparently that was the one I gave them, or at least it was the only one I was able to say."

"So it _could_ be your real name?" asked Raven.

David scoffed at that. "Yeah, I suppose," he said, his tone indicating that he didn't believe for an instant it was. "Or, you know, it could have been my dad's name, assuming those people in the car were my parents. Or it could have been a relative's name, or a friend's, or a pet's. Hell, it could have been something I heard on the radio." He shook his head. "But... I mean... it was all I could remember. And... you know," he shrugged and blushed slightly, "I kinda liked the sound of it. After all, I needed something."

Raven nodded slowly, and let a few moments go by in silence before asking another question.

"And Foster?"

David stifled a laugh. "You're gonna love this..." he said with an embarrassed shake of his head. "So I just had the one name, David, for something like four years. I think the welfare people just figured I'd take whatever last name from whoever adopted me. But of course, I couldn't get adopted so..."

"You couldn't?" interrupted Raven. "Why not?"

David blinked. "No records," he said, as though this were the most obvious thing in the world. "No medical history. No proof of orphanage. There's something like five kids in the system for every one that actually gets adopted. You think the agencies were going to waste time trying to place a kid who had all kinds of unknowns and legal hassles in his file? What if they'd found something later? What if they'd placed me with a family and, a year later they get someone barging in screaming 'That's my nephew!' or something? They couldn't take the risk. Places like that are allergic to lawsuits."

Raven didn't answer, but what David was saying did make sense. She was however somewhat surprised that he wasn't more bitter about the experience. He spoke of the decision not to press his case as though it were the most reasonable thing in the world for the authorities to decide. And perhaps it was so, but she would have expected a little more anger. As it was she could detect none.

"So anyway," continued David. "When I was about six, it started to get more important to have a 'real' name, for starting school and everything. So one day they told me that I needed to have a last name and asked me if I was sure that I didn't have one. So I sort of had to pick one...

"They let you 'pick' a last name?" asked Raven, raising an eyebrow.

"Well there's not really a 'system' for kids without names to get one. It's not exactly common, you know? They really didn't know what to do, if they should just assign me one or what. So I decided to pick."

"And you picked 'Foster'?"

David blushed slightly and nodded. "... yeah," he said.

"Why?"

He didn't answer immediately, shaking his head slowly as though what he had to say was too embarrassing to be spoken. "I was six." he finally said. "You know how a six-year-old's logic is. My whole life, I'd been in Foster homes or Foster care centers or 'Foster' this or 'Foster' that, and I thought..." he smiled and laughed a bit at himself, "... I thought that if my _name_ was Foster, that it would make all the other kids think that this actually _was_ my home, that I was _supposed_ to be here, not like everyone else. I mean we were all orphans or runaways or wards of the state for one reason or another, but... I thought that maybe I could make everybody think that I was different than all of them, like I actually had a family or..." he trailed off for a second almost wistfully, then shook his head and snapped back to reality. "Like I said, I was six. It was some stupid kid's game. But that's the name I gave to the social workers, and that's the name I got." He shrugged and sighed. "And besides, I _still_ like it better than 'Doe'. That was what the school officials wanted to use. It's like a default name for anyone without one."

Raven nodded slowly, careful not to betray what she was thinking by any careless expression. David however was able to divine something of what she had been suspecting. "Let me guess," he said, "you thought it was weird to have a foster kid named 'Foster'?"

"It sounded like an alias," said Raven.

David took a deep breath. "Well that's probably because it is one," he said, "... sort of. You're not the first one to notice. I usually don't go on this much about it but," he laughed nervously, "this is kind of a special case."

"I suppose so," said Raven. She remained silent for a few moments, before changing the subject. "So then how do your powers fit into all this?"

David groaned softly and shook his head. "The short answer is... they don't," he said. "I didn't have them then, or maybe I did and I just didn't know about it, but they've never done what you were talking about. They don't go off by themselves. That's just... that's not how it works."

"You understand that's a little hard to believe..."

David rubbed his eyes with one hand as his other hand balled into a fist. "What do you want from me?" he asked, frustration apparent in his voice. "You say they don't work like it says in your book there, fine! I believe it! But I don't know anything about this stuff, or how these things are supposed to work! I barely know how _my_ powers work, let alone everyone else's! And the way mine work is the way I told you."

"Fine," she said, and let the matter sit for the moment as she decided on what to ask next, but before she could, David asked her a question.

"Why are you guys so obsessed with this whole 'control' thing?" he asked. "I mean, beyond the obvious. I know it'd be real bad to have me setting stuff off all the time. But... I mean it's like you're waiting for me to lose it and start blowing everything to pieces. Is it really that common?"

"With powers like yours, yes, it's that common. In fact it's universal."

"But... you can do the same sort of stuff, right? I what you did to that dragon and I've... I've seen the TV clips whenever you guys go out. You don't seem to have any trouble with..."

Raven's deadpan expression stopped the young psychokinetic in mid-sentence.

"... your powers actually go off by themselves?" he asked, his expression close to one of horror.

"When I let them," said Raven, "which I don't. Ever." She wasn't being entirely accurate herself of course, but this wasn't about her, and she _had_ gotten better at preventing outbursts since arriving on Earth.

"Wow..." he said, his voice trailing off. "That's... I can't even _imagine_ that."

"It's not pretty," said Raven evenly, "but there's plenty who don't know how to control them at all. Every time they get upset or emotional, their powers go haywire." She crossed her arms and regarded him with a cool, practiced gaze, her best impression of Robin (though without a mask, the effect wasn't quite the same). "So you can see why we're a little concerned."

David sighed. "I don't... I don't know what else to say," he said. "Look, you know what happens if I get really scared, or angry, or upset or whatever?"

"What?"

David shrugged. "Nothing," he said, "absolutely nothing. I can't use them at all. To blow something up... it's like trying to play the piano or solve a puzzle or remember your lines in a play. I have to concentrate on it, sort of press the energy down in just the right way, figure out how all the little bits connect to one another and how they move, otherwise nothing happens. That sort of thing doesn't just happen by itself. If I'm really upset, I can't even snap a twig."

Raven considered what David was saying, trying to decide if she believed him or not. It was all consistent with what she had observed so far. Even under attack by Cinderblock, even when Malchior was looming over him, his powers had not erupted to his rescue as hers would have. Still there was something about all this that didn't feel right.

"If they only do what you want them to do," she asked, striking in a new direction, "then why didn't you ever use them before you came here?"

David chuckled nervously. "It's not like I _never_ used them..." he said, "but... I mean they blow things up. It's kind of dangerous."

"What happened?"

David blinked and adopted a confused expression just a little too obviously. "What do you mean? Nothing happened, I just don't..."

"Don't give me that," said Raven, who narrowed her eyes once more and peered at David with a gaze that would have melted steel. "Nobody just 'decides' that these things are dangerous, not at age seven. Tell me what _happened._"

David winced and shut his eyes for a moment but did not reply. Raven took a shot in the dark.

"Did you kill someone?"

"What?" he yelped, his eyes flying open in surprise. "No! Of course not! What the hell do you think...?"

"I don't know _what_ to think," said Raven acidly, "because you're sitting there trying to pretend that nothing ever happened, and that's a lie, and we both know it. Now either tell me what happened or I'll go get Robin and you can tell both of us together."

David blinked in mute astonishment for a second before he closed his eyes again and let a long breath out through clenched teeth. "You have to understand," he said, not opening his eyes, "I didn't know what _any_ of this stuff was at first. I knew I could... see things, the insides of things, what they were made of, if I thought about it hard enough and concentrated long enough. And I figured out, after a while, that I could press down on the energy inside and that when I did that, I made whatever it was get colder... freeze even. I didn't know what the hell I was actually doing, or anything about explosions or molecules or physics, I was seven!"

"So what made you learn?"

David leaned forward and rested his head on one hand, still not looking up at Raven, his voice barely kept under control. "Every year around December, there's a charity drive to get presents for all the kids in Foster care. People donate all sorts of stuff. My second grade year, I guess I was about eight..."

"You guess?"

David looked up at Raven sharply. "No ID, remember?" he said in a snippy tone, "I don't know my birthdate or exact age. I think I'm about fourteen now, and this was six years ago, so yeah, I _guess_ I was about eight. If you have a better guess, go ahead and make it."

Raven said nothing, forcing herself not to roll her eyes.

"Anyhow," said David, "I was in second grade, and Christmas had just happened. I was in an orphanage in San Diego, a pretty nice place. I don't have the first idea how they decided who got what presents, but that year I got a bicycle, solid aluminum, three-speeds. It wasn't fancy or anything, but I was real excited. Then one day Marcus Beech comes up to me and says he wants it."

David smirked and raised his eyes, as though the story were amusing in hindsight. "Picture a kid the size of Cyborg, only he's in sixth grade" he said, shaking his head, "or at least that's how he looked to me. Big, stocky kid, not too fast, but built like a brick wall with a brain to match, and always looking for someone to pick on. He was a real foster kid, not an orphan. Got taken away from his parents after they beat him with a broom handle, at least that was the rumor. So he comes over to me and tells me to get off the bike, and before I can even say anything, he shoves me off it and picks it up and starts to ride off."

David laughed and a mischievous glint flashed in his eyes as he continued. "... only he gets about thirty feet away, and I get this idea. So I sort of stay laying on the ground and stick my finger out at him, and as he's riding I freeze the front brake to the wheel. He's right in the middle of calling me some name, and the bike just stops dead like it hit a wall, and he goes pitching forward over the handlebars and lands on the ground in a puddle of mud, and the bike flips over and comes down on top of him. Right there in front of everybody. Everyone just bursts out laughing at him like it's the funniest thing in the world..." He trailed off and the smile faded from his face. "... and so did I."

Raven nodded. "And that's when it blew up?" David sighed and nodded slowly.

"Before... whenever I'd frozen something, I'd always let it go slowly, just because I didn't want to break it, you know? But this time... he just flipped over and went splat and everybody laughed, and so I just laughed at him and let it go all at once. And then all of a sudden there's this "BAM", like a gunshot, and the front brake goes off like a hand grenade, and everyone turns dead quiet for a second." David took a deep breath and let it out raggedly. "And then Marcus lets out this shriek like he's being murdered, and everyone starts screaming and..." He paused and stared at the floor for a bit. "His foot was right on top of the brake when it blew, and he nearly got it cut off. It broke his leg in three places, both ankles... they rushed him to the hospital and managed to fix him back up but..."

"Did they know it was you?"

"No," he said, "they said it was some kind of freak accident, that the tire was over-pumped or something. I mean what else were they gonna say? Nobody saw me do anything except point at him. But I knew. And I'm pretty sure Marcus knew, or at least he never tried anything around me again." He shrugged. "So anyhow, that's when I learned that I wasn't just freezing things, I was making them blow up. And that's why I don't just go around using it. I mean... what if I'd frozen the wheel itself instead of just the brake pad? Something that big would have blown him apart."

"I see," said Raven. It was an old story, and a classic one. Inevitably, every meta-human eventually encountered the unintended consequences of their own powers. Some resolved to use them for good, some for their own gains, and some were scared into never using them at all.

They sat in silence for a few more moments, before Raven chimed in once again with another question. "So you don't know where these powers came from?"

"They didn't _come_ from anywhere," replied David. "I mean not from radioactive meteors or whatever. I just figured out how to use them."

"So then you might have been born with them?"

He shrugged. "I guess, maybe."

"Well then doesn't that mean your parents might have been..." she trailed off, letting him finish the sentence.

David reacted in disbelief. "... what? Superheroes?" He laughed sarcastically. "Right."

"It's possible, isn't it?" said Raven in a calm tone.

David groaned and shook his head. "No, Raven, it's not possible. It's not even slightly possible, okay?"

"Why not?"

"Have you ever _been_ to an orphanage?" asked David, his voice becoming short and clipped, bitter frustration oozing from every word. "_Everyone_ there is the son or daughter of superheroes or royalty or international spies or long-lost billionaires. Nobody's _really_ an orphan, they're all just living there until Mom and Dad come back in their private jets or their magical chariots to take them back home to a castle in the sky. _Everyone_ says that, _everyone_ lies. Even the social workers play along with it, because they don't want to have to tell some six-year-old kid that their parents are actually dead, or worse yet, that their parents abandoned them or were locked away because they were drug addicts or criminals or abusive. Nobody wants to face that, so everyone makes it all up. _Everyone_."

Raven refused to be browbeaten out of her point. "I'm sure they do," she said, "but you actually _have_ superpowers."

"Yeah..." said David. "So?"

"So didn't you ever think..."

"Of _course_ I thought!" said David angrily. "Of course I imagined that maybe they were superheroes! Of course I told myself that! And then you know what? I actually _looked_. And you know what I found out? I found out that no superheroes went missing around the time of my accident that weren't accounted for elsewhere. I found out that there was no way _anyone_ could have been near Grapevine on that night. I checked every single superhero team, and all the independents I could find. The Justice League, Legion, the Doom Patrol, _everyone_. The only ones I didn't check were... well... ones like you guys. I mean, you know, you guys weren't around back then. That's why I'd never heard of you before, and you all are my age, or close to it. But everyone that _was_ around, everyone who might have been, I looked at, even the bad guys, just in case, you know? Superheroes are high profile. Nobody disappeared, nobody vanished, nobody was there. It's _not_ possible! Period!"

Raven said nothing as David clenched his fists again and shook his head. "I'm not special," he said. "I'm not unique. I can blow things up by thinking about it, and I don't know why, but it's not because I'm the son of Superman or some kind of chosen one. I'm not Moses, I'm not an alien, and I'm not Harry Potter. I don't have dark secrets or whatever the hell else you think I have. I was not _sent_ by anyone, I was not _trained_ by anyone, and I am not holding out on you somehow. I'm _not_ a superhero _or_ a supervillain or anything else. I don't even have a real name."

David finished speaking and took a long, deep breath, then lowered his eyes back to the floor. "And if you don't believe that," he said after a short time, "... then I don't know what to tell you."

The room was quiet for a minute or so as Raven watched the young teen, whose eyes were still affixed to the floor and who showed no signs of raising him again or offering any further insight. Finally, she stood up.

"Okay then."

David looked up quizically as Raven stood and moved the chair back over to the wall with a wave of her hand. She noticed that he no longer flinched at the sight.

"So... do you believe me?"

Raven paused a moment before replying.

"I don't think you're lying, if that's what you mean," she said, "but I also think you're wrong."

"Wrong?"

"You say you're not special at all except for the explosions. Well whether or not I believe that, obviously Cinderblock and whoever sent him _don't_. So since you don't seem to know anything specific, I'd say they're more likely to be right."

"But what do they _want_ with me? I mean I can't do anything close to what any of you guys can with or without my powers!"

"I don't know," said Raven, "but Robin's working on that, and if anyone can find out, he will."

David sighed slowly. "Yeah, I guess he will, won't he?"

Raven didn't reply immediately, but after a moment she decided it was time to leave. "You should get some rest," she said, not mentioning that she should as well. "Robin's going to want you ready tomorrow."

"Again?" asked David. "What's he trying to do? Kill me so Cinderblock won't get the chance to?"

"Quite likely," said Raven with a smirk. David had seen _nothing_ yet of Robin's single-mindedness, and thus had no idea what was in store for him, but she would let him figure that part out himself. She turned to go, walking towards the door, but once more, she was stopped by David, this time armed with a reminder.

"Raven?"

"If you're going to tell me that you're actually working for Slade, do it tomorrow. I'm tired and I want to go to bed."

"Who's Slade?"

"Nevermind, what is it?"

"Just... before you go..."

Raven sighed and turned around again. "Yes?"

"You... never answered my question."

Raven paused. "What question?"

"Why are you so worried about who I really am?"

Raven raised an eyebrow. "You're our only clue to what's going on here, why wouldn't I be."

David shook his head. "Because you didn't come here to find out who's chasing me. You came here to find out if I was being chased at all, or if this was a setup. I... sort of expected Robin to be the one coming here to ask me all this, not you..."

Raven crossed her arms and tapped her foot quietly, indicating to David that he should get to the point. He stumbled over his words and then shook his head.

"Look... I... I just wanted to ask... did... did something happen here?" He raised his head again to look at Raven with a guarded expression, as if he was worried about what the answer might be. "Did something happen before I got here, that made this so important? I mean... you guys _have_ to know that I'm not able to threaten any of you. You're _superheroes_. You're all fifty times more powerful than me, and you know how to fight and everything, so... I mean... you come in here and threaten me about Beast Boy and all and I just don't get it..."

Now it was Raven's turn to take a long, deep breath. Of all the subjects she didn't wish to get into now... but still, she owed him the truth at least.

"Yes," she said finally, "something happened."

"What was it?"

"That's... a very long story," she said.

David nodded. "Is it one I should hear?"

"Maybe," said Raven wondering the same thing, "but not tonight. And not from me."

"Then when, and from who?"

"From all of us," she said, "when we're ready to tell it."

For a few seconds, David looked almost disappointed, but then he slowly nodded. "Okay..."

"Good night," said Raven, walking to the door and sliding it open. As she stepped across the threshold however, she hesitated. "And David?" she asked, turning halfway back around to face him.

"Yeah?"

"I'm sorry. About your parents."

David sighed. "Thanks," he said, "but... I mean what can you do? Some people have it even worse."

"Yes," said Raven as she turned back to leave, conscious of the fact that David didn't actually know how right he was, "some people do."

The door slid shut behind Raven as she softly padded back down the silent hallway, turning everything that had just happened and been said over in her mind. No answers were forthcoming, just more questions, save for the fact that whether or not Cinderblock and company wanted something with David, or had a different agenda in mind, David didn't appear to be their pawn, or their willing pawn at least. Of course, that much she had guessed already, and yet it had not allayed her suspicions, nor altered her gut feeling that there was something to this kid that was dangerous, beyond the obvious danger of exploding objects. That feeling remained, a deep-seated instinct that he was placing them all in danger, but she could not see how, not after tonight, not after their talk.

She arrived at her own room at last, and entered, and flopped down on the bed. Questions circled above her head, but she knew that mere meditation and pensiveness would provide no answers. Indeed she was more convinced now than ever that there were no answers to be had, merely mysteries that would reveal themselves, no doubt, in good time. In the meanwhile, Robin was on the case, and Robin was _scary_ when he latched onto a good mystery. Her empathy had convinced her that David believed what he was saying, and even if he hadn't said everything he could have, Raven could read enough between the lines to know what she needed to know. The incident with the bicycle had happened, yes, but it had not been the only one. She had seen it in his eyes, felt it in his mannerisms, that there was something else that he wasn't speaking of, but she had not pressed for it. Some things were legitimately none of her business, and it wasn't as though she had any right to get up in arms about accidents _other_ people had had with their powers. She still felt there was a risk in this boy, a dark possibility just on the edge of her senses that she couldn't quite place, but in the absence of any further evidence, she could no longer justify making assumptions. He hadn't done anything to them. Not yet. There was still a risk, but now at least, she knew the risk.

… or so she thought.

But the clouds had not yet gathered, and the weather remained calm, and despite all her suspicions and warnings and instincts, as she finally drifted off to sleep, she did not actually see what was coming.

Nobody did.

* * *

**Author's Note:** Once more, please leave a review with your thoughts, so that I might know them. I make a special effort to reply in as much detail as possible to each and every review, and I hope to reply to you all as best I am able defending my decisions with this latest offering.


	11. Of Beasts and Bombardiers

**Disclaimer: ** Anyone who thinks _I_ own the Teen Titans needs to have their heads examined.

**Author's Note:** Hello again everyone, and I must apologize to you all. I intended to have this chapter completed no less than a week ago, but it grew WELL beyond my original conception, and is far and away my longest chapter yet. I do not know if it is any GOOD, but of course that is for all of you to decide. Once more, I wish to thank everyone who has been reading and reviewing this chapter so far, and I pray that you will all find this offering acceptable. I intend (and yes, I said this last time) to switch to a once-per-week or once-every-other-week schedule as soon as I am able to sustain it, though monster chapters like this one are hard to complete in less than three weeks. Please, if you take the time to read it, leave me your opinion in the form of a review, be it bad or good, for the reviews I get are the fuel that keeps me running. Thank you all.**  
**

* * *

**Chapter 11: Of Beasts and Bombardiers  
**

_"Adversity is like a strong wind. It tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that we see ourselves as we really are."_

- Arthur Golden**  
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**O-O-O****  
**

**6:06 PM**

"Come on, _concentrate!_"

David fought down the urge to inform Robin of the fact that yelling at him to concentrate was not helping him do so, and settled merely for a sharp glance. Something hit him in the chest and shattered, staggering him, and a loud buzzer sounded, letting him know along with the rest of the world that he had picked the wrong moment to glance away.

Robin sighed and shook his head. "You're dead," he said. "Again."

David doubled over, planting his hands on his knees as he tried to catch his breath, his eyes clenched shut. "I can't..." he managed to gasp out between breaths, "I can't... do this."

"You got eight in a row," said Robin, "and if you can get eight in a row you can get twenty."

"I got eight in a row _two and a half hours ago_!" snapped David through clenched teeth, frustration clearly audible in his voice.

Robin crossed his arms. "And what's different now? You're tired? Cinderblock isn't going to care if you're tired, and neither am I. If you can only use your powers when you're feeling up to it, then you might as well go find him and surrender, because he's not going to let you catch your breath before he attacks."

David had nothing to say to that, and Robin, looking insufferably smug (insofar as that was possible from behind a mask) turned to the training room controls to punch in a few more commands. "Now try again."

The overhead lights blinked a couple times before turning green. David opened his eyes, stood up again, and tried to focus, tried to will away his thundering headache and his throbbing muscles and just concentrate on the task at hand. He turned in a slow, nervous circle, as though expecting attack from any direction, and then suddenly caught a blur of movement out of the corner of his eye. He spun around as fast as he could; extending one hand towards ceramic disk that was flying towards him from one of the three dozen launchers that were set up in a circle around him. He forced his mind to compress the energy in the disk, fought the molecules for the briefest of moments, and then snapped his fist closed like a mousetrap.

The disk exploded in mid-air, and he closed his eyes for a moment as a hail of ceramic fragments washed over him. An instant later he opened his eyes to see another disk flying straight for him, and he turned on it for a moment before blasting it to fragments as well. As the echoes died down, he heard a noise from behind him and spun around to see another disk curving towards him at waist level. Once again he extended his hand and concentrated, forcing the energy down into a compact little ball. It quivered as he pressed the molecular energy towards the breaking point and he was already preparing to turn around and ward off the next disk, when suddenly he cried out, clutching at his temple as a searing spike of pain drove straight through his temple. His concentration disintegrated instantly as the pain shot through him and the disk immediately thawed, wobbled slightly in mid-flight, and then slammed straight into his stomach, shattering as it knocked the wind out of him and doubled him over onto the ground.

Robin shook his head again as the young kineticist landed on the floor surrounded by the shattered remnants of the disks he had been destroying or attempting to destroy for the better part of three hours. As he did so, he heard a snicker from the doorway behind him.

"I could do better than that when I was nine."

Robin turned around to see Beast Boy leaning against the doorframe, an arrogant smirk on his face. The green changeling seemed almost bemused at the scene, and strolled into the training room as though entering a stadium filled with his adoring fans. David turned his head weakly to see him enter the room, but simply could not muster the energy to make a reply, his hand still clutched to his temple as he sat on the ground and waited with clenched teeth for the pain to go away.

"We're a little busy right now, Beast Boy," Robin said coolly, obviously expecting the order implicit in his voice to be obeyed. His expectations were not satisfied.

"Oh yeah? With what?" scoffed Beast Boy as he approached, "More of your 'training' sessions?"

There was something distinctly abrasive in Beast Boy's voice, and Robin narrowed his gaze. "Yes," he said, "now if you'll excuse us..."

Beast Boy laughed. "Dude, what a waste of time."

This remark brought Robin up short. "What?"

"Shooting at clay pigeons all day, like a bad guy's really gonna start throwing these at anyone," said Beast Boy, snatching a ceramic disk out of one of the launchers. "And he can't even shoot these down."

Robin could hear David fall silent and he knew that David had heard Beast Boy clearly. "It's power endurance training," said Robin, "the same sort of thing we all started on, and we're right in the middle of a session now, so..."

"Started?" asked Beast Boy, "I could do this stuff before I started anything. Face it, Robin, he doesn't have what it takes to do any of this."

Robin blinked, uncertain if he had heard Beast Boy properly. "... what?"

"You heard me," said Beast Boy with a sneer. "He's not tough enough, Robin, and you know it. So why doesn't he just step aside and I'll show you both what a _real _man can do?"

Robin could scarcely believe what he was hearing. A single glance told him that David couldn't either. The kineticist was staring at Beast Boy in undisguised shock, saying nothing, not even moving.

"Beast Boy..." said Robin slowly, reduced to merely repeating himself, "we are in the middle of..."

"Oh come on, Rob," said Beast Boy contemptuously, "you don't actually think he can do any of this do you? You heard him; he's not a superhero. Something goes wrong, what's the first thing he does? Runs off to hide behind the real heroes, just like all the other civilians."

"You know I _am_ sitting here, right?" said David in an even tone that sounded very forced.

Beast Boy scoffed, an incongruous look of disgust plastering itself across his green features as he turned to David. "Yeah? So? I said you don't have what it takes, and that you're weak. You got something to say about it?"

David hesitated, as if he wanted to say something back to Beast Boy but either couldn't generate the words or couldn't stomach speaking them. Beast Boy stared at him for a moment before laughing. "That's what I thought," he said. He turned back to Robin, dismissing David implicitly. "C'mon Robin, let's head down to the gym. I bet I can break Cyborg's bench-press record."

"Beast Boy," replied Robin coldly, his eyes narrowed, "you need to leave this room, right now."

"Oh, what?" asked Beast Boy in a mocking tone, "you don't like me talking down to your new little pet? He's not worth anyone's time. Watch."

Beast Boy strode confidently over to the controls and re-activated them. As David watched, Beast Boy punched a few commands in, and the clay pigeon launchers revved themselves up. David stood up, the pain obviously either gone or sidelined, and he stared at Beast Boy with a look of smoldering anger that was unmistakable. "You ready?" asked Beast Boy, "or d'you want a lollipop first?"

David didn't deign to reply.

Beast Boy hit a button, and a ceramic disk was shot from one of the launchers at the side of David's head. David turned towards it and raised his hand, blasting it out of the air a second later with a satisfying "BANG". No sooner had he done so than a second one was launched from his right, and he blew this one apart too. Beast Boy smirked and then hit the button three consecutive times, causing three different launchers to fire their disks. Beast Boy watched with a look halfway between amusement and revulsion as David, caught by surprise by the fusillade, hesitated as to which one to target first, a mistake which allowed all three to strike him dead on and shatter, staggering him, and causing the lights to turn red again and a buzzer to sound. The buzzer sounded, and David grimaced and fell to his knees, clutching his head with one hand again as the headache came back with a vengeance. Beast Boy watched all this with a look that was a cross between amusement and revulsion.

"See," said Beast Boy, "totally pathetic. My advice? Leave the fighting to the real men."

David glared up at Beast Boy in frustrated anger. "What... the hell... is your problem?" he asked between sharp breaths.

Beast Boy's gaze darkened and anger appeared on his face. "My problem," he said, "is people thinking that they belong here when they don't. You think you can walk in here and in a couple of weeks, you can just learn how to do what we do? You could never be as good as me. You're too weak. You don't know anything about being like me."

"Yeah, I'm starting to get that idea," said David pointedly, slowly getting up off the ground. Robin was trying to figure out a way to end this without actually having to physically drag Beast Boy out of the room, when Beast Boy suddenly hit the trigger button once again. A launcher behind David fired, and unprepared as he was, the disk struck him in the back of the neck and shattered, knocking him forward onto his hands and knees. David cried out in surprise and clutched the back of his neck as he winced in pain, before raising his head at Beast Boy in a fury.

"_What the_...?"

Another disk smashed into his side and he was knocked over onto the ground. "You can't even beat a bunch of clay pigeons, and you think you're gonna be able to beat someone like me?" snarled Beast Boy, an unusually feral tone in his voice. "Just admit it, you don't have what it takes."

"_FOR WHAT?_" screamed David back at Beast Boy, but Beast Boy just scoffed and hit the button again, sending another clay disk flying at David, this time hitting him in the shoulder as he tried to stand up.

"_That's enough_!" shouted Robin in a commanding tone, stepping in to shut the training program down. Beast Boy blocked his access.

"You're the one always saying that we've always gotta be ready to keep fighting no matter what, Robin," spat Beast Boy, a glint in his eye that Robin had never even imagined before. "Isn't that right? We all need to learn how to take hits and keep going, right? Just like this?"

To Robin's horror, Beast Boy slammed his hand down on the trigger button hard enough to shake the control panel and held it down, causing all three dozen launchers began firing in automatic mode. David let out a shout of alarm before a hail of ceramic plates smashed into him from every direction and knocked him sprawling to the ground. Beast Boy's features twisted into a leering grin, as though he were relishing the sight of the young kineticist lying utterly spent on the ground, beaten down by a hail of clay. Robin did not hesitate further.

"I said that's _ENOUGH!_" bellowed Robin and he shoved Beast Boy aside before flipping the off switch on the control panel and causing all of the launchers to lower back into the floor. David slowly emerged from a mountain of clay fragments, moaning softly and clutching his head, as Robin furiously rounded on Beast Boy.

"Oh, what?" said Beast Boy with an attitude a mile wide, "so he gets special treatment now? You save your hard-ass routine for me and treat him with kid gloves, is that it?"

"I don't know what this attitude of yours is," said Robin, "but I'm not having _any _more of it! Get out of here right now, and don't come back unless I tell you to!"

Robin saw a second's hesitation in Beast Boy's eyes, and it worried him more than anything he had yet seen. Beast Boy was actually trying to decide if he should disobey a direct order, or back down and leave. In the end, after a moment's indecision, he decided on the latter, not without the need to save face of course.

"Pft," scoffed Beast Boy, "whatever, dude. I've got better things to do than hang out with a couple of losers. Call me when you need something important done." And with that, the green changeling spun around and strolled out of the training room, as though he had just finished effortlessly defeating an entire posse of criminals. The door slid shut behind him, and everything was quiet once again.

Robin stood staring at the door that Beast Boy had left through for some time, unable to understand what had just transpired. Behind him, he heard David slowly climbing back to his feet. He turned around, and found David leaning against the wall next to the smashed remains of dozens and dozens of clay disks, his eyes downcast, mostly from pure fatigue... but not entirely.

"You... you want me to... try it again?" offered David, looking up at Robin almost furtively.

Robin said nothing for a moment, lost in his own thoughts. "No," he said finally, "we're done for today."

David did not reply immediately, and when he did, it was wordless, merely an exhausted and slightly disappointed nod. He shook some of the clay fragments off of himself, and trudged slowly towards the door, looking so deflated that Robin ventured an excuse.

"Look," he said, "Beast Boy's been acting really weird lately," he said. That much was certainly true. "Don't... worry about what he said. I'll talk to him."

"It's all right," said David unconvincingly, "I'm just gonna..." He trailed off without finishing his sentence, almost as if speaking was too great an effort right now. With a soft sigh, David half-walked, half-stumbled to the entrance to the training room and exited, whatever thoughts he had on what had just happened buried and hidden partly by design, but mostly from sheer mind-numbing fatigue, leaving Robin alone in the training room to consider what in the world had just happened.

**O-O-O****  
**

**10:53 PM**

"Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen please, if I could just make a statement? Ladies and gentlemen..."

The press conference was thinly organized anarchy, the reporters from seven different local networks and two dozen print publications all shouting questions at the same time, while the bespectacled man at the podium stood before them all, the bright lights of the TV cameras shining in his eyes, unable to get a word in edgewise. Even through the impersonal barrier of the television screen, David felt sorry for the man who had to stand there and take such treatment, unable to respond to the flying accusations and loaded questions being hurled his way.

"Why was the public not informed that this facility was being constructed in Jump City?"

"Do you have any comment on the allegations that the Justice Department is presently investigating Axis Chemicals for criminal money laundering activities associated with South American drug cartels?"

"Is it true that the assailant claimed to be acting on behalf of the Earth Liberation Front, and was attempting to free the test animals imprisoned in the facility?"

The harried mayoral press secretary could do no more than continue to urge the reporters to remain calm, an urging that they all resolutely ignored. This went on for several minutes, before finally a large dark-skinned man wearing a Jump City police officer's dress uniform and a scowl that could have sunk a small boat walked onto the stage from the left side, allowing the press secretary to beat a hasty retreat. The man stared down at the assembled press corps as though he were inspecting a particularly loathsome species of mildew, and as quiet slowly fell over the room, he addressed them in an authoritative, even tone that brooked no argument whatsoever.

"Ladies and Gentlemen," he said as though begrudging them the term, "here is what we know.

"At approximately eleven PM last night, an intruder broke into the Axis Chemicals research and testing laboratory complex in the Ortega Hills district of Jump City. Before being subdued by the intruder, the security guards on-site tripped a silent alarm that alerted the police, emergency services, and, of course, the Teen Titans to the break-in. As this complex contained highly valuable and potentially dangerous equipment, and as all signs pointed to a meta-human assault, the Teen Titans were requested to handle the situation. I'm happy to report that they overcame and captured the intruder with a minimum of collateral damage."

Whatever his words, the Police chief did not _look_ happy to report anything, though perhaps his aggravation was due to his having to undergo this press conference. With a resigned groan, he asked for questions, and the press corps erupted once again.

"Chief Brown," asked a reporter from the Jump City Tribune, "do you have any comment on reports that the Jump City Fire Department Hazardous Materials team was ordered to the complex shortly after the incident in question?"

"Axis informed us that bio-pharmaceutical compounds, pesticides, and other chemicals were being produced in the complex, and that if spilled, these might pose a public health risk. We took all precautions to make sure that no such risk materialized."

"Chief Brown," called out a TV reporter, "what of the allegations that Axis Chemicals has ties to organized crime syndicates in Gotham City?"

"We're a long way from Gotham here, people," said the chief. "Go ask the FBI if you want to know about that."

"Chief," asked a woman in the back row, shouting over the others to be heard, "my readers would like to know how the Jump City Police Department justifies sending children into an admittedly hazardous area filled with unknown intruders and dangerous..."

"We all know the answer to that," said the chief of police with clear impatience. "They're superheroes. I'm not here to repeat the obvious. Go fill your tabloid with something else."

"Well then can we speak to the Teen Titans?" insisted the reporter over the laughter and din of the others clamoring to ask their questions.

"You know the drill," said the chief, "send a request in for an interview. But I don't think they'll agree to talk to the Enquirer after your stunt last month..."

"That was an vitally important in-depth study of the potential for abuses of power in the meta-human...!"

"Sexual slavery at Titans Tower?" quoted the police chief. "You're damn lucky they didn't go after you for libel. Next question!"

The press conference continued with more of the same, and David zoned out, what little interest he had in such proceedings overwhelmed by how bad he felt. His entire body ached, his head throbbing mercilessly with a steady rhythmic pulse that would not go away no matter what he took for it. It hurt so badly that despite how exhausted he was, he couldn't even come close to sleeping, and so all he could do was lay on the couch in the tower's common room, occasionally paying what attention he could to the television, which wasn't much, which gave him plenty of time to feel sorry for himself.

He hadn't seen Robin or Beast Boy since the end of the training session that afternoon, nor for that matter had he seen anyone else, in fact he had avoided running into them as much as possible. His head was still spinning after the confrontation with Beast Boy. What Beast Boy had said, what he had done... he couldn't make sense of any of it. All he knew was that Beast Boy had been angry. Angrier than David had ever seen. Angry enough to even give Robin pause. Angry with him.

Why?

David didn't know what was more frustrating, knowing that he had somehow done wrong by Beast Boy, or not knowing how. Raven had been one thing. Suspicious, private, dark, and mysterious, Raven had, if not resented his presence, at least not gone out of her way to be friendly, but after a long and difficult and sometimes bitter conversation, accompanied by him spilling his guts, he considered that even if things between them weren't exactly _happy_, they were at least cordial, a major improvement as far as he was concerned. Beast Boy on the other hand had been 100 outgoing and friendly, literally since day one, to the point where David needed to actually take a break from his company at times, lest he lose his mind. Beast Boy, along with Cyborg, had managed to make his time here at the Tower seem less like an unending succession of unimaginable terrors (not that there weren't some of those anyhow), and more like a particularly weird sort of extended vacation (the fact that he hadn't had to return to school since the attack on the center certainly didn't hurt). One of the reasons he had decided to leave in the first place was that he hated feeling like the anchor around everyone's neck, the sixth wheel that was disturbing the strange, indescribable _thing_ that these five superheroes had, and after Cinderblock's second attack, Beast Boy had gone out of his way even more to make David feel welcome, to the point where he had managed to stop worrying about it so much...

... and now he had screwed it all up somehow.

Was it something he had said? Done? Did it have something to do with what Raven had been alluding to during their conversation, some trauma or catastrophe in Beast Boy's recent past that he had inadvertently tread on? He didn't know. Raven hadn't been willing to tell him, and he hadn't dared ask Beast Boy or any of the others about it. He had no answers for the questions that pounded in his head with the same regular drumming beat as his headache. All he knew was that he felt more than ever like he was intruding on the Titans' lives, violating their sanctuary and their home by staying here, only this time leaving wasn't an option. Cinderblock was still out there waiting, and so all he could do was sit here and curse himself for this state of affairs, for being so dependant on the Titans' generosity and patience, because the alternative was to invite another public assault that would get more innocent people killed.

Lying motionless on the couch, David found that he was getting drowsy despite himself. The pounding headache was slowly beginning to ebb, and his eyelids were becoming heavy. Weakly, he reached up for the remote control and switched the television off, and yawned before closing his eyes and slowly drifting off to...

"Didn't you see what he did to my chest plate?"

Cyborg's voice was loud enough to be heard through the closed door to the common room, and roused David from his slumber. A second later, David heard the door slide open, and two sets of footsteps walk in. One was too heavy to be anything but Cyborg's. The sound of metal soles on metal floor told David the other belonged to Robin.

"Over a game?" asked Robin's voice incredulously, though David could see neither Titan, due to the couch facing away from them.

"Yeah man, we were just playin' a round of Ninja Racer, and I won. Next thing I know out comes these claws and he tears the top layer of my armor up like wrapping paper, then storms off like I just called him somethin'. It was _weird_. I never _seen_ him like that before."

"He's had a bad attitude all day," said Robin, who sounded about ready to punch something, "but that's completely over the line. First he slashes you, then he explodes at David, and now he threatens Raven..."

"Somebody better talk to him, man."

"I'm gonna give him a chance to cool down and apologize," said Robin, his voice making it clear that he was only grudgingly doing so. "But I'm not putting up with this sort of thing from him any more. If he won't quit it..." he let the sentence finish itself.

"Whoa, hold on man, you don't mean..."

"It's totally unacceptable what he did, no matter how upset he feels. I won't allow anyone on this team to act like that. Period."

David clenched his teeth as he divined what Robin was talking about, and he cursed himself again silently. Had he made Beast Boy _that_ angry? He couldn't imagine what else could have gotten into the normally exuberant green changeling, and he had a sickening feeling in his stomach that he had somehow brought this about.

"Look, let's just give him a little while, and then maybe someone else should talk to him, eh?" said Cyborg.

"This is _my_ team," said Robin pointedly, "and it's _my_ responsibility to keep everyone on it in line."

"Fine," said Cyborg, "but you _know _how you can get man, when someone pisses you off, so why don't we let just let Starfire or someone else talk to him first, see if we can't calm him down?"

"He already upset Star," said Robin, with an edge to his voice that made it clear just how bad a mistake that was in his book. "He tried to order her around like she was his servant or slave!"

"Whoa, back _off_, Lancelot," said Cyborg as Robin was clearly working himself up into a righteous fury of his own. "Star's a big girl, she can handle Beast Boy being a jerk. Besides, we both know she couldn't hold a grudge with both hands. Once she's calmed down, why don't you let me and her take a crack at Beast Boy, and see if we can't talk him out of this crap before you read him the riot act, okay?"

Robin groaned audibly, still very clearly aggravated at Beast Boy. "Fine," he said. "But let him know that I'm not going to let..."

He was cut off by a roar.

A low, unearthly, howling sound reverberated through the tower from somewhere below, stopping Robin in mid-sentence, rattling the windowpanes of the common room. David's eyes flew open wide, all thoughts of sleep or self-recrimination driven instantly from his mind as the roar sent chills running down his spine. Frozen in place on the couch, he could not see what Cyborg and Robin were doing, but it wasn't hard to guess that they too had been taken by surprise by the horrible _sound _that had emerged from Lord-knew-where. As it died, the common room was silent for a short time, before Cyborg broke it with the obvious question.

"What the _hell_ was that?"

He was answered, not by another roar, but by a crashing sound as something caved in beneath them. Snarls and growls could be heard, and then suddenly a loud, fearful cry which couldn't possibly be anyone but...

"Raven!" shouted Robin, and in an instant he was off, racing through the door to the common room towards the source of the disturbance, with Cyborg hot on his heels. David, still laying half-petrified on the couch, lifted his head as they ran off. For a moment he hesitated, not sure if he should obey his first instinct, which was to dive underneath the couch and hope nobody found him. With difficulty, he managed to suppress the urge to hide, and after another second's pause, he scrambled off the couch and ran after the two Titans, figuring that whatever was going on, he was safer around them than he was by himself. Images of the gargantuan black dragon that had nearly fried him not long ago shot through his head and he forced them aside as he ran for the stairs and vaulted down them three at a time, landing in a heap on the floor below and sprinting down the hallway towards where he could hear sounds.

He rounded the corner to see Starfire, Robin, and Cyborg standing in front of Beast Boy's room, the door to which had been ripped from its rails and cast into the hallway. He approached quickly, the others taking no notice of him, then stopped and gasped. Beast Boy's room looked as though a bomb had been detonated within it. Furniture, toys, comic books, clothes, and everything else had been ripped to shreds and flung about the room as if hurled by a giant centrifuge. The walls were covered in dents and claw marks, steel torn into ribbons and hanging from the ceiling in lace-like patterns. The window was wide open, having been smashed to bits and blown out of the tower.

"What happened?" asked Robin in shock, speaking for everyone present. All three Titans entered the room and approached the shattered window. David followed, gingerly placing his hands on the windowsill and sticking his head out of the open portal. He looked down the side of the tower, only to see that there were claw marks gouged into the exterior of the tower as well, as though King Kong had paid them all a visit. There was no sign of Raven or Beast Boy. He pulled his head back inside and turned around to see all three remaining Titans conferring.

"I fear that the shout of anguish belonged to Friend Raven!" exclaimed Starfire. "We must locate her and Friend Beast Boy at once!"

"They're not in the Tower," said Cyborg, pressing a few buttons on his arm. "We're gonna have to look for them."

"But they could be anywhere within the city!" replied Starfire in horror. "How are we to discover their whereabouts?"

"We'll split up, each cover a different sector," said Robin tersely. "Stay in contact by communicator and scour the city until we find them."

"It's a _big_ city," said Cyborg, "and we're down two people. It'll take us a week to search the whole thing. How we gonna find them if we don't know where to start?"

"We're just going to have to work quickly," said Robin. "Standing around here won't solve anything. Starfire will search from the air while Cyborg and I take the T-car and the R-cycle. As soon as any of us find anything, we'll all vector in and try and track them by sensors. We've got a lot of ground to cover, so let's get to it."

"Wait."

All three Titans stopped and turned to David, who was still standing inside Beast Boy's room. David's eyes were lowered, his fists clenched at his sides, looking like he couldn't quite believe he was saying this. He took a ragged, nervous breath, and then raised his eyes to meet the others' gazes and spoke quietly.

"I'll go."

For a second, none of the others responded or even gave an indication that they had understood. Robin was the first to wake up.

"What are you talking about?"

"There's… only three of you, and you've got the whole city to search, right?" He exhaled softly, trying to breathe the apprehension out of himself. "So let me help. I can look for Raven and Beast Boy just as well as you guys can."

The expressions on the Titans faces clearly indicated that they had not even considered such a thing before. Indeed neither had David up until a second ago. He wasn't even sure why he was suggesting it now, but there it was...

"I dunno man…" said Cyborg hesitantly. "I mean you can see what happened here, right? We find Raven and Beast Boy, we might have to mix it up with whatever did this. No offence or nothin', but I don't think you're up for something like…"

"I… I know…" said David quickly. "But… I mean we're just trying to find them right? I can do that much. If I find anything, I can just call you guys and let you handle whatever did this, can't I?"

Cyborg fell silent, turning the idea over in his head. Robin however had quickly made his mind up.

"Thank you for the offer," he said in an authoritative tone, "but we can't let you take that kind of risk."

"Robin," said Starfire gently, "it… _would_ accelerate the searching process to employ four rather than three," said Starfire. "And time _is_ of the essence…"

"It's too much of a risk," said Robin flatly. "If Cinderblock or someone else is still watching for him to leave the Tower, they might take this opportunity to try something. If David leaves here and someone attacks him while we're short two Titans and spread all over the city, we won't be able to help effectively. He could easily get killed."

A heavy lump settled in the pit of David's stomach as Robin said that. Cyborg however ventured to question the decision.

"It's worth a little risk to find Raven and BB," said Cyborg, "and it's not like we can just lock him up here forever because someone might be watching him. If he wants to go…"

"No," said Robin, clearly prepared to tolerate no further discussion of the matter, and turning back to David. "We appreciate the gesture, but this isn't the time to gamble on whether or not Cinderblock or whoever still has you under surveillance. Trust me, it's _much_ too dangerous."

The others fell silent, and David gulped down his apprehension and nodded. Inwardly, he felt relieved. Everything Robin had said about Cinderblock had been running through his head like some kind of prediction, and he had already been dreading going out there into the city and meeting with Cinderblock in a dark alley, or worse yet, the agent of _this_ catastrophe.

With the matter settled, Robin turned to the others. "Let's get out there and find Raven and Beast Boy!" he said, his voice controlled and commanding. Cyborg and Starfire raced off towards the elevator. Robin hesitated only long enough to turn back to David and give him some quick instructions.

"If you want to help," said Robin, "set up the medical bay down in the basement to receive injured… just in case." And then the boy wonder was gone, racing after the other two Titans, leaving David alone in the hallway.

**O-O-O****  
**

**12:37 AM**

The medical bay was as silent as a tomb, and had lighting to match, or so David thought; a vast dark expanse that served as garage, workshop, and medical recovery facility all in one, presently illuminated only by a glowing blue fluorescent bulb suspended from the ceiling, casting a pale light over the corner of the garage wherein Cyborg had set up the medical machines, all of which were now humming softly, ready for whatever might be needed of them.

If only David could have said the same.

Since waking up in Titans Tower all those weeks ago, he had not yet returned to the medical bay, despite spending much of his time in Cyborg's adjacent workshop. It had not improved in atmosphere in his absence. The air was cold and felt slightly damp, more like a cave than a basement, and despite the jacket he was wearing, he shivered as he paced back and forth within the small circle of light cast by the overhead bulb. The garage of course had lights all over, but David wasn't entirely sure where the switch was for them, nor was he entirely sure he wanted to see what else was concealed within these cavernous depths.

It was _that_ kind of night.

He felt anxious, restless, nervous, all at the same time, and he could not understand why. For more than an hour he had been down here pacing and staring at the clock, waiting for one or all of the Titans to roll back into the Tower. Thus far, there had been no sign of them. He knew that he should be trying to sleep. It was well past midnight after all, and he was deathly tired after the "session" today, but he knew he couldn't sleep. Not tonight.

He rubbed his eyes with one hand, trying to calm himself down. Why was he so worked up? Yes, something very strange was happening, but that was hardly new, and the Titans were on it as usual. This was not the first or even the twelfth time that they had left him alone in the Tower while they raced off to combat some malevolent criminal or greater hell-beast, and those times he had had no trouble whatsoever waiting patiently for them to return, confident that they would have all manner of tales to tell him of their latest victory against all odds.

So why not this time?

The situation was bad, worse than usual, but it wasn't like he didn't trust that the Titans could handle it, was it? Of course not. They were the Teen Titans, and for weeks now he had been discovering just what that meant. And even if he had been worried that they might be in trouble, what exactly was he supposed to do about it? If Robin and Cyborg and Starfire couldn't find their missing comrades-in-arms or defeat whatever the agent of this weird situation was, then how could he hope to alter the equation in their favor? Robin was the unflappable detective, Starfire was the alien princess, Cyborg was the unstoppable warrior, not him. Best to stay here where it was reasonably safe.

He paused in the middle of his pacing and shook his head. Why in the hell was he _still_ thinking about this?

"One-track-mind…" he whispered to himself, shaking his head, and he glanced up at the clock again. Ten minutes to one in the morning. He _really_ needed to try and get some sleep. And yet at the same time as he thought that, he resumed pacing, his own footfalls the only sound in the tomb-like silence of the garage level.

Minutes ticked past like hours as he walked back and forth, back and forth, trying to assure himself that everything was all right, trying to believe that he was getting worked up for nothing, trying to remind himself that he normally didn't act like this, and trying to figure out why he was. Certainly he was worried about Beast Boy and Raven, but Beast Boy and Raven were practically demigods in terms of their power. There was no cause for _overt_ alarm, especially not since three _other_ demigods were right now tearing the city apart looking for them (figuratively speaking he hoped). So why did he feel like, by staying here, doing what he normally did, letting the Titans handle what they were best suited to handle, why did this feel like he was doing something wrong.

And the answer came back, because he _was_.

He shook his head violently as though to fling the thought from his mind, but there it sat, impervious. 'The Titans saved your life', it went, 'and now two of them are in trouble, and what do you do? You hide in a basement.'

"That's not true!" he said aloud to nobody in particular, his voice echoing through the empty halls, and no sooner had he done so than he realized that he was talking to himself. He was clearly more tired than he thought.

'It is true,' ran his thoughts. 'Hiding here, waiting for others to take care of it.'

But Robin had told him to stay. He had _offered_ to help for God's sake and Robin had _told_ him to stay _right here_!

'Which gives you a perfect excuse to do nothing.'

It wasn't an excuse! It made sense! He was a civilian, not a superhero! This was a job for superheroes!

'This is a job for people with eyes and ears', returned his own thoughts, 'and you have both. Raven saved your life on the roof that day with the dragon. Beast Boy welcomed you into the tower with open arms, supported you through the training and the attacks, and now they're both in trouble and you won't lift a finger. No wonder he finally got frustrated with you. He was right; you don't have what it takes.'

What _what_ takes?

'What it takes to be like them.'

"I'm _not_ like them!" he shouted suddenly.

The cavernous basement and garage reflected his voice around back to him in a cacophony of sound. David rubbed his eyes and clenched his fists as the echo faded away. This was insane. He could not actually be considering doing this, could he? And yet the more he asked himself that question, the stronger the voice in his head became.

'You're damn right you're not like them,' it said. 'You saw what they do when the chips are down. You saw the way they act. You don't have the guts to be like them.'

But they had superpowers! They were super-human!

'_And what the hell do you think you are?_'

That one stopped him short.

He stared into the darkness of the Tower basement for a time, not moving, barely even breathing, and as he did so, he felt as though a great abyss was opening up before him, that he was standing on the edge of it, that he was afraid he was about to fall into it and plunge down into the unknown dark, and never return. It was the same dizzying feeling that he had felt that night after the Dragon incident, only this time, instead of recoiling from the abyss, fearfully running lest he fall in, he felt like the abyss was calling to him, like it was demanding he turn around and jump into the darkness, come what may.

He shook himself out of the metaphorical imagery, and sat down on the side of the bed, shaking his head as he tried to make sense of the mental labyrinth he was lost in. What the hell did he think he was? He didn't _know_ what he was, or who he was, or anything else. It wasn't blindness. He knew he was a "meta-human", but even _thinking_ that term caused him to wince and shy away from it. Not that there was anything _wrong_ with being a meta-human, far from it, but it seemed ridiculous, almost arrogant, to name himself such a thing, merely because he could detonate something. Meta-humans were larger than life. They were demigods, superheroes, giants among insects. To think of himself as a meta-human, was to place himself in the same category as the Titans, and he couldn't do that. He knew he couldn't do that. It wouldn't be fair. It wouldn't be right.

He sighed. Ever since he had come to this place, everything had become so complicated…

The thought emerged, a quote he had heard somewhere. 'Life is only as complicated as you let it get.'

He couldn't see how that was though. Robin had told him to stay here, and leaving carried so many risks.

'_You_ make a decision, _you_ stand by it, and _you_ take the consequences,' came the reply from within his own mind. 'Do what _you_ think you should,'

But this wasn't a question of deciding what to eat for lunch. He could die. Worse yet _others_ could die, just because he chose to leave the Tower. It had happened before. It could happen again. And if it did, he couldn't stop it. He wasn't strong enough to prevent the deaths that he might cause just by stepping outside. What right did he have to...

"No."

David closed his eyes and shook his head forcing his mind to clear. It wasn't about 'rights'. It was about Beast Boy and Raven, and also Starfire and Cyborg and Robin. It was about the Titans, and about himself, and what they had done for him. It was about two missing Superheroes, and their three friends, who right this instant were scouring the city looking for them. It was about David himself, and what he could do or not do to help find them. Pride, hubris, superheroism, none of these things mattered in the end. What mattered were the five people that had taken a big risk helping David, a risk that was clearly greater than David had realized at first. He had made enemies somehow, powerful, terrible enemies, and they had made those enemies their own, on his behalf. He had carried within him a threat of some kind, amorphous and terrible, and they had accepted it regardless. He was nobody, an unknown in the literal sense. They had done all this for him.

And now two of them were missing.

And then, all of a sudden, all the agonizing confusion and chaos evaporated like steam, and in its place was a the calming realization that for the first time in ages... perhaps the first time ever, David knew _exactly_ what he had to try to do.

Not what he had to do, what he had to try to do. He wasn't a hero, he was a normal kid with an abnormal ability. There was an important difference. Heroes succeeded at these sorts of things. Normal kids merely tried to.

But sometimes trying was enough.

And there was only one way to find out if this was one of those times...

He stood up from where he had been sitting and took a long, slow breath, opening his eyes as he exhaled, watching the steam from his breath spiral up into the cold air and vanish, altering his own perception so as to watch the molecules of water vapor spin and dance among those of the nitrogen and oxygen that surrounded them before they finally became too diffuse to detect anymore. And then, after turning to glance at the clock one last time and to whisper a silent prayer that he not wind up walking into certain and painful death, David raced off into the darkness of the garage, looking for an object he had seen down here many times, but had never once imagined in his life that he would use...

... much less _steal_.

**O-O-O****  
**

**1:44 AM**

The city was quiet, quieter than he had ever heard it.

Not that this was surprising, given that in all his time here he'd been out in Jump City itself only for a matter of hours here and there, and that those hours had chiefly been occupied in being assaulted by animated concrete monoliths. That there were no such monoliths attacking him right now was a fact he was infinitely grateful for, not that he wasn't still watching. Cinderblock had been rather roughly handled by the Titans as well as by David himself last time they met, but that didn't mean that he wouldn't return for more at some point. David just hoped this wasn't that point.

He sped down the deserted streets quietly, the only sound the rustling of leaves and discarded papers in the wind, and the soft clicking of the spokes of the bicycle he had "borrowed" from the Tower basement. It was a beautiful bike, twenty-four speeds, with adjustable handlebars and seat built around a titanium frame painted fire-engine red with the Teen Titans logo emblazoned on the wheelguards. David wasn't certain who it belonged to, though his guess was that it was Robin's. Starfire and Raven could both fly, and the bike didn't look or feel like a girl's. Cyborg was too large to fit on a normal bicycle, and while he couldn't rule out Beast Boy, the color scheme just seemed to fit Robin better. It even resembled Robin's motorcycle.

He hoped Robin wouldn't mind that he had borrowed it.

In fact, as the minutes ticked by, he hoped a lot of things. For example, he hoped that by the time he found any sign of Beast Boy or Raven, he would have figured out just how he was going to contact the other three Titans. He knew that the Titans had those hand-held communicator things (he had thought that they looked like something out of Star Trek), which they could use to talk to one another, but he didn't know where they had gotten them. His suspicion was that Cyborg had built them as they didn't exactly look like they were out of a catalog. Either way, he didn't have one, so he would have to hope that either Raven's or Beast Boy's were still intact, or else he'd have to rely on the old fashioned method of making enough noise to attract someone's attention. Given his own abilities, that at least wouldn't be a problem. People tended to notice explosions.

Of course it was entirely possible that the others had already found Beast Boy and Raven and were now back at the Tower wondering where the hell he had gotten to (or, he had to admit, not wondering that at all). Even if they had not, it was very likely that they would find signs of Raven or Beast Boy before he did, if only because they knew this city like the back of their hands, and he was reduced to searching semi-randomly through the darkened and deserted streets. Fortunately it was impossible for him to get truly lost. Titans' Tower served as an admirable reference point, being visible from largely anywhere in the city. At any rate, having left the Tower, he now had plenty of time to consider all the wonderful reasons why this was a stupid plan. But to each of them he had the same answer. Even if the others were perfectly capable of finding their lost teammates, four sets of eyes were still better than three, no matter how superior the other three happened to be.

It _was _a big city.

He pedalled along quietly, looking left and right at the closed shops and the deserted office buildings, at the flickering streetlights and the illuminated billboards. Nobody was about at this hour, save the occasional drunk or homeless, as well as the police in their black and white squad cars making the midnight rounds. He avoided all of them, sliding into shadows whenever a car passed by, largely unconsciously. He wasn't supposed to be here. He wasn't even supposed to be alive. Robin had deemed it an unacceptable risk for him to be out by himself, and he wanted no accidents to complicate things. The cops saw only a figure on a bicycle, if they saw anything at all. David was pretty good at not getting noticed.

He rode up and down hills, past skyscrapers, apartment houses, and factories. He moved randomly, looking for any sign, any indication that the Titans had passed this way. Once, just once, he reached the top of a ridge and thought what he saw the T-car racing past an intersection down below him in what looked like an industrial part of the city and vanishing into the labyrinth of streets beyond. That meant that the others were still out searching and hadn't found out that he was gone yet. It also meant that they had yet to turn anything up.

A half hour passed as he pressed on doggedly, looking for any sign, a claw mark, a scrap of indigo cloth, a green animal darting about, and finding nothing. Every minute he continued to search, he became more and more convinced that he had made a terrible mistake coming out here. At this rate he was about as likely to find the Loch Ness Monster as he was Beast Boy or Raven. He was exhausted, freezing, and highly conscious of the fact that once the other Titans noticed he had left the Tower after being told to stay put... well he wasn't sure _what_ that discussion was going to look like, but he had a feeling it was going to be neither pleasant nor calm. From a certain perspective, he was putting the entire city in danger just being out here. No doubt that was what Robin was going to say.

He was on the point in fact of turning around and making his way back to the Tower as best he could, when he heard something.

He wasn't sure what he had heard. It sounded like shout or a cry of some sort, but soft, and reasonably nearby. Instantly all of his dire predictions of what the future was going to look like flew out of his head, and he clenched the handle-break on the bicycle and skidded to a stop. He cocked his head, listening for the source of the disturbance, but heard nothing save the wind. For several seconds he waited, wondering if he had mis-heard it, or if it was the sound of someone's television, when he heard a hollow "Clang" as something struck metal nearby, followed by another series of muffled shouts. David felt his heart starting to beat faster. The shouts were definitely distressed, and sounded like a girl's voice, somewhat higher pitched than anything he had heard out of Raven, but then he had never heard Raven crying out like that before, save once earlier tonight. Either way, this was the first thing he had come across out of the ordinary, and so he quickly dismounted the bicycle, leaving it leaning against a wall, and quietly ran towards an alleyway that seemed to be the source of the sound.

The alley was choked with garbage cans, dumpsters, and other urban debris, and David slowly made his way down it, apprehension building inside him. More than ever now, he wished he had some way to contact the Titans, but there was nothing to be done for that now. He reached a corner, turned it, and ducked behind a large pile of garbage bags, peaking out at two figures standing some dozen yards ahead. One was a man, large, hulking, holding a lead pipe in one hand as he loomed over the second figure, a blond teenaged girl who looked a year or two older than David, wearing a hooded sweatshirt and jeans, and who was backed up against a metal dumpster by the man. The man swayed side to side slowly as if intoxicated, and slurred his words as he sneered at the girl.

"Whadayamean you don't want to?" said the man. "That ain't no way to talk to me!"

"I said get away from me you creep!" said the girl, as she glanced left and right, looking for an exit. There wasn't one that wasn't blocked by the man in question, and before she could do anything, the man reached out with one hand and grabbed her sweatshirt, nearly hoisting her off the ground as he lowered his head towards her.

"Missy," he said, and even at distance David could smell the alcohol on his breath as he did, "you and I are gonna have some fun. And if you don't play nice, I'm gonna beat your skull in with this pipe. Got it?"

"Let _go _of me!" shouted the girl, and she tried to shake free, but the man merely laughed and grabbed her by the hair, yanking her nearly off her feet as he shoved up up against the opposite wall.

"What if I don't?" said the man. "You gonna scream?" He hoisted the pipe and laughed. "Nobody here to hear you, you little bitch. It's just the two of us..."

Unfortunately for the man's intended recreation, it was not in fact just the two of them... a fact made clear a moment later when the lead pipe in his hand spontaneously blew up.

The pipe burst into a thousand pieces as though it had been crammed full of explosives, and the man let out a hellacious shriek as splinters of rusty metal dug into his hand. He flung the stump of the pipe down onto the ground and grabbed at his maimed hand, screaming bloody murder, hopping up and down as drops of blood splattered over the alley walls and the ground. The girl slid back from the sight as the man tripped and fell against the concrete alley floor, writhing and shouting as though he was being killed, and promising all manner of painful death to the girl, who took the opportunity to break for the alley's entrance. As she ran, the man lunged forward and grabbed her ankle, tripping her up and knocking her sprawling to the ground. With an angry shout, the man crawled towards her as she rolled over onto her back and tried to scramble away.

And that's when the sidewalk exploded.

A section of the concrete floor of the alleyway blew upwards like a landmine, the blast catching the man straight under his stomach and knocking him into the air a full foot before dropping him back onto the ground. The blow was like a punch to the chest from a pneumatic drill, and the man gasped as the wind was knocked out of his lungs. He made no further attempt to get up, and merely lay moaning on the ground as though beaten with a sledgehammer. The girl slowly moved back from the man, clearly (and understandably) surprised by what had just happened, and got up slowly, glancing around in all directions for the source of the eruptions that had disabled her assailant.

David remained crouched behind the trash bags, peering over them to see the scene, his hand held rigid at his side as he slowly exhaled and tried to stop trembling. Though he had been using his powers on a more or less daily basis for some time now, this was not a training exercise, and that man was not a pop-up target. What surprised him the most though was how... natural it had felt to use them. Whereas previously it had taken a threat the scale of Cinderblock or a collapsing building to galvanize his attention long enough to use his powers free of doubt or hesitation, this time... this time he had just started detonating without even really stopping to think about it. He supposed it was force of habit, and... well... it wasn't like he regretted it. That man had deserved far worse after all. Still, he realized that it was high time to leave this place before the girl realized what had happened.

Quietly he backed away from the trash bags, making as little noise as he could as he snuck back towards the entrance to the alleyway. He walked carefully to avoid attracting attention, intending simply to get back on the bicycle and get the hell out of here.

"Hey! Wait!"

David froze in mid-step, and no sooner had he done so than he realized he shouldn't have. He should have kept going, jumped onto the bike and pedalled away. It was however too late. He could hear footsteps behind him, and sure enough, when he turned around, the girl was standing a dozen feet behind him, her blond hair covered in grime from the fall she had taken, but otherwise apparently all right. She looked remarkably collected given the circumstances, though there was a fair bit of surprise on her face as she got right to the point.

"Did you just do all that?"

David found himself tongue-tied. Of course he nearly always wound up tongue-tied around girls, but this was a little different. "I..." he said. "I... um..." His hesitation seemed to answer the question for her, and she stepped forward into the light so as to get a better look.

"Hey, I know you!" she said.

This one threw him for a loop. "What?" he asked. "You... do?"

"You're that boy from the TV," she said, "The one from the news a few weeks ago? When that big concrete monster attacked the waterfront?"

David blinked stupidly. He had no idea that any of that had been caught on television. But then he supposed it _had_ been a fairly public spectacle.

"It _is_ you," exclaimed the girl, and she smiled and stepped forward, as he continued to stand there searching for words. She looked him over as though not sure what to expect. "Are you... like a superhero or something?"

"No!" exclaimed David sharply. He quickly shook his head and tried to force some sense through his mouth. "I mean... I'm... I'm sorry are... are you all right?"

"I am now," said the girl with another warm smile. "So it _was _you back there? You made the pipe break?"

For an instant, he considered denying it, but it was plain that the girl already knew the answer to the question. "Y... yeah," he said and he felt himself blushing as he lowered his head slightly. She seemed to take it stride.

"Well thank you," she said, "I don't want to know what that creep was gonna..." She let that sentence drop as she noticed his embarrassment. "Hey, are you okay?" she asked.

"What? Oh... no. No, I'm fine," he said. "I just... this... this has been a really weird night, and... I'm sorry..."

She laughed, and David reflected for a second on how stupid he was sounding. "You saved me from that guy," she said. "Shouldn't I be the one who's nervous?"

Despite his own awkwardness, David couldn't help but chuckle at that. "It's... the first time for me too," he said, shaking his head and blushing beet red. "Like I said I'm not a..."

"Not a superhero, right," said the girl. "So what's your name?"

"David," he said. "My name's David."

She smiled again. "Well thank you, David, for saving me from that drunk." She extended her hand towards him and a moment later he shook it gently. "I'm Carrie."

"Carrie," David repeated, taking the chance to look her over up close. She was definitely older than he was by at least a year or so, and taller as well, almost rail-thin, with long blonde hair and blue-grey eyes. Her heavy black sweatshirt, emblazoned with some kind of cartoonish school mascot seemed to hang off of her body, as though several sizes too big for her.

"It's good to meet you, David," said Carrie, "but if you're not a superhero, then what are you doing out here? And how did you _do_ all that stuff?"

"I'm... actually looking for some people," said David, shaken back into reality by her questions, and choosing to dodge the latter of the two.

"Out here?" asked Carrie, rather surprised. "Who are you looking for?"

There was no point in lying. "Do you know who the Teen Titans are?"

Carrie laughed. "Everyone knows who they are," she said. "Why? Are you trying to join up?"

"No!" insisted David a _bit_ too strongly, and he quickly toned it down. "No... I'm... look it's really, really complicated, but I'm looking for two of them. Have you seen any of them around?"

"Not except on TV every time they get into a fight," said Carrie. "But it's not hard to find them. Just go to the big tower on the island in the middle of the..."

"No," said David, "I meant tonight."

Carrie looked puzzled. "No, I haven't seen anything. I was just coming back from a friend's house when that drunk guy tried to jump me." She shuddered at the thought, and no sooner had she done so, than both of them heard a noise from within the alleyway, a shuffling sound that both of them immediately took for the 'drunk guy' in question starting to recover his senses. Both teenagers glanced at one another, and then slowly began to back out of the alleyway. When they reached the street itself, David was trying to think of what to say now when Carrie asked him a rather urgent question.

"Um... I know you're busy and all," she said, "but... do you think you could... maybe walk with me for a while? This isn't a great neighborhood, and I... I don't want to get..." she trailed off, and now it was her turn to blush.

Not to seem un-chivalrous, but David honestly wanted to get out of this place as quickly as possible. The fact that he wasn't supposed to be out in the city at all tonight only made this encounter seem more dangerous, and he had the distinct feeling that he should be avoiding this sort of thing as much as possible. At the same time however... well... he _did_ know what would likely have happened if he hadn't been here to drop that guy...

"I... I'm not sure if... if I can..." he said.

"I live just down on the other side of the hill," said Carrie. "It's about twenty minutes away. I'm really sorry to have to ask but..."

He had to keep looking for the others, but then... he had no idea _where_ to look for them. In a way, walking back with Carrie was as good as searching in any other direction. At least that's what he imagined. In reality he had a lingering feeling that this was what he _should_ do. Not to be heroic... just the sort of thing that decent people did.

"Sure," he finally said, and the relief on her face was apparent.

"Thanks," she said with a nervous grin. "Come on, it's this way..."

**O-O-O****  
**

**2:19 AM**

"So you never thought of just… going to the police?"

David shrugged as he walked Robin's bicycle down the deserted street. "I guess I did," he said, "but if Cinderblock was willing to do all that just to get at me in the first place… I dunno… it seemed like the safer thing to do."

Carrie nodded slowly and whistled. "That sounds… really weird."

David laughed at that. "Tell me about it…" he said. "Most days I don't even know what I'm doing. I just sort of try and ride it out, you know?"

"Yeah, I guess…" said Carrie, plainly unsure of whether or not she did, but David didn't mind. He hadn't expected to say much to her at all on their little stroll back to Carrie's house. Just walk her back home out of the bad part of town, and get on with things. And yet not five minutes into their walk, David was already feeling more relaxed than he had in _weeks_. For the first time since this whole ordeal began, he had someone to talk to to whom he owed nothing, someone who wasn't superhuman and larger than life, someone like him. David was not exactly hyper-social at the best of times, but he hadn't realized just how much he had missed that.

"So then what do you _do_ there?" she asked.

He sighed. "Lots of practice," he said. "I don't really know why. I mean they call it self defense or something called 'power endurance'. Mostly just a lot of busy-work. Other than that… not much. I mean I don't go running around the city doing… well you know… that kind of stuff. I'm not a…"

Carrie laughed and David smiled as he turned to her. "What?" he asked.

"David, we've been talking for twenty minutes," said Carrie with a grin, "and that's the fifth time you've said you're 'not a superhero'."

"It is?" David thought back for a second sheepishly. "Crap…" he said, "sorry."

"It's okay," she said, "but I really do get it. It sounds totally nuts."

"It _is_ totally nuts," said David. "But that's just the way it is for now I guess." He smiled a bit and shook his head. "I'm really not even supposed to be out here."

"I won't tell on you," said Carrie. "But you still haven't told me why you're looking for the Teen Titans out here."

David fell silent, then shook his head. "I'm sorry," he said. "I… I can't…"

Carrie merely nodded. "I understand," she said, and she looked concerned for a second. David rapidly changed the subject.

"So then what's _your_ story?" he asked.

"Oh nothing special or scary like that," she said. "Just the usual, you know? High School, homework, parties, cheerleading…"

"You're a cheerleader?" asked David incredulously.

Carrie laughed. "What, I don't look like it?"

"No, no!" said David quickly. He laughed and shook his head. "It's just that at the schools I went to, the cheerleaders wouldn't ever talk to the kids like me, you know?"

Carrie smiled impishly. "Well I bet most of the kids like you never saved a cheerleader from getting attacked."

David couldn't help but laugh at that. "Probably not."

"So were you like, a nerd or something?"

David shot her a look of mock insult, and she laughed. "I'm just asking!" she said. "You said the 'kids like you'. I don't think you meant the kids who had secret superpowers."

"I wasn't a nerd," he said. "I mean, maybe I was, I don't know. I was… that kid who sits in the back of the room and nobody notices him, you know? There's always one in every class? You go through the whole year and never even know his name?"

"The one everyone thinks is gonna wind up a school shooter?"

"Gee, thanks," said David sarcastically.

"Hey!" said Carrie, "I'm just saying, that's what people think, you know?"

"I know," he said, "but do I look like I wear a black trench coat and listen to death metal all day?"

"No," she said, and she smiled again. "You just hang out with a bunch of people who wear yellow tights and swing around from rooftops shouting one-liners."

David said nothing for a second. "Touché," he finally admitted. Carrie cackled in victory, and they both continued walking, rounding the corner towards Carrie's house.

"So you're saying I should be nicer to that kid?" asked Carrie.

"Which kid?"

"The one who sits by himself and doesn't say much?"

"Hey, whatever you want," said David. "I _liked_ being that kid. I'm sure everyone thought I was weird, but I didn't really care. I changed schools a lot."

"Well I don't think you're weird," said Carrie with a warm smile that made David blush. "I mean, other than that stuff with the ground and the pipe."

"Yeah, well… that stuff _is_ weird," said David. "Take it from me."

They had gotten halfway down the block, before Carrie finally indicated that the apartment building ahead on the right was hers. Stopping in front of it, David wondered awkwardly what to say or do here.

"Well thanks for saving me, David," said Carrie before David could figure out what to do.

"Oh… er… no problem," he said. "I'm glad I could help." He winced at how stupid that sounded, but Carrie merely smiled.

"Well do me a favor then," she said.

"A favor? Um… sure."

"The next time they let you out of that Tower," said Carrie, "come look me up. We'll go hang out or something."

David blinked, and the look of surprise on his face was enough to make Carrie laugh again. "Seriously?" he asked.

"Of course!" she exclaimed. "What? You think we're all stuck up airheads? I could have been killed if you hadn't been there, and you look like you could use a break one of these days."

"I do?"

"Hell yes!" said Carrie. "David, you look like a scared rabbit, like you expect someone to jump out at you all of a sudden. You really need to relax."

David chuckled and shook his head. "I hadn't noticed…"

"Well I did," said Carrie, putting a hand on his shoulder. "Just come down to the city one of these days. Long as you don't get all stalkerish or creepy, we can just hang out. What do you say?"

"I don't know…" said David, before looking up at her with a mischievous grin, "are you going to use me like a tool to get back at your ex-boyfriend or something?"

Carrie hesitated in confusion a second, then laughed. "No stupid cheerleader tricks, I promise," she said.

"Well then," said David, faking magnanimity, "I guess if I manage to survive long enough I'll come and see if…"

And then suddenly everything went straight back to bizzaro-land.

A loud crash resonated through the empty street as a trash can was overturned somewhere behind them. David's eyes widened and he spun around, only to see a large young man staggering out of an alleyway next to Carrie's building. He wearing a blue jumpsuit, or rather what was left of one, as it looked like it had been torn in several places. His hair was jet black, and he stood a full head taller than David, but what was most noticeable were his eyes, brown but with bright white irises that practically shone in the dark, giving him a feral and intense look that was very unsettling.

Neither David nor Carrie said anything as the young man stumbled into view. He blinked a few times in the light of the streetlamp, then kicked the garbage at his feet away, sending tin cans and banana peels spilling out into the street. Only then did he notice that he was in the presence of others.

"What the hell are you two wimps looking at?" said the young man in an unmistakably aggressive tone. Neither of the two other teens responded, and the young man turned towards them with balled fists and stomped over.

"Yeah, that's right, I'm talkin' to you, losers! What are you gonna do about it?"

"What is _wrong_ with this city?" asked Carrie to David, clearly neither impressed nor intimidated by the young man's appearance. David didn't reply, his mouth hanging slightly ajar as he studied the young man's face closely.

"You got somethin' to say?" asked the young man. He wasn't spectacularly tall or well-built, but he certainly had a demeanor that reminded one of such people. His voice was low and gravelly, and his manner leering and threatening. "What's the matter? Your little boyfriend here not gonna fight for you?"

"He's not my boyfriend, and neither are you, asshole," said Carrie with remarkable aplomb. "Leave us alone."

The young man sneered as he pointed a finger in Carrie's face. "Or else wha…?"

"Marcus?"

Everyone froze, and both Carrie and the young man, slowly turned towards David with surprised looks on their faces. David ignored their surprise. "Marcus is that you?"

"You _know_ this guy?" asked Carrie, as the young man was trying to formulate a similar question.

"I don't know," said David. "Are you Marcus Beechman?"

The young man said nothing for a second, and then responded with another question. "Who the hell are you?"

David broke into an incredulous smile. "I'm David Foster," he said. "You remember me?"

The sudden flash of recognition in Marcus Beechman's eyes indicated that he did.

"No way…" said Marcus. "No way… you're dead."

"Yeah, I'm getting that a lot," said David, who was by now prepared to accept this as a sick joke being played on him by the world at large. "What the hell are you doing here?"

"That's none of your goddamn business, freak!" shouted Marcus in David's face. He glanced back at Carrie, and then smiled malevolently. "Or does she know that you're one of those freaks that can do stuff?"

"Yes, Marcus," said David patronizingly. "I'm one of those freaks who 'does stuff'. I see you haven't changed."

"You watch your mouth, you little wimp or I'll…"

"You'll what?" asked David evenly. This was not at all how he normally would have spoken to anyone in this circumstance, but the weirdness of the day was becoming such that he felt like he was in some kind of fake parallel universe where the laws of reality no longer applied, and given that, he was done taking this sort of crap from someone like Marcus Beechman.

"What will you do?" David asked with a smirk. "Steal my bike and make me blow your foot off again? You _do_ remember what happened last time you messed with me, right? I'm having a _really_ strange day Marcus, and it would not bother me at _all_ to have to send you back to the hospital because you were acting like an idiot again."

Carrie stifled a laugh, and Marcus reacted in confusion that could only be slightly less than David's. The difference was that David was long-since used to not understanding how these things kept happening. Marcus was plainly not.

"You don't know who you're messing with!" shouted Marcus, clearly keen on retaining what little dignity he had.

"Oh, I think I do, Marcus," said David. "Unless you've actually managed to grow a brain since the last time we met."

"My name's not Marcus anymore," said the young man. "They call me Adonis now, and you better step aside if you know what's good for you!"

David looked unimpressed. "You named yourself after a shoe?"

Carrie laughed, and Marcus practically gnashed his teeth with rage. "I think that's Adidas", said Carrie.

"Oh right," said David, "Adonis… that's what, a Greek God?"

"That's right," said 'Adonis' threateningly. "They call me that 'cuz I'm the strongest guy in the world."

David groaned. "That's Hercules you idiot, not Adonis."

Adonis hesitated. "It… is?"

David shook his head. "Yeah. Adonis was the god of being an arrogant jerk. No wonder you got that name…"

"Hey! SHUT UP!" screamed Adonis, forcing David back a pace. "I'm gonna teach you a lesson I shoulda taught you a _long time ago_!"

David was by now long-since fed up with being 'taught lessons'. "I do _not_ have time for your crap, Marcus," snapped David. "Get out of here or I'll send you back to the hospital in a body cast."

"You can't hurt me, you little punk," said Adonis with a sneer. "I took out the Teen Titans! You've got nothin'!"

David froze at the mention of the Titans. "You… you what?"

"Yeah, you heard me!" he said. "I busted the Titans up last night, and I busted them up tonight too! You're just a _warm up_ for me!"

Before David could ask another question, Marcus took a swing at him as hard as he could with a right hook. David ducked instinctively, Marcus' fist passing over his head, and with a thought he reached out to a mailbox standing nearby and commanded the mail chute, solid iron through at through, to freeze and compress. The mailbox shook, but Adonis took no notice of it and grabbed David by the shirt, holding him in place as he reached back with his other hand to deliver a haymaker.

Before he could do so however, David released the energy, and the mailbox exploded, blasting letters and smashed packages all across the street. The unexpected explosion knocked Adonis off his feet, forcing him to drop David as he staggered to retain his balance. Snarling with rage, he loomed towards David, who backed up several paces before tripping over a package that had fallen in the middle of the street. Adonis laughed as he fell behind it onto his back, but David merely reached forward towards the package and flicked his wrist at it.

With a crash, the packaging was torn to pieces, as the object inside, a toaster or other kitchen appliance, cracked in half. One half, the half containing a large piece of steel that David had fixated upon, exploded. The other half was propelled by the explosion at high speeds directly into Adonis' stomach, slamming into him like a riot gun slug, doubling him over, gasping for breath as he fell back onto the ground.

David scrambled to his feet, and looking around quickly, he spotted a tree branch that had been snapped off one of the sidewalk trees when the mailbox exploded. By now he was furious. It was bad enough that monsters of all stripes attacked him every time he set foot outside the tower, bad enough that _Beast Boy_ of all people had decided to start bullying him around, but now bullies from the depths of his past were being conjured up to make his life just _that much_ more miserable? Adonis was still trying to regain both his footing and his breath. With a shout of anger, David ran over and clobbered him across the back with the branch, knocking him back down onto the ground.

"Why can't you people just _leave me alone?_" shouted David as he kicked Adonis in the ribs as hard as he could. "I've never done _anything_ to _any of you_!" Adonis tried to get up but David shoved him hard and knocked him back over. He threw the branch at Adonis, screaming "_Get the hell out of here_!" before he turned and stomped back away, his hand over his eyes, feeling like he wanted to just scream.

Adonis moaned behind him as he stood there and tried to suppress the tears of frustration. Ahead, he saw Carrie, still standing on the steps to her apartment building. She looked… well frankly she looked a bit scared of everything that had just happened, but that was to be expected. He tried to think of something to say, some lame apology to give for his behavior, when suddenly her eyes went wide, and she pointed at something behind him.

"_Look out!_"

David turned around, and his jaw dropped. Adonis was no longer there. In his place stood a monster.

A towering, slavering bestial monster stood in the middle of the street. Twelve feet tall at least, covered in fur like a mutated werewolf, it howled into the air as it beat its chest like an enraged gorilla before extending claws from its fingers and pointing them at David. David stared up at the monster in horror and shock, as he realized from the scraps of blue fabric that adorned it that this thing hadn't replaced Adonis. This thing _was_ Adonis. And then suddenly David realized where those claw marks on the walls of the Tower had come from, and it occurred to him just _how much_ trouble he was now in.

"Oh shit…"

With a single heave, the monster tore an entire streetlight from the ground and swung it like a two-handed club, barely giving David enough time to duck under the swing as it clobbered a parked car and overturned it with the force of the blow. David backed up quickly, glancing left and right for something to use before pointing his finger at one of the nearby cars, intending to set off the fuel tank and do to this monster what he had done to Cinderblock. He did not get the chance. The thing that had been Adonis reared up, bringing the streetlight down towards David overhand, aiming to crush him like an ant, and he was forced to abandon his attempt at setting off a gas tank and simply dive to the side. The powerful blow shook the street as though an earthquake were occurring, and then suddenly there was a loud crash, and the ground seemed to give way.

With a scream of terror, David fell, rocks and rubble and bits of debris falling with him. It was only a second later that he landed, fortunately in water, and he scrambled and clawed for the surface as quickly as he could. His feet found the ground beneath him and he stood up, and found himself standing waist-deep in the middle of a large sewer, a hole overhead indicating how he had come to be in this place. The monster's blow had been so hard it had actually smashed a hole through the street. His shoulder ached horribly from where falling debris had struck it, and he clutched at it, wincing with the pain and feeling something warm starting to trickle down his arm and soaking into his shirt and jacket. He looked around, searching for any sign of the monster and finding none. His breath came rapidly as he struggled to find a way out of this place, but before he could, a low growl emanated from the darkness before him, and a pair of glittering white eyes materialized in the darkness ahead.

With a cry, David stumbled backwards, the water impeding him as it flowed around his stomach. Taking its time, the monster stepped into view before him, moving with inexorable strides to put him down once and for all. It raised its claws high, claws sharp enough to disembowel an elephant, and in fear for his life, David held his hand back out behind him and clenched his fist.

The water lurched as something blew up inside it, and an instant later, a brick shot out of the water and slammed into the monster's face, striking it right between the eyes. The monster howled in pain, and David reached to his left, setting off another explosion deep within the wall, which hurled another brick into the monster's shoulder. This one drew blood, and the monster wailed loud enough to wake the dead as it lunged forward, snatching David up and tossing him up onto the walkway along the side of the sewer. David landed on his back, hard, and he scrambled to his feet, already trying to find another brick to turn into a missile when the monster leaped out of the sewer, landed right in front of David, and slashed at him with his enormous claws.

There was the sound of ripping fabric.

David thought for a second that the monster had just grazed him, and prepared to ward off another blow, but the monster, instead of pressing ahead, stepped back, an unmistakable smirk on his face. David hesitated for a moment, not comprehending why, and then he felt a tingling sensation in his chest, and looked down.

There were four deep red gashes in his side, all of them spilling blood down his leg and into a growing puddle on the ground.

David blinked for a second, not understanding what had just happened, and then his legs gave out beneath him and he collapsed onto the ground. The monster stepped forward, licking its lips, towering over him, and it bent down, fangs bared. David looked up at the monster, still barely able to believe what had just happened, and slid down the wall slowly, leaving a bloody smear against it. The monster's face was inches away now, its fangs open as it moved towards David's throat, and David could do nothing but watch, and wait.

But the monster stopped.

Initially David wasn't sure why it had stopped, but then he saw its ears perking up, and with all his remaining energy, he tried to hear whatever it had heard. There was a sound, a very, very faint sound, but it was that of voices, and forgetting about David, the monster suddenly stood up and struck off into the darkness quickly, leaving David bleeding out on the ground. There was still no pain; his system was in too much shock for that, but he knew that he was badly hurt. As badly as the day he had first encountered the Titans. He could hear sounds emanating from somewhere else in the catacombs, but couldn't make them out. Not, that is, until some trick of acoustics brought him the unmistakable sound of Cyborg's voice.

"Just _chill_ man! It doesn't have to go down like this!"

David had no idea who Cyborg was talking to. He had no idea _what_ Cyborg was doing here. He had lost the capacity to think back rationally. All he did know was that there was a terrible monster loose down here. Indeed he could hear the slavering, growling sounds it was making. And so, summoning whatever will he had, he reached up, grabbed the railing of the walkway he was laying on, and began to pull himself to his feet.

Why was he doing this? He could not have told you. He did not know. All he knew was that he had to move, he had to go and find Cyborg. Maybe he was afraid he would die if he did not. Maybe he was afraid Cyborg was in trouble. Maybe his mind was not making any rational sense anymore and his body simply moved on its own accord. All he knew was that moving jarred him, and caused waves of terrible pain to rush through his body, and yet he _had_ to move anyhow.

He staggered to his feet, leaning heavily on the railing. Slowly he shuffled towards where he had heard the sound. New sounds were emerging now. Thunderous, crashing sounds of battle up ahead. The ground shook, the railing trembled. He lost his footing more than once, but still he shuffled ahead, leaving a trail of blood behind him as he cried and sweated and pulled and _forced_ himself to take another step, and then another, and then another. He was getting closer. He was approaching the sounds. Just a little bit further.

A door.

The walkway terminated in a solid metal door, behind which the sounds were coming from. The door was locked shut, dead-bolted perhaps or even welded. He couldn't tell. But he knew he had to get through the door somehow.

And he knew how.

He clutched the railing with both hands, his eyes closed, trying to will away the pain and the fatigue and force one more explosion. The steel materialized as particles before his shut eyes, and wearily he manipulated them, his mind flickering automatically down the paths needed to do this last, terrible exercise that was being demanded of him. Behind the door, screams of inhuman anger were heard. The monster was fighting someone. What David would do once he had blasted the door down was beyond him. He didn't have a plan, other than _get through the door_. He pushed and he pushed, ignoring the pain, ignoring the chill that seemed to enter the air, ignoring the numbness that was beginning to spread into his extremities. Nothing mattered but the door. He could hear Robin's voice echoing in his mind. "Concentrate,"

It was the only way to please Robin. It was the only way to end the training session. The only way they would let him sleep. He had to concentrate.

He concentrated.

"BOOM!"

The shock flowed through and around him, but did not bowl him over, for he seemed to flow with it, as though the explosion were some extension of himself, and as he opened his eyes he saw the door flying to pieces, ripping off its hinges, shattering like glass before his unspoken command. The pain was almost gone now, the comfortable numbness spreading to his chest and wounded side, and in relief, he smiled as he walked slowly into the doorway. Behind the door stood Robin and Cyborg, and both were staring at him as though they could not believe what they were seeing, and the expression on their faces seemed hilarious to him, so he laughed weakly, though no sound emerged. Cyborg was carrying Beast Boy in his arms, and Beast Boy appeared to be unconscious. Rubble and the signs of terrible battle were everywhere, and laying on the ground at Robin's feet, David saw Marcus, er… Adonis, also asleep, also unconscious.

None of the others seemed to be able to say anything as David stumbled into the room. He smiled at Cyborg and at Robin and at Beast Boy, though Beast Boy of course could not see him, but it was to Robin that he addressed his words, weak and barely understandable even to himself.

"You... you want me to... try it again?"

And before Robin could answer or even move, David felt the world spinning, and felt himself falling once more, and then everything went black.

**O-O-O****  
**

**5:06 AM**

"So?" asked Robin for the fifth time, still pacing back and forth in the middle of the medical bay, apparently unaware that this was driving Raven to distraction.

"So he's going to be fine," said Raven. "The antibiotics should take care of the three hundred different infections he probably picked up in that sewer, and I've managed to stop all the bleeding. He's gonna need a week or so to recover, but there shouldn't be anything permanent other than some scarring."

Robin nodded, his mask doing a worse job than usual of blocking out all signs of what he was thinking, not that it was hard to figure that out right now anyhow.

"Are you sure _you're_ okay?" he asked.

"I just had a concussion and a few bruises," said Raven, standing back up and fastening her cloak back on around her neck. "It looks like I got lucky."

"Good," said Robin. "We all were afraid that the worst had…"

"I was with Beast Boy the whole time," said Raven. "He would never let me get hurt. You should know that by now. I did."

"Yeah," said Robin with a sigh. "Where's Beast Boy now?"

"I'd guess he's out on his rock," said Raven. "He goes there whenever he's upset."

"Is he upset with me?"

"I think he's probably upset with himself," replied the sorceress. "Cyborg said that those chemicals unleashed something from inside him, but they didn't create it. It can be really scary having something that powerful and that primal inside you." She finished putting on the cloak, and shot a narrowed look at Robin. "Trust me, I know."

Robin shook his head. "Look, I did what I thought was right. There was no way to know that…"

"No way to know that Beast Boy wouldn't attack me?" interrupted Raven angrily. "Didn't it ever occur to you that if Beast Boy had wanted to hurt me, he would have done it long before you showed up? You found me in his _jaws_ for God's sake! All he would have had to do was bite down!"

"I know!" exclaimed Robin, fighting down the urge to kick something. "I know I should have seen it, okay, but I was worried about you, and Beast Boy had been acting… so weird…" He sighed. "Look, I don't have an excuse. I'm sorry."

"Don't apologize to me," said Raven, "apologize to Beast Boy."

"You know I'm no good at that."

Raven scoffed. "Learn," she said.

Robin averted his gaze back to the medical bed. Raven said nothing for a moment before asking a question.

"So do we know what he was doing out there?"

"The best I can tell," said Robin, "he took my old bicycle out of the garage and rode it all the way out there."

"Any guess why?"

Robin shook his head. "I thought he had enough sense not to pull a stunt like this after what happened with Cinderblock. Adonis nearly killed him"

"He's not dumb, Robin. He probably had a reason to go out. Be sure you ask him what it was before you crucify _him_."

Robin raised an eyebrow at Raven. "He disobeyed a direct order…"

"… to stay in the Tower," she said. "Cyborg told me he wanted to go help look for us. Why didn't you let him?"

"It was too dangerous. We couldn't have protected him if Cinderblock had shown up."

Raven paused before adding an observation. "Well whatever he was doing out there, he obviously didn't care too much about our protection while he was doing it."

"Obviously not," said Robin in a short tone.

"So maybe we should find out what he _did_ care about before we make any more assumptions?"

Robin raised an eyebrow at Raven, but Raven gave no further sign of any sort, merely turning around and walking towards the door.

"Where are you going?" asked Robin.

"Out to talk to Beast Boy," she said. "He needs it after tonight."

Robin nodded. "All right then. Tell him I'm…" Raven paused, waiting for Robin to finish his sentence, but Robin did not, finally letting out a sigh. "Nevermind," he said.

"Robin," said Raven.

"Yeah?"

"Beast Boy's not the only one who needs it," she said, before stepping out the door, and letting it slide shut behind her.

Robin turned back to look at David, still fast asleep, his side swathed in bandages. He took a deep breath as he sat back down in the chair set up next to the bed.

"Yeah…"

* * *

**Author's Note:** Phew! Long one this time, no? Please leave a review such that I can hopefully improve for the next chapter. Thank you all very much for reading, and may good luck be yours in all your endeavors!

- General Havoc


	12. Trust

**Disclaimer:** One more of these chapters, and I might start to think I DO own the Teen Titans. Because I will be INSANE.

**Author's Notes:** Greetings everyone. It has been some time since my last update, and for that I apologize. The reason for my delay was not sickness or work or real life intervening. It was, quite simply, that this chapter destroyed me. Shorter slightly than the previous one, this chapter is quite simply the most difficult thing I have ever written, not because it is particularly complicated or good (heavens no), but simply because some chapters are easy to write, and some are REALLY not. This chapter was not merely one of the latter, it destroyed me. I spent ages trying to get through the blocks I encountered in attempting to write it, and I have only now finally managed to push through the last ones. Why was this the case? I don't know. Perhaps it is different, perhaps more of the same. I humbly beseech your judgment on that matter, as I have no ability to evaluate it.

I apologize profusely to my readers for this extended delay, and can only say that, baring further blocks of the scale I encountered writing this chapter, the next one should be up in another week or two's time, on schedule as usual. I deeply hope and pray that you will enjoy this chapter, and ask, as always, that you leave a review to let me know your findings. Thank you all very much, and may your endeavors and writings be blessed by whatever god, gods, goddesses, or non-religious manifestations of goodwill you choose. Enjoy.

* * *

**Chapter 12: Trust  
**

_"Life is not easy for any of us, but what of that? We must have perseverance and above all, confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained."_

- Marie Curie

**O-O-O****  
**

"What the hell were you _thinking_?"

Robin stood, leaning over the folding table, his hands planted on the surface as he stared at David with an intensity that rivaled that of an industrial laser. Before him, the psychokinetic refused to meet his gaze, sitting sullenly in his chair instead opposite Robin in the combination medical bay/garage of the tower. Three of the other four Titans were scattered around the cavernous room, and all three of them were pretending not to pay any attention to the conversation he was having with David. Cyborg was, as always, performing maintenance on the T-car, his head buried inside the hood of the Titans' vehicle. Starfire was busy checking and re-checking various figures printed on medical screens and the clipboard in her hand, and casting occasional concerned glances at Robin as his temper rose that she only _thought _he wasn't seeing. Raven was seated in another chair in a corner, reading a leather-bound volume as she slowly replenished her energy from the healing session she had just finished. She too was periodically glancing up at Robin whenever a particularly sharp word was spoken, but unlike Starfire, she made no attempt to hide them, nor her displeasure at the fact that he had insisted on having this talk here in the midst of everyone else.

Robin was not presently in the mood to care what Raven thought of his choice of venues, and he waited only a few moments for an answer, carrying on implacably when he didn't receive one.

"You nearly got yourself killed, which is bad enough," he said. "You stole a bicycle from the basement and you went out into the city, alone, without any way to contact us in case you got into trouble, even though I told you we couldn't take the risk that something would happen." Robin shook his head and thumped the table for emphasis. "What the _hell _were you thinking?"

David seemed to wince, perhaps out of pain, but more likely not. "I don't... I don't know, okay?" he explained for the umpteenth time, the same old tired excuse. "I just... I thought you all could use a hand trying to find..."

"Didn't it occur to you that whatever we were looking for managed to disable at least Raven if not her and Beast Boy both?" interrupted Robin, ignoring a sharp glance from Raven as he said it. "Did you think you could stop something like that by yourself? You could at _least_ have let us know you were out there."

"How was I supposed to do that?" countered David. "I don't have one of those walkie-talkie things you guys use."

"Well if you couldn't find a way to contact us," said Robin without skipping a beat, leaning forward even further and narrowing his gaze, "then maybe you _shouldn't have gone out there in the first place!_"

David wilted under Robin's fire, lowering his eyes again and slouching down in his chair. Robin looked him over with the same gaze he normally reserved for recalcitrant criminals. "Whatever you thought you were doing by going out there," said Robin with a gesture at the bandages still swaddled around David's mid-section, "you could have gotten yourself killed. You almost _did_ get yourself killed! And it could have been a hundred times worse than that!"

"It was a stupid idea," said Raven from the side of the room, sounding as though her reserves of patience were just about exhausted, "and he shouldn't have done it, but it's _over_ now. It's pointless to argue about what could have happened to him when we know what _did_ happen."

"Yeah, man," said Cyborg wearily from within the T-car, "give it a rest already. It's over now."

Unwilling to deal with Raven right now, Robin rounded on Cyborg. "And if we hadn't happened to chase Beast Boy into the sewers, Cyborg," Robin snapped at the half-metallic Titan, "he'd be _dead_." David shuddered involuntarily as Robin made the matter-of-fact pronouncement, and Robin returned his gaze to David before continuing. "But that's not even the worst thing that could have happened," he said.

David raised his head slightly. "What?"

"What if Cinderblock had showed up? What if this had been another trap? Did you ever think of_ that_?"

"Wait a minute," said David, his voice beginning to falter, "Cinderblock? Cinderblock hasn't shown up in weeks!"

"That didn't stop him last time, did it?" said Robin remorselessly, clenching his fists and pressing down on the table with them. "Did you know he wasn't going to be there? Or did you just _forget _that there's some sort of conspiracy trying to get their hands on you, willing to kill anyone that stands in their way?" His voice sharpened as he bore down further. "How could you think it was a good idea to go into a _residential _part of town, _alone_, while being hunted by a living battering ram who already destroyed an entire orphanage trying to get at you?"

It was bad enough in Robin's eyes that David had done these things. That he had apparently done them without thinking of the possible consequences was _truly_ unacceptable. He stood impassively as David tried to stammer out a reply. "I didn't... I didn't think Cinderblock could come back again, not after what happened to him last time!"

"It's been weeks since then," said Robin, "and if you remember, he vanished into thin air right in front of us. If they can make him do that, they can repair the damage you caused, and if not they could have sent someone else! There's at least twenty outstanding metahuman criminals we don't know the locations of who operate around Jump City. Any one of them could have done it!"

David clenched his eyes shut and gripped the table with one hand. Robin crossed his arms coldly. He had to make David _see_, and if the others were sick of hearing about it, then there were plenty of other places in the Tower for them to be.

"If Cinderblock had attacked, there could have been _dozens _of people dead if not more!" he said, leaning forward even further. "Dozens of people dead because you didn't _think_ before you acted! I _thought_ you understood that!"

"I _did_!" shouted David, shoving his chair back and practically leaping to his feet in a flash of anger at the accusation. No sooner had he done so than the young kineticist let out a sharp cry as he clenched his teeth, clutched his bandaged side and doubled back over.

"Obviously _not_," insisted Robin, "since you even got a _civilian_ involved!"

"I... _what_?" replied David incredulously, staring wide-eyed up at Robin and his latest accusation. Robin refused to give an inch, but before he could say anything, Raven preempted him.

"Can we _please_ just _drop it_ already?" she asked sharply, her hand to her head, clearly in no mood to ask again. "There _no __point _in fighting over something that's already..."

To Robin's surprise, and obviously to Raven's as well, David actually cut the sorceress off in mid-sentence, paying her no mind as he half-spoke, half-shouted at Robin, ignoring all else.

"She was being _attacked_," said David, slowly staggering back up to his feet. "She could've been killed or _worse_! What the _hell_ was I supposed to do? Sit back and _watch?_"

"You were _supposed_ to be here in the Tower!" fired Robin right back, "not running around the city by yourself looking to get killed. But _since_ you went out into the city and _since_ you happened upon a crime in progress, you were supposed to stop it and make sure the girl was all right, and then you were supposed to get out of there before you put her in even _more _danger!"

"Goddamnit," said Cyborg, clearly alarmed by the tone this argument was taking on, "that's _enough_! Will you both let it _go_?" Both David and Robin ignored him.

"She _asked _me to walk her home, and I did," said David, now standing up once more with one hand clutched to his side. "What would _you_ have done?"

Robin stared down at David, and with an even, cold tone that would have made Raven proud were she not becoming so angry, replied. "If _I_ was being chased by an unknown group that had already murdered dozens of civilians to get to me, I _probably _wouldn't have stood out in the middle of the city for half an hour telling the first person I ran into everything that I knew about what was going on inside the Tower. I _probably_ would have helped her home and then left as quickly as I could so that I didn't put her in danger!" He crossed his arms, tightened his gaze, and tapped the steel toe of his boot against the table leg. "But that's me."

"Oh so now I'm not only supposed to stay locked in here forever, but I'm not allowed to _talk_ to anyone else?" replied David angrily, his free hand waving ever more violently through the air as he spoke.

"Friends, please!" said Starfire in her eternally reasonable tone, now inflected with worry and urgency, "There is no need to be raising the voices. Can we not discuss this in a calmer manner?"

Robin was becoming just as tired of this as the others were. "You're not allowed to put yourself in danger like that," he said simply, his voice signaling that this was the end of the conversation as far as he was concerned, "and you're _certainly_ not allowed to put others in danger..."

"... by _walking outside_ and saying '_hello_'?"

"By _any_ means!" shouted Robin back angrily. He could not understand how David could be so irresponsible as to _not see this_?

David hesitated before Robin's anger, but only for a second. "For how long?" he demanded

"For as long as Cinderblock is at large," replied Robin, trying to keep his voice down.

"And how long is _that_ gonna be?"

This question brought Robin up short. "What?"

"It's been almost two months," said David urgently, his free hand open palm upwards as though he could physically show Robin what he was trying to say. "Two months, Robin! I've been declared dead, I've been attacked by a monster every time I try to leave, you five are pretty much the only people who know that I still exist besides Cinderblock, and now you're saying that I'm not even allowed to go off the island and _talk_ to someone until this is over. You've got tracer bugs on me wherever I go, you make me go through some kind of demented boot camp practically every day! I want to know when this is _all going to_ _end_!"

Now it was Robin's turn to hesitate. He glanced to the others, but none of them seemed to be capable of or willing to reply in anything but stares, worried or otherwise. He returned his gaze to David who had an expectant, almost pleading look in his eyes, similar to the one he had had the day he had first decided to leave the Tower.

"It will end," said Robin carefully, "once we've found out who's..."

Wrong answer.

David practically exploded. "_Two months!_" he shouted, tears forming in his eyes as he waved his free hand around as though flailing with a sword. "And you haven't found _anything_! How many _more_ months is that gonna take? Am I supposed to be locked up in this place _forever_?"

"Calm _down_, man!" said Cyborg, stepping forward towards the table. "I know this ain't _easy_ but you gotta understand..."

David however was clearly in no mood to calm down. "Understand _what_?" he shot back, "Somebody I've never met wants to kill me so I have to hide in a basement and never talk to anyone because they might come after me until the end of _time_? Is that what I'm supposed to understand, that this is how it's going to be _forever_?"

"Man, that's _not _what we said!" insisted Cyborg angrily, "But..."

"Yes."

Both Cyborg and David stopped talking, and turned back to Robin, who had just spoken the last word.

"Yes, that's what you have to understand," said Robin, tired, angry, and sick of having this argument. He was no longer willing to beat around the bush. "This is how it _is _now, David, and I'm _sorry_ that it _inconveniences_ you to stay here, but you're a _danger_ to this city for as long as Cinderblock is alive and that means you _are_ staying here, for as _long_ as it takes to..."

"_I know that!_" David roared, slamming his hand down onto the folding table hard enough to collapse it. It crashed to the ground in a heap. The reaction was so unexpected that both Cyborg and Robin stepped back as David clenched his teeth again and snarled, clutching hard at the bandages. It was a moment or two before he opened his eyes again.

"How long?" he demanded. "How long am I here for?"

"For the fiftieth time, until we can stop whatever's _behind _this!" insisted Robin.

"How long?" yelled David, his voice practically giving out on him with the strain. "_Answer_ me! _How long_?"

"I don't _know_!" shouted Robin right back. "What do you think is going on here? As long as it takes!"

David shook his head incredulously, tears forming in his eyes as he laughed hollowly at Robin's words. "I don't believe this..." he said. "What is _wrong _with you? _Wake up_! You haven't found him in two months, what are you gonna do in the next two, call a _psychic_?"

Of all the conversations Robin was not interested in having right now...

"Will you _let me_ worry about that?" he shouted back at David, livid.

"I wish you _would_ worry about that," yelled David, "instead of trying to _kill _me every other day in that goddamn _torture chamber_ of yours!"

Robin stopped dead in his tracks, and instead of the reply he had planned to give, he simply stared at David with narrowing eyes and clenching fists. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Raven with a scowl on her face as she watched them, and Cyborg looking like he wanted to overturn something just to shut them both up, but he ignored them both, hot anger boiling in his veins at David's outburst.

"What?" said David, noticing Robin's discomfort. "You thought if you knocked me out every couple of days in that training room I'd lose track of time or forget what it's like to go outside? You're supposed to be some amazing detective, right? I can't tell if you _can't_ find Cinderblock, or if you're not even _trying_!" David reached up and with a single pull, snapped one of the buttons off of his own shirt collar and threw it onto the ground at Robin's feet. Robin didn't have to pick it up to know which one it was. It was the tracer bug Cyborg had built and that he had snuck into the clothes Beast Boy had lent to David when he first arrived at the tower.

"You've got me under surveillance all the time," said David, stabbing a finger at Robin, "you won't let me leave or talk to anybody else, you keep making me blow things to pieces for hours at a time until I pass out or get a migraine, and _don't tell me_ it's just for self-defence because I know it isn't! What am I _doing_ here? What do you _want_ with me?"

Robin stared back at David for a few moments, his emotions boiling inside him like a pressure cooker ready to explode. He tried to summon an answer, tried to repeat himself for essentially the fifty-first time, but he found he had no words, just a roiling, directionless anger that coursed through him like acid, and he found that all he wanted to do was leave the room. Right now.

Before he could do so, the silence was broken by Raven's book slamming shut as the sorceress stood up from her chair, her expression dangerously threatening.

"I am done listening to this," she said, staring at David with flames dancing in her eyes. You are being hysterical and acting like a selfish idiot. _Stop_ it, _right_ now."

There was no mistaking Raven's tone, and David hesitated only a moment or two before closing his eyes again and slowly exhaling through clenched teeth. "Fine," he snapped, and still holding his side with his left hand, he coldly stalked towards the exit.

Robin was still near-boiling with fury. "Where are you going?" he snapped

David stopped in his tracks. "To the roof," he said, without turning around. "Is that okay? Is that _allowed_? Or is there too much risk that space aliens might try to kidnap me as part of a plot to destroy the city?"

Nobody answered David, and after a second or so, he let out a low groan and turned back around once more. Walking over towards Robin without meeting any of the Titans' gazes, the young kineticist stooped down and picked the discarded tracer bug/shirt button up from where he had thrown it. He held it up to Robin for a moment before sliding it into his pocket. "Happy?" he asked angrily, and without waiting for a reply, he stalked off out of the basement, the doors sliding open and shut to admit him, leaving the four Titans in silence.

For a few seconds, nobody said anything. Then, as the silence became too awkward to bear, Raven sighed and rolled her eyes.

"So _that_ went well..." said Raven sarcastically, turning to Robin.

Robin was presently not in the mood for sarcasm. In fact he was not in the mood for anything. A cold, bitter anger coursed through him, not at the others, nor even so much at David as at himself.

Cyborg sighed as well, a more resigned sigh than Raven's, and slowly he turned back to the T-car. "You two have another shouting match like that, do it somewhere else, eh?" he said over his shoulder. "I'm not getting in the middle of another one."

Starfire approached him from behind slowly. "Is... everything going to be all right?" she asked hesitantly. He knew that fights like this always upset Starfire, and upsetting her was in some ways worse than anything else that could result from them, but it was too late to think about that now.

"He's not stupid, Star," said Cyborg. "I really don't think he's gonna try to leave again."

"That is not what I meant," said Starfire carefully as she neared Robin. He could detect her stare from behind him, almost feel the worry in her eyes, and in his head he could practically hear a voice rebuking him for having caused such worry. He shook his head.

"I'll be in the evidence room," he said curtly, stalking off towards a different door, and the sanctuary of lists of leads, information databases and research methods that he took refuge in at such times. He walked through the door and into the hallway, leaving the other three Titans behind to discuss what had just happened or not, as they liked.

Right now he needed to be busy.

**O-O-O****  
**

Jump City in late spring was a very windy place, especially on the bay. Wind blew off the Pacific Ocean towards the valleys further inland and encountered the skyscrapers of the city and the open waters of the bay. Thermals rose off the water and twisted in every direction, deflecting off islands, racing across the bridges, prompting Jump City's residents to break out windsurf boards and sailboats and kites to take advantage of the warming weather. Higher up, above the kites and the para-sailors, flocks of birds rode the eddying air currents, egrets and pelicans and flocks of squawking seagulls looking for a dropped french-fry or an unguarded hot dog. And often enough, among them all flew a very special bird, a bird that defied identification. At times it appeared a hawk or an eagle, at times a sparrow or a jay, by turns it took the form of a minute, barely-visible hummingbird, or that of a soaring, majestic condor. No matter its size and species though, always its only constant feature was its color, the deep emerald green that revealed it to any Jump City resident as no bird at all.

Beast Boy spread his wings and floated above the clouds of birds that swooped and danced around below him, letting the thermal air current keep him aloft without any need to beat his wings. He was in the form of a swallow, and there were hawks about today, circling at his altitude, but he paid them no mind. Hawks were smart animals, and they had learned long ago not to select the green birds as prey, as the green ones had the habit of turning into pterodactyls when attacked. Beast Boy would never actually hurt them - they were just doing their thing after all - but all it took was once to convince the raptors that their time was better spent targeting the pigeons. Right now he was glad that the other birds were leaving him alone. He didn't want to deal with them. He didn't want to deal with anyone right now.

He turned a slow circle around the bay, letting the wind direct him by turns over the land and the water. He was coming back towards the island in the middle of the bay on which the tower sat when he heard the first explosion. It wasn't particularly powerful. No flash, no puff of smoke, just a echoing sound like a firecracker or a car backfiring heard from far away. Beast Boy turned his head in the direction of the tower, and about ten seconds later there was another one, and he saw with his avian eyes a small glint of light from the roof of the tower and a small figure standing atop it. He winged over and flew towards the tower, descending swiftly, landing atop one of the chimneys that dotted the roof, not sure what was happening, but fairly certain that he could guess.

David was standing on the roof, facing away from him, holding a handful of gravel in his left hand, no doubt plucked from the rooftop just a moment ago, and he took a single small pebble in his right hand, and with a soft grunt and a wince threw it overhand off the tower. He threw like a girl, shoving the rock through the air rather than hurling it, lobbing it up in a long slow arc as it spun off the tower towards the water three hundred feet below. It never got there however, for just as the small rock reached the apex of its flight, David's hand twitched, and it burst into a small puff of dust with the sound of a gunshot, as tiny fragments rained down into the water below. David watched the dust melt away in the stiff breeze, took another half dozen steps along the roof's edge, muttering something to himself in an angry tone, and then turned and threw another pebble off the roof, blowing it to pieces as well. He proceeded in this way for several minutes, walking back and forth slowly, destroying a dozen or more pieces of gravel before he came to a stop, dropping the rest of the gravel back onto the roof as he slid his hand down to his side and clutched it tightly closing his eyes and clenching his teeth to force the pain of his injury away. When it finally subsided, David flopped down onto the roof with a sigh, draping his free hand over his face and massaging his closed eyes, looking very much dead to the world.

Beast Boy might have sighed himself if his current form had possessed vocal cords. As it was, he watched the psychokinetic teen sit there shaking his head and whispering softly to himself for a few moments, before slowly dropping off the chimney onto the ground, and reverting to his human form. David was clearly upset, and Beast Boy didn't know why, but once again, he could guess. They hadn't spoken a word since the afternoon Beast Boy had fought Adonis, the day he had barged into the training session Robin and David were conducting and acted like a total jerk. Since that moment, plenty had happened. He had been turned into a raging Beast, fought Adonis, saved Raven, and acted with such primal fury and instinct that he had scared himself as well as everyone else. Robin had practically accused him of trying to kill Raven, threatened to throw him in jail, even shot at him with rockets when he couldn't stop himself from fleeing into the city. Raven had come and talked to him after that night, assured him that she at least had understood that he didn't intend to hurt her, in fact that he had been trying to save her from Adonis, but that didn't make what Robin had done, had thought of him, any easier to stomach, nor had the knowledge that he had nearly disemboweled Cyborg over a video game, angered Starfire in a way he had sworn he never would again, and at the very least, been a total jerk to David (if not worse). And so he had avoided everyone else as best he could, taking to the air or the water and just staying out of people's way and knowing that he should apologize but convincing himself that if Robin refused to do so after having tried to _kill_ him because of his own mistrust, then it absolved him of any responsibility to take the first step with anyone else.

But here David was, still obviously upset, and Beast Boy remembered what he had said that afternoon, and the hurt look that had come over David when he had said it, and recalled the revulsion that had boiled up inside him at how _weak_ David was, and he felt vaguely sick recalling it. And so with a real sigh, Beast Boy slowly walked over towards David, his heavy velcro shoes making crunching sounds on the gravel-covered rooftop. David's ears perked as he heard Beast Boy approaching, and he lifted his head, but he did not turn around, and Beast Boy approached to within a dozen steps before speaking.

"Hey, dude," he said simply.

David didn't reply immediately, and instead he took a long, slow breath and let it out again. When he finally spoke his voice was even and quiet.

"Hey."

This was not going to be simple.

**O-O-O**

"All scans complete. No matches found to query. Please redefine parameters."

Robin suppressed, with difficulty, the urge to smash the computer in front of him. No matter what he did, no matter where he looked, he always ran right into this same dead end, with the calm, inhuman voice of the computer seeming to mock his inability to find answers. He stared at the monitor as though he could intimidate it into telling him what he wanted to know, but as always, the cursor simply blinked back at him, taunting him with total indifference to his plight. He clenched his teeth and took another gulp of the coffee next to him and tried to focus on another avenue of approach to take.

"Robin?"

Robin jumped, having not heard the door open, and spun around to see Starfire standing in the doorway of the evidence room. Relaxing again slowly, he tried to force a smile to assure her that everything was all right. She had been worried after his fight with David, and he had been unable to muster the wherewithal to convince her that he was okay. He had to admit however that he was surprised to see her here. Generally speaking she didn't venture into the evidence room unless there was some urgent need.

"Is something wrong, Starfire?" he asked, trying to sound as confident and calm as he could.

"What are you doing?"

There was an edge to Starfire's voice that normally wasn't present. Starfire didn't usually mince words, but it was clear that there was a great deal she wanted to say now but wasn't willing to for whatever reason.

"I'm trying to track down Cinderblock," he said as he turned back to the computer, "and find out who's employing him.

He heard Starfire approaching him from behind. "… again?" she asked with worry in her tone. "Have you not already been seeking him?"

"It's important that we find him, Star," said Robin, begrudging the distraction somewhat. Not that he didn't like talking to Starfire, but he had work to do right now.

"But… is there new evidence that leads you to believe that he shall be located presently?" she asked in her inimitable fashion. Robin caught the implication, but once again, he had work to do, and there simply wasn't time for this now.

"I just have to keep looking until I find him," he said, typing a new search query into the computer as he did so.

"Then there is no new evidence?"

"I'll find him," insisted Robin, "no matter how long it takes."

It did not occur to Robin that this might have been the wrong thing to say until he heard Starfire sharply inhale at his words and walk over to place a hand on the top of his chair.

"Robin, perhaps it…" she hesitated, unsure how to say what she was trying to say, "… is it possible that Cinderblock may not be found?"

"He can't hide forever," said Robin as the computer search came up empty again. "I _will_ find him."

"But, is it _necessary_…"

"Of _course_ it's necessary!" shouted Robin before he could stop himself, spinning his chair around to face Starfire. "He's killed more than fifty people, and he's part of a conspiracy aimed at killing more! How can you ask if it's necessary to find him?"

Starfire withdrew a step or two, her eyes wide in surprise. "That is not what I meant!" she protested. "I meant to ask if it was necessary for you to devote yourself entirely to the search for Cinderblock as you once did for Slade?"

"It's my _job_!" insisted Robin with far more vigor than he had intended to. "It's _my_ responsibility! I _have_ to find him!"

"But…"

Robin turned his chair back to the computer. "You know what this is like, Starfire," he said, "if we don't do what we're supposed to, people die. It's that simple."

"But, Robin, surely there is…"

"I can't let him get away with what he's done, and I can't let the people he's working for go unopposed. None of us can."

"Robin, _please_! It is not necessary to…"

"Even if I couldn't find him after the last attack, it's my duty to keep trying. I won't let someone else die because I wasn't able to…"

"_Robin, stop this!_"

Starfire's words were not a request or a plea, they were a demand, and her voice was louder and more commanding than Robin had ever heard it, save once. It brought him up short, and he slowly turned his chair back around to see her standing in the middle of the evidence room with her fists clenched, and her eyes gleaming. Her gaze was not that of a naive girl, but that of an angered alien, fully as fierce and as desperate as the first time he had met her, when she had been an escaped prisoner willing to lay fight an entire alien army rather than be enslaved once more by the Gordanians.

Robin stopped.

**O-O-O**

"You feeling okay?"

David shrugged softly and glanced down at his bandaged side. "I've had worse," he said, and then chuckled at his own presumption. "… I guess that says something."

"Yeah," said Beast Boy, who was standing next to David on the edge of the roof. "So uh… can I sit down?"

David, who was already seated, glanced up at Beast Boy and raised an eyebrow. "It's your Tower," he said, and he gestured at the patch of roof next to him for Beast Boy to sit. Beast Boy did so. Neither one spoke for a bit, staring out at the bay and the city beyond it. Only after enough time had passed to make it clear that David wasn't going to start speaking on his own, did Beast Boy break the silence.

"Look," he said, turning to David. "I'm really sorry about what I said before. Back before you got hurt. I was acting like a jerk. I didn't mean any of that stuff, about you being too weak and everything."

"Yeah you did," said David evenly.

"No, _dude_, I really didn't, honest," insisted Beast Boy. "And even if I did, I wouldn't anymore after all the stuff that happened that night."

"What stuff?" asked David, sounding disgusted, "I stole a bike and nearly got killed _again_ by an enraged gorilla. Very impressive. Plus apparently I put the whole city in danger again. I'm on a roll."

Beast Boy paused. "Who said that?"

David turned his head towards Beast Boy. "Guess," he said.

"Oh." So David had _also_ had a fight with Robin. Well at least he wasn't the only one. David returned to staring out at the city, and Beast Boy made another attempt.

"But, dude, I'm serious," he said, "I'd never really think that."

"And _why not_?" snapped David back at Beast Boy. "Everyone _else_ seems to! And they're right!"

Beast Boy had been through this line of arguments before however with Cyborg, albeit from David's perspective, and he didn't skip a beat. "Oh yeah?" he asked, recalling Cyborg's third-hand account of what had happened to David during that crazy night, "what about that girl you rescued from the drunk guy? Did she think so?"

This one caught David off-guard, and his frustration melted away instantly. "Maybe…" he said, returning his gaze to the city.

"Dude, trust me, there's no way." He grinned a bit at David. "Did you try to tell her you weren't a superhero?"

David closed his eyes and chuckled a bit. "Yeah."

"Did she believe you?"

"I don't think so." he said, shaking his head and smiling.

Beast Boy's grin expanded to its usual proportions and he lightly shoved David's shoulder. "You see, dude! You totally impressed her. You should go ask her out!"

David laughed openly at the suggestion. "Right," in a voice dripping with sarcasm.

"I'm _serious,_ dude! Chicks dig the knight in shining armor thing! You'll see! The superhero angle totally works!"

He might have continued, but right then Beast Boy realized he had said something wrong, as David's face fell and the kineticist lapsed back into silence. Beast Boy sat there, tongue-tied for a moment, "... what'd I say?" he asked finally.

David glanced deadpan at Beast Boy for a second. "The 'superhero angle'?"

Was _that_ it? The green changeling shook his head and chuckled. "Dude, _seriously_, you've _gotta_ stop worrying so much about that word. So you're a kinetic? So what? I'm green. Cyborg's a... cyborg. You don't think we're weird do you?"

David blinked at Beast Boy as the changeling smiled confidently. "Uh... no comment."

"_Duuude_" said Beast Boy with a broad grin. "Totally not fair!"

"Hey, you asked!" said David, raising one hand defensively.

Beast Boy chuckled. "C'mon dude," he said, "you sound like being a superhero's a bad thing. Why not just go with it for a while? It's not like you don't have the powers to back it up."

"It's not a _bad _thing..." said David, shaking his head "It's just not _me_, you know? I'm nothing like you guys."

"Well... maybe not _now_ dude," said Beast Boy, "but..."

Beast Boy trailed off, and David turned and raised an eyebrow. "But what?"

"Well... dude... why not?"

**O-O-O**

Starfire stood transcendent before Robin, her fists clenched tightly enough to crush coal into diamonds, as she glared down at her leader unblinkingly. She neither moved nor spoke, but instead her eyes bored holes into Robin's, and he gulped softly and tried to adopt a conciliatory tone.

"Um... what's... wrong, Star?" he asked.

"What is wrong," said the angry alien princess, "is that you are behaving like a royal zarbnarf!"

"A what?" asked Robin. Was that a good or a bad thing?

"A zarbnarf is one who does not concern himself with the feelings of others," she said impassively. "On my planet, it is considered shameful to act in such a fashion."

Despite the upsetting novelty of having Starfire annoyed with him, Robin still maintained enough anger from his previous conversation to challenge her claim. "Is this about David?" he asked, "because I _really _don't want to talk about that anymore. He put the whole city in..."

"This has _nothing_ to do with Friend David," insisted Starfire, cutting Robin off, "any more than it has to do with Friend Beast Boy."

Robin's eyes narrowed beneath his mask. "That's also not something I want to talk about right now. I already had this discussion with Raven, and if Beast Boy can't understand that I had to..."

"As I said before," repeated Starfire, not backing down an inch, "this has nothing to do with Friend Beast Boy either. It has to do with you."

"Then it can wait," said Robin, turning back to his computer. "I've got a lot of work to do."

"I believe Friend Cyborg would say that this is 'tough'," said Starfire. "Now _please _turn around so that we may talk, or else!"

Robin hesitated. Was Starfire making a _threat_? "Or else what?"

"Or else," she said, a note of hesitation in her voice, "I shall... think of something unpleasant to do to you until you do so!"

"Starfire, I _really_ need to..."

"I shall cover you in mustard and hang you by your feet from the roof of the tower and let the seagulls attack you for an entire night and day and then I shall think up something else to do to you, Robin, unless you turn around and speak to me _this instant_!" exclaimed Starfire, in a voice that was not at all humorous, the above statement notwithstanding. Robin turned back slowly, half-expecting to see her already brandishing one of the half-gallon jugs of mustard that they kept for special occasions for her. She was not, of course, but the look in her eyes was desperate enough to make him believe that her next move would be to raid the refrigerator for one.

"Look, Starfire, why is this so urgent?" asked Robin. "I'm sorry if I upset you back there but I need to find..."

Starfire cut him off yet again. "It is urgent," she said, "because you are preparing to hide in the evidence room once more instead of speaking to your friends, just as you did during the time of Slade's campaign. You refused to trust us and you refused to trust yourself to be able to stop Slade, and so you barricaded yourself in this place for weeks without seeing any of us, and we both know what became of that. You attempted to stop Slade yourself at the expense even of your friendship with us... and you became a criminal, first as a ploy, and then because you thought there was no choice."

Robin felt a flash of anger that Starfire would bring that long-past incident up again, and forced it down again, remembering just how upset she had been even after their first major victory over Slade.

"Starfire," he said as gently as he could, not sure if she was about to cry or hit him or something else altogether, "I know that was a mistake, I told you so, and you know I'd never do that again."

"But you _are_ doing it again!" she insisted, waving her hands around to gesture at the evidence room and the equipment and newspaper clippings within it, "or if not that, then something resembling it! You are becoming upset and hiding in this room of evidence once again, and you will stay in here for weeks once more, until you are so desperate to protect us that you will do something else that is a mistake because you still refuse to trust that we will trust you and support you as our friend! Last time you did this because you could not think of a way to stop Slade without putting all of us in danger, and this time..."

Starfire hesitated and lowered her eyes, unsure if she had gone too far, but Robin said nothing in return, so concerned and desperate was Starfire's voice and tone that the arguments he was already preparing defending his behavior and explaining why it was important that he do what he was doing all seemed to melt away like snow in the sunlight. Several moments of silence went by before he prodded her to finish.

"This time?"

"This time," said the Tamaranian girl, "you are doing it because you know that you will never find the Cinderblock."

**O-O-O**

David blinked slowly at Beast Boy as Beast Boy sat crouched on the roof next to him. "... you can't be serious."

Beast Boy grinned. "Why not?"

"Look at me," said David, speaking slowly as if repeating the obvious. "Do I look _heroic _to you? Do I go out and solve crimes and fight bad guys and make the world a better place?"

"You gave Cinderblock something to think about, didn't you?"

"Yeah, 'cause he was trying to _kill me_! Not for the "greater good" or some 'hero's code'."

"Pft," scoffed Beast Boy, "so what dude? You still got him, and besides if all you were thinking about is not getting killed, why'd you go out after Raven and me?"

David lowered his head and chuckled. "Because I'm an _idiot_." Beast Boy laughed at that, and his laugh was infectious enough that David did too.

"Seriously though, dude," said Beast Boy, "why'd you do it? I mean Robin told you not to go, right?"

"Yeah," said David, "and he wasn't too happy that I went."

"Well you had to know he was gonna be like that, right? And you went anyway. So why?"

"Honestly," said David quietly, shaking his head, "I don't know. It just... I guess it seemed like the thing to do at the time."

Beast Boy smiled and nodded. "Uh huh, and what about the thing in the alley?"

"Well," hesitated David, "she was... getting attacked, or close enough to it! I mean it was happening right there in front of me, I had to do _something_!"

"Exactly!" exclaimed Beast Boy with a broad grin, and he leaned back and crossed his arms, satisfied at having made his point.

David blinked in confusion. "... what?"

"Dude, don't you get it?" said Beast Boy, "That's what this thing is! That's what we do!"

"You... what?"

Beast Boy groaned and stood up, waving his arms around at the Tower they were standing on. "This! All this superhero stuff! That's all it is. We go around and try to help people and fight bad guys because," he shrugged, "because we _can_! Because someone's gotta do it! Because we're all friends and we look out for each other! Because we see people in trouble and we try to help! That's all there is to it, dude. It's not like someone showed up one day and said that the five of us were chosen ones or something and assigned Jump City to us. We all just ran into each other in the middle of an alien invasion, and we decided we had to stop it, and after we did, we figured that we made a pretty good team, so we stuck together. That's it! We all do what we think the right thing is, and kick a lot of bad guy butt in the meantime!"

David watched Beast Boy with a blank stare on his face. "... that's it?"

"Of course!" exclaimed the changeling, "What did you think, that we got appointed by the Justice League or something? That we all got permits? We're just like other people that try to do what's right, except we're not, you know? None of us actually goes around like they've gotta be perfect all the time..."

David raised an eyebrow.

"Okay, nobody but_ Robin _does that, but that's why he's in charge... sorta. But d'you see what I mean? All that stuff you did, it's the same thing we do."

"Come on," said David, shaking his head and wincing. "It's not at _all_ the same thing. I mean, look at what you guys _do_, _every _day! I can't do a _fraction_ of..."

"That's just practice, dude!" said Beast Boy, gesturing with his hands. "I've been at this stuff since I was seven!"

David's eyes widened. "You have?"

"Yep!" said the changeling with a boisterous grin as he adopted a suitably 'heroic' pose. "I was with the Doom Patrol before the Titans. I've kicked more bad guy butt than anyone here except maybe Robin..." he suddenly began to wonder, and screwed up his face as he thought about it. "... and Starfire," he added, as he began counting on his fingers.

"There _has_ to be more to it than that," said David. "You make it sound like _anybody _can do this stuff!"

"What?" asked Beast Boy, having lost count somewhere around the Titans' first encounter with Trident. "No, no way, dude. Not everyone can be like us. I mean it can be really tough sometimes... when the bad guys look like they're gonna win or when one of your friends gets hurt..." he trailed off. "Not many people are willing to go out and fight like we have to. A lot of people just try not to rock the boat."

"Yeah," said David, "like me."

Beast Boy grinned knowingly. "Oh yeah? I'd say you rocked it pretty hard a couple nights ago."

"Yeah, and that was _such_ a great idea."

"Dude, who _cares_ if it was a good idea or not, you were trying to help us, right? Even after I acted like a jerk to you? Cinderblock didn't attack you, nobody got hurt, nobody _else _at least, and if you hadn't been there, then that girl might've been killed. It's all good!"

"Tell Robin that," scoffed David.

"Yeah," said Beast Boy, his own bitterness creeping back up inside him as he balled one of his gloved hands into a fist, "well, Robin's not always right."

David sighed and rubbed his bandaged side. "Maybe not," he said, "but he _is_ this time. I mean I _didn't_ know Cinderblock wasn't going to be out there, and I didn't even have a plan for what I'd _do _if I found you guys. I just... ugh."

"So, live and learn, dude," said Beast Boy, pushing the bitterness aside again, "Adonis might've kicked your butt, but you're still here, right? Next time you'll have a plan or you'll be able to deal with him better."

David groaned, shaking his head at Beast Boy. "There isn't gonna _be _a next time, Beast Boy," he said. "I can't leave the tower anymore, or Cinderblock or some monster from the Black Lagoon might take out half the city trying to get at me. Everyone outside the tower thinks I died months ago, so they're not going to come looking for me, and even if they did, Robin's... he's _right_. It's too risky to let anyone else know I'm alive. It doesn't matter if I 'have what it takes' or not, I'm stuck here until this is all over and Robin isn't about to let me pretend I can match up to any of you guys anyway..."

Beast Boy blinked in near astonishment at David as he lowered his head and sulked. Several moments passed before David noticed that Beast Boy was staring at him. "... what?" he asked.

"Dude," said Beast Boy, "how can you not know this?"

"How can I not know what?" asked David.

Beast Boy shook his head incredulously. "What do you think you and Robin are _doing_ in the training room?"

David blinked. "Self... defense lessons," he stammered unconvincingly. "It's just learning how to stop from..."

Beast Boy smiled and shook his head.

"... it's just self-defense," insisted David, "right?"

"Um... dude? Please don't tell me you actually bought that..."

The kineticist fell silent for a few moments, and Beast Boy watched, waiting for the moment when David's eyes widened in surprise as what was previously obvious to everyone except him suddenly popped into his head.

"Wait..."

**O-O-O**

"You will never find the Cinderblock."

Everything, every fiber of Robin's being, seemed to react to that simple statement with rejection and anger. It was with difficulty that he fought off the urge to shout an angry denial and turn back to the business of _proving_ that he could find Cinderblock by finding him, no matter how long it took. Had it been Cyborg or Raven or Beast Boy making that claim, he would have taken it as, at best a challenge, at worst an accusation, but Starfire's tone could not have been further from such things, and as she gazed down at the floor almost mournfully, Robin struggled to find an answer, and settled on defiant rejection.

"I _will_ find him," he said with narrowed eyes and clenched fists. "I _will_ find Cinderblock _and_ his employers."

Starfire slowly shook her head as she lifted her eyes to look at Robin once more. "No," she said, "you will not. He cannot be found, not now."

"You don't know that!" snapped Robin before he could stop himself.

"I _do_ know it, Robin" said Starfire, maintaining a far more reasonable tone than he was, "because I trust you. I trust that you have attempted to find the Cinderblock for many weeks now without relent. I trust that you are among the finest detectives who have ever lived on this planet. I trust that if it were possible to find the Cinderblock at all, then you would have discovered his whereabouts and uncovered the plot that he is involved in."

She sighed and slowly walked over and placed a hand on Robin's shoulder. "But you have not found the Cinderblock, even with all the searching and the hours spent in here, and because I trust you, Robin, I trust that this is because whoever has employed him has made him impossible to find." She glanced past him for a second at the normally well-organized workbench, now covered in papers, files, CDs, books, and microfilm, "Tell me truthfully," she said, "has there been any sign of the Cinderblock in all your searches?"

Robin didn't know what to say. He didn't know how he felt about what Starfire was saying, save that all of a sudden, he felt incredibly tired. He slowly slumped down into his chair and took a long, slow breath as he rubbed his eyes through his mask. "No," he admitted bitterly, "nothing."

Starfire seemed unperturbed by his admission. "Then why do you insist on continuing to seek for something that is not there to be found?"

"Because it's my job, Starfire," said Robin, feeling his resolve starting to return to him. "Because if nobody finds Cinderblock then more people could be hurt the next time he attacks."

He expected Starfire to argue with him some more, but instead, Starfire nodded slowly and clasped her hands behind her back.

"Do you remember," she asked, "when I first arrived on this planet, and how it was that I came to be here?"

Robin nodded. "Those Gordanians were taking you back to their planet to be a slave. You escaped them."

"Yes," said Starfire, "but that was... not the first time that I attempted to do so."

Robin said nothing, and Starfire sighed and sat down in another chair as she attempted to explain.

"When I first came to be a prize for the Gordanians," she said, "they placed me in chains and locked me within a great prison on one of their fortress-worlds. Every day, I struggled and strained to find some way of escaping from the prison, and returning to Tamaran, but the prison they had built for me was too strong. I told myself that in all prisons there is always some way to escape, and so I tried everything I could think of to do, and always I was unable to so much as get out of my cell. And so after many months, I realized that I was not able to escape from the prison, and then I understood that the only way for me to escape was if I was no longer held within it."

Robin slowly clenched his teeth. The concept of Starfire as a helpless prisoner was one he tried never to think of. Still, she clearly had a point in telling him all this, and so he waited.

"One day," she said, "I ceased seeking a way out of the prison. I became docile and compliant with the Gordanian's commands. I pretended that I no longer wished to escape, and wished only to live out my days as their slave. It took some time to convince them that I was no longer a threat, but eventually they decided that they would transport me to their homeworld to be exhibited as a prize of war before their King. It was for that purpose that they placed me within the Gordanian Cruiser..."

"... and then you escaped?"

Starfire nodded. "They could not make a starship as secure as they could their prison-world, and they did not believe that I had enough of the... spirit... to make it necessary. The orange-skinned alien girl smiled innocently as she beheld Robin's gaze. "It was an error."

'Understatement of the year,' thought Robin as Starfire stood back up.

"Robin," she said, "I do not pretend to understand everything about your planet and all of the strange people and creatures that we have fought in protecting it, but... I do understand that there are times when we must be patient with ourselves if we are to perform our role as Titans. If you cannot find Cinderblock, Robin, then it is not because you have failed as a hero or as our leader, but because Cinderblock cannot be found by any seeker, and perhaps the best thing for us to do is to prepare for what we shall do when or if he returns, rather than trying to find something that cannot be found."

Her words made sense, and her voice was reasonable and calm and concerned, and Robin wanted more than anything to agree and just let this damned search go, but everything he felt inside, everything he knew, told him that this was the way of giving up, of surrendering, of admitting that he was beaten. He couldn't do that. He just couldn't.

"I can't let Cinderblock get away with this," he said. "I can't do it, Star. He has to be stopped."

"And he will be stopped," she said, a touch more confidence in her words than she had voiced earlier. "Just as I never planned to abandon my attempts to escape," she said, "we need not abandon our wish to see Cinderblock and his associates receive the kicking of the butt they so richly deserve." Robin had to bite his tongue to avoid laughing at Starfire's awkward construction, and perhaps she noticed, as she paused and asked uncertainly "Do you... understand the meaning of my comparison?"

"I get what you're saying," he said. "If we stop hunting for Cinderblock, his masters might feel safe enough to let him out again, and this time we'd be ready." He exhaled slowly and shook his head, trying to suppress the voice inside that cursed him for a coward for even thinking about calling off the search.

"But that will only work," said Starfire, "if you can trust us."

This comment brought Robin up short, and he lifted his head sharply. "What?" he asked, "I _do_ trust you guys, you _know_ that! How can you say that..."

"Forgive me," said Starfire, "that was not what I meant. You do trust us to fight at your side, and to support you as best we can. You trust us to be your friends, and to be the heroes that you have taught us to be. What you do not trust us to do, is to trust _you_."

Robin blinked stupidly, uncertain of what Starfire was trying to say. "What?"

"Once more," said Starfire with a sigh, lowering her gaze, "forgive me if I do not understand, but I believe Robin that you feel, as I once did, that to stop trying is to give up all hope, and that if you no longer seek for Cinderblock, you fear we will think that you are weak or despairing or unfit to lead us." She raised her eyes again to look at Robin. "Nothing could be further from the truth. You do not see that we trust you, Robin, to do what you think to be right, because that is what you always do, even at great risk to yourself. You believe we will not trust you if you do this, just as you believe that Beast Boy -"

"I thought you said this didn't have anything to do with Beast Boy," interrupted Robin.

"It does not," she replied. "Please let me finish. You believed that Beast Boy had become a monster and had harmed Raven, and so did Cyborg and I, and we were wrong. But you do not trust that Beast Boy will ever be able to forgive you for doubting him. You believe that you failed Beast Boy, and that he will never forgive you for it, because you do not understand that he trusts you, and even if he is angry now, he will forgive you if you ask him for it, just as he did Cyborg and I. You trust us and forgive us when we make mistakes and make errors, but you do not see that we trust and forgive you when you do such things as well."

Robin watched Starfire in silence, unable to think of what to say, and slowly his certainty that there was nothing to be done but to stand his ground and keep looking forever if need be began to die away.

"We worry about you," said Starfire. "I worry about you, and I do not wish to see you cause yourself anguish because you cannot trust us to trust you. If you truly believe that you will find Cinderblock by locking yourself in this room and searching for him, then I shall leave you be and wait for you to finish." She smiled. "But if you do not believe this, and you are merely searching because you are afraid that we will think less of you if you do not, then you will either stop this at once, or I shall go and fetch the mustard and the bungee cord and get Beast Boy to locate the seagulls."

Robin couldn't help but smile as Starfire said that, and slowly he stood up from his chair. Starfire stood before him, trying not to look excited and failing as always, and finally with a glance back at the desk littered with papers, he nodded to her.

"All right," he said with a smile. "We'll do it your way." And as he said it, the glow in Starfire's eyes and the smile that appeared on her face seemed to banish his fears that this was entirely the wrong thing to do back into the recesses of his mind, and fill the room with joy and happiness and song. Starfire nearly squealed as she threw her arms around Robin's neck and gave him a bone-crushing hug that left him gasping for breath.

"I am so relieved that you will not be locking yourself away!" she said happily. "Now we can all participate in Gorb-Gorb, the Tamaranean festival of berating drapery!"

Robin had learned by now just to smile and nod at such things. "Uh... looking... forward to it!" he said, declining to try to unravel what _that_ could possibly mean. "But before we can do that, we still have to figure out what to do about David." Remembering that this insoluble problem was still hanging over him dispensed with much of the good will that he had felt infusing the room.

To his surprise, Starfire merely giggled at his comment. "... what?" he asked, self-consciously.

"Robin," she said, "you still do not trust us to trust you."

"What are you talking about?"

"You already know what you are going to 'do about David'," she said, "even if you hide it with words like 'self-defense'. We all can see this, even Beast Boy. But you must trust that we will trust in your decision to try."

Robin blinked. "You... _all_?"

Starfire nodded.

"But... I didn't even decide yet...!"

"Yes you did, you simply were afraid of what we would say once you told us, especially of what Beast Boy would say." Starfire's smile was almost arrogant in the way she announced so matter-of-factly what he had been thinking. He made a mental note to ask Raven if the there were any other telepaths in the tower.

"And... Beast Boy's all right with it?"

"I do not know if Beast Boy is all right with the it," she said, "but I believe he understands, and I know that he trusts you to make the right decision, even if you do not."

Robin shook his head, allowing himself a chuckle as he considered what was going on here. "So then I guess we just have to ask David himself."

Starfire smiled once more, placing her hand back on Robin's shoulder. "Friend David...does not trust himself or others yet," she said. "He has never had a family, or... I believe many friends. But though he was wrong to do so, he left the Tower attempting to aid us in locating our friends. I believe that... he will be willing to try at least, if we can learn to trust him, and teach him how to trust us."

**O-O-O**

"No way, _no way,_ man," said David, backing away from Beast Boy with his hands held out in front of him, as though warding off some kind of monster. "There's just no way."

"I'm _telling you_ dude, he's putting you through Superhero 101. It's just like what Mento and Elasti-girl used to do with me back in the Doom Patrol."

"Robin _said_ it was self defence!" exclaimed David, still refusing to see. "Why the hell would he lie about it?"

"Don't even get me _started_ on all the stuff Robin does just to be weird," said Beast Boy with a scoff. "He probably had some plan or other to tell you later, after it was over or something."

"But why _me_?"

Beast Boy blinked. "Why you?" he asked, incredulous. "Um... _hello_? Paging Mr. Psychokewhatsit! You have _superpowers_! How many people with that sort of thing do you think we _have _stashed in the tower?"

"Yeah but... so _what_?"

Beast Boy blinked in astonishment. "Dude, are you _crazy_? What do you mean 'so what'? You've had these powers for a while, right? Didn't you ever imagine you _might _be superhero material when you were a kid?"

"_Hell_ no," said David, as though the very thought were abhorrent. Beast Boy paused in place, not entirely able to believe what he was hearing.

"Never?"

"Not since they showed up," said David.

"Um... dude?" said Beast Boy hesitantly, his eyes widening slightly at the admission. "That's... a little weird."

David gave a hollow laugh, then bent over and picked up another rock. "No," he said, "that's not weird." He turned and hurled the rock off the roof again, and detonated it in mid-air, sending small fragments raining down towards the water below. "_That's_ weird," he said, turning back to Beast Boy and pointing his finger at the puff of smoke left behind by the blast.

"It's your power," said Beast Boy, "it's supposed to be weird! That's why they call it a superpower. You think that's weird, try turning into a bacteria and going into Cyborg's body."

Beast Boy had expected that comment to produce the usual blank stare followed by David asking him about that particular endeavor (a memorable one, to say the least), but it did not. Instead David clenched both fists and his teeth and breathed painfully through his injury, narrowing his eyes to almost slits and responding in what was almost a hostile voice.

"Don't you _get it_?" he asked Beast Boy, his teeth still clenched and his voice constricted to a snarl. "I could _kill_ you, right here,right now, just by _thinking_ about it. I could blow the ground out from under you. I could make your belt implode and cut you in half. With a little work, I might even be able to turn your _teeth_ into hand grenades. _Think_ about that for a second. Even if I couldn't actually do it to _you_, because you're a superhero or whatever, I could do it to anyone I meet, without anyone even knowing it was me. I could do it_ accidentally_!"

"Whoa, dude," said Beast Boy, backing up slightly, "I thought you said you had control of..."

"I _do_ have control, but are you telling me I'm never gonna make a mistake? Ever? 'Cause if I do make one, guess what happens. And the more you guys make me practice this stuff and use these powers, and the more Robin tries to get me to use them without hesitating or whatever, the better the chances are that I'm gonna make that mistake. The next time something happens, an attack or even just something normal like car accident or a fire or some guy getting in my face, what happens if I panic? What happens if I just react all of a sudden? I see something behind me or I think I hear Cinderblock's voice or I get really pissed off at something and then..."

David fell silent, dropping his hands and exhaling slowly as Beast Boy stood silently, not sure of what to say. David needed a second to regain use of his voice, and when he did, he continued.

"I told Robin once," he said, "that I don't want to die, and I don't want to kill anyone, and I wasn't joking. And now you're telling me he wants me to turn into some kind of..." David trailed off, clenching his eyes shut, as though he couldn't bring himself to finish the sentence.

"I don't... know what Robin wants," said Beast Boy. That much at least was true. "I'm... I'm sorry, dude. I wasn't trying to say you have to do this or make this call now or whatever. I was just saying that's what it looks like Robin's getting ready to do. I thought you knew."

David scoffed at the idea as he stepped back and leaned against a large pipe before sliding down it into a seated position. "Beast Boy, I don't know _anything_," he said bitterly. "I don't know what the hell I'm doing here, I don't know what's going on, I don't know what these powers are or how they work or why, or if they're gonna start going off by themselves one day like everyone seems to think they will or should, or why it gives me a headache to use them." He fell silent for a moment or two, before a slight smile came to his face and he glanced up at Beast Boy. "Is it always this complicated around here?"

"Dude," said Beast Boy, "you shoulda seen _last _year." David could only shake his head as Beast Boy walked over and sat down next to him. Neither one said anything for a little bit, before Beast Boy broke the silence yet again.

"So," he said without turning his head, "you... don't wanna be a superhero?"

He heard David sigh softly. "I didn't say that," he said. "I just... never even thought about it, you know? And now it's like Robin's already made the decision and didn't tell me or something."

"It's really not like that," said Beast Boy. "Robin can be kind of a jerk, but he'd never make the decision for you. It's your choice."

"Great," said David, "now if I only could figure out how to make it, that would be something."

"Well, dude, you mind if I ask you something?"

"Sure."

"You really _never_ thought you could be a superhero one day?"

David shook his head almost whimsically. "Never once."

"Why not?"

David turned his head to look at Beast Boy to see if the question was genuine, and Beast Boy explained. "I'm just saying, every kid I know of wanted to be superman when they grew up. All the kids we deal with, even the ones in the orphanages around town all wanna be like us. There's even this class full of kids who are missing an arm or a leg, and have fake ones, that all write to Cyborg because they think he's just like them. And you've actually _got_ superpowers, dude. A lotta kids would kill for those. So... you know... what gives? Are we all _that_ crazy?"

David smiled at Beast Boy's last question. "It's not you guys," he said. "It's... those kids wish they were superheroes because they don't know what that is. They don't have powers so they think about how cool it would be to fly or do magic or turn into animals, and I'm sure that stuff _is_ really cool. But I don't do any of that. I blow things up. I _destroy_ things. That's _it_. That's not what I use my powers for, that's what my powers _are_. I knew that when I was eight. The first time I ever blew something up, I think it was a concrete block or something... I didn't sit there and think 'wow, look at that, that's so cool', I thought 'oh crap, what if someone else saw that?'" He chuckled and shook his head a bit. "I always sort of assumed that if I ever really _met_ a superhero because of these powers, it would be because they were coming to get me and stop me from using them, not to try and get me to use them _more_. If I was gonna be a super-anything, it wasn't going to be a hero. I mean how many superheroes go around blowing things up all day?"

Beast Boy shrugged. "Robin carries bombs," he said. "Cyborg has a cannon in his arm. Raven can blow stuff up with her powers, she even does it by accident sometimes."

David groaned softly. "Fine," he said, "that's good for Raven and Cyborg and Robin. They're _heroic_. _You're_ heroic. That dragon thing attacked, and you all just went after it. Cinderblock or some other monster shows up, and you drop everything and fight it just so that it can't hurt anyone else. That's not me at all. When that dragon attacked, I nearly jumped off the damn tower. Cinderblock showed up looking for me and I ran away. If he shows up again, I'll probably do it again. So you tell me, does that sound like the sort of person you'd want to have around in the middle of one of your fights?"

Beast Boy did not even hesitate. "Hell yes!"

_That_ produced the blank stare.

"Dude," he said, smiling and clapping David on the back, "I don't think I wanna _meet_ the guy who isn't afraid of the stuff _we_ fight. Even _Robin_ wouldn't pretend to be like that. Raven might but she's just like that, she isn't actually as cold-blooded as she pretends to be, trust me. When that dragon showed up, I totally freaked out."

"Yeah, and then you turned into a dinosaur and tried to rip its throat out," said David. "You _fight_ those things. I don't."

"Like _hell_ you don't!" insisted Beast Boy. "You blew up that water tank, remember? You knocked it off the tower. When Robin took on Cinderblock in the street that one time, you set a car off in his hands. You shoulda heard Cyborg afterwards. He was totally impressed."

David shook his head. "Was he also impressed with how I shot Robin? And a lot of good the water tank did. The dragon barely noticed."

Beast Boy jumped back up to his feet again. "Dude!" he cried, grinning and gripping the side of his head. "Don't you get it? Who _cares_ if it didn't work? So you screwed up? You wanna know how many times _I_ screwed up when I was with the Doom Patrol? At least you were _trying_ to get it right. Robin once turned himself into a criminal because he thought it was a good idea! Raven lost it when we were fighting this crazy guy called Dr. Light and nearly _ate_ him or something. And don't even get me started on Larry..."

"Larry?"

"Robin's clone from another dimension. _Really_ long story." David seemed to take his word for that one, and Beast Boy finished up as quickly as he could.

"Look, dude, I know you don't get what's going on here. I don't either half the time. And I know you don't think you've got what it takes to do it, but think about what happened again. You blew up the water tank when the Dragon was trying to eat Starfire. You blew up the car when Cinderblock was trying to crush Robin with it. You saved that Carrie girl from the guy who was after her, and maybe even from Adonis too, and you even risked _Robin_ getting mad at you to come after me and Raven. Yeah, some of those things didn't go so well, or maybe you shouldn't've done 'em, but... you asked me if that was the kind of person I'd want to have around when we fought somebody?" He smiled warmly and extended a hand to help David up. "Totally."

David did not take Beast Boy's hand immediately, indeed he almost looked like he had lost his motor skills. He stared up at Beast Boy like a shell shock victim, as if he couldn't associate what Beast Boy had just said with himself. Eventually though, he recovered enough sense to take Beast Boy's hand and slowly stand back up, his eyes unfocused and blinking, and Beast Boy grinned and considered if he should take the opportunity to try and convince David of something totally hilarious, but thought better of it.

"You... really mean that?" David asked slowly.

"Well, I don't know if you'll ever be as awesome or kick as much butt as _me_," he said with a broad grin, "but not everyone can be this cool, just ask Cyborg." David did not seem to appreciate the joke, so Beast Boy laughed anyway and continued. "It'll be fine, dude. It's not like we're gonna send you out tomorrow to go take something down yourself. I'm sure Robin knows what he's doing, or at least he thinks he does. Just don't stress about it."

David shook his head, as though trying to clear it after a boxing bout. "Sorry," he said, "it's just... kinda weird even thinking about this. I mean Robin was really _pissed_, and we had a big fight about that thing with Adonis... and now you're telling me he actually wants me to be... like you guys?"

"He just wants to see if you can do it," said Beast Boy, artfully avoiding saying all the things he could have quite easily said about Robin right around now. "He's Robin, so he's probably got his own weird reasons. Just... don't worry about what he thinks so much." His smile failed as he turned away slightly. "I don't."

If David noticed anything the matter however, he gave no sign. He let out a long breath, and then turned back to Beast Boy. "So you think... I should go talk to him?"

"Who, Robin?" Beast Boy shrugged. "I dunno, dude. I can totally understand not wanting to deal with him sometimes."

David shook his head slowly. "He was probably right," he said with a sigh. "I'm just not sure about all this..."

"So don't worry about it. If you don't want to do this stuff, you really don't have to."

"It's not that," said David, turning and looking out at the city. "I just..." He chuckled. "I actually _liked_ being normal, you know? No superpowers or monsters or plots to kill me or anything, just... school and the other kids and the social workers and everything else." He sighed and shook his head. "And it's like that's all over with now, even if we do catch Cinderblock. And it's like part of me wants to just say 'go for it' and run downstairs and totally do this, and the other parts wants to go home."

He laughed again at that statement. "Go home. I don't have any family, I haven't lived in one place for longer than nine months since I was two, and most of the places I did live were state-run orphanages, and I'm sitting here talking about that like it's home." He rolled his eyes and took a long slow breath. "I guess it is..." he said.

"It's what you know," said Beast Boy. "I grew up doing this stuff, so it was totally natural for me. I know it's gotta be pretty weird for you."

"It's not the weirdness..." said David. "I think I melted my weirdness circuit back when that dragon showed up anyhow. It's that it's... permanent. I mean you can't... do this stuff that you guys do and then just stop and go off and become a normal person again, can you?"

"Well uh..." said Beast Boy sheepishly. "I'm not sure. I mean... you know... I'm green."

David's face fell. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to..."

"No, dude, really, I get it. It's not a small thing to just go and do. I can't help you decide, but... I mean it's not all bad, in fact it's really pretty sweet. Everyone looks up to you, everyone knows who you are. People stop you on the street and say that they think you're awesome, and on top of that... I mean your job is to help people by taking out bad guys. It's hard and it hurts sometimes and it's dangerous and you worry a lot about if you're gonna be able to do it... but if you can do it, it's really the coolest thing in the world. I mean it."

David considered this for a moment, before finally shaking his head as though trying to wake up. "Well... I think I'll go see if I can find Robin. You gonna... stay up here?"

Thinking about it for a second, Beast Boy nodded. "Yeah," he said. "I think so. Good day for flying."

That of course was not at all the reason, but David didn't know it, and he simply nodded. "All right," he said, and he turned to go.

"Um, dude?"

David stopped and turned back. "Yeah?"

"I _really_ didn't mean what I said that time in the training room. I don't think you're too weak for this."

David took a long, slow breath. "Yeah, well," he said, as he turned to go, "that makes one of us." And with that he walked back into the stairwell and vanished into the Tower.

**O-O-O**

The corridor was dark, the slate gray walls not reflecting anything close to enough light, as David slowly padded down it towards what he hoped was the common room. He wasn't entirely sure. How the Titans navigated around this place without signposts was totally beyond him. He turned several corners, pausing at each intersection to try and remember a familiar landmark, but the further he went, the more aware he was that he was hopelessly lost. It did not hit home however until he turned the final corner and found himself staring at a dead end hallway with several doors far too small to be those of the common room periodically studded along it. Closing his eyes and muttering a curse to whoever had designed this place (a very quiet curse, as he wasn't certain if the offender was Cyborg or Robin or some hapless contractor), he was about to turn around to leave when a voice caught him from behind.

"Trying to get somewhere?"

David froze as he heard the voice, then took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "How'd you know?"

"You've been going in circles for ten minutes," said Robin. "I could see you from the..."

"... tracer bug, I figured." finished David, and he turned around. Robin was standing a dozen paces away, having just exited one of the doors David had walked past to get to this place. Robin's gaze was, as always, both unwavering and totally inscrutable, and it only took a few seconds before David sighed and lowered his gaze.

"Look," he said with a sigh, "I'm... sorry I was an idiot." He paused before adding, "both times."

"Both times?"

"You were right," he said. "I shouldn't have... gone out there."

"No," said Robin, "you shouldn't have. But I should have let you come with us instead."

David raised his eyes again, now a bit confused. "You said it was too dangerous. You said I shouldn't leave until Cinderblock was caught."

"He's not going to be caught," said Robin, and David thought he could detect a note of reproach in Robin's voice, but didn't know who it was directed towards. "Not this time. I knew that before we went out there. I can't find him. I don't think I'm going to find him."

David felt his heart sink at the news. "So... then what happens now? Does that mean... what does that mean?"

To David's surprise, Robin did not reply with a plan or a series of orders for what was going to happen next. Instead he crossed his arms and leaned against the wall. "Well that's up to you."

"Up to me?"

"You have a... unique power," said Robin. "And you've never used it before. That might be why they want to get you, it might not. I've been trying to... teach you how to use it to defend yourself, but... there's a lot more to it than that. Not just self-defense. More than that. I know all this stuff is new to you but, if you want, if you're willing to stay here and not put the city in danger again by leaving… then I'd be willing to see what you're actually capable of."

David didn't reply immediately. He got the sense that neither of them quite knew what they were talking about, but then he could never figure out what Robin was actually thinking.

"You mean… like what you guys do?"

"Maybe," said Robin. "What we do is… very dangerous and not for everyone. It's a huge responsibility. People depend on us, not just to protect them, but to set an example, and show them that evil doesn't always win, and that there are people willing to stand up and fight to make the world a better place. A lot of people think that sounds corny, or like rhetoric, but we don't, and we put our lives on the line to do just that." Robin stood up again and walked over towards David. "Do you think you could do that?"

David had no clue, and in the absence of any other bright idea, answered with the truth.

"I don't know."

And to David's surprise, Robin smiled.

"Good answer."

The ice broke, and David actually laughed. What else was there to do, after all?

"So do you think I could?"

"I don't know," said Robin. "But if you're willing to try, and I mean _really_ try… then I'm willing to find out. Are you willing to try?"

"I don't know that either," said David, and he sighed. "I don't know anything here. I never… thought about this sort of thing before I got here, and now it's… it's a lot to take in, you know?"

"I know," said Robin, "but you don't have to make a decision right here. All I need to know now is, are you willing to stay, and are you willing to try?"

There were all kinds of ways to answer that, and most of them shot through David's head as he stood there in the hallway. His fears, his worries, everything from the dark nightmares, waking or otherwise, that had plagued him since he had come to this tower, all of them shot through his head. He thought of himself getting killed, maimed, captured by Cinderblock. He thought of the taste of blood in his mouth from the wreckage of the Center, and of Adonis bearing down on him. He thought about having to go around for the rest of his life with the knowledge that at any time he wanted, he could kill anyone in sight painfully. He thought about the headaches that shot through him whenever he pushed his powers, thought about the sound of the gunshot that had winged Robin, thought about all the terrible things that might come from what Robin was suggesting, all in a flash.

And when he returned to reality, he found that he was nodding anyway.

"I'll try," he said, and Robin's eyes narrowed and he smiled again and uncrossed his arms to extend one hand to David, just as he had done the first day David arrived in the Tower.

"It's not gonna be easy," said Robin, but his voice didn't sound like a warning as much as it did a promise, and, while it was always impossible to tell what Robin was thinking, David got the distinct sense that for once, Robin was actually pleased.

It was anyone's guess why.

"So where were you trying to get to?"

"Um… the common room," said David. "To… find you."

Robin jerked his head back the way David had come. "Follow me," he said.

David followed Robin back through the twisting, turning halls, back towards the common room, but his mind wasn't on the destination. Instead he found himself wondering about what Beast Boy had said, and Robin, and everyone else during his stay here. And it occurred to him that he hadn't actually asked a reasonably important question. 'Why'? Why was Robin willing to go through this? Why did Beast Boy think he had what it took? Why would any of them even consider him for such a thing? They had to know that they were miles beyond anything he had ever dreamed of achieving. If it wasn't obvious just from looking at him, he had only told them all eighty times. So why?

He might have stopped Robin to ask, but to be honest, at this point, it no longer mattered. All he wanted to do right now was just get through the rest of the day, and see what the next one had to offer. And so to that end, he kept his head down and followed Robin, intent on simply letting this day run out without any more questions. The door to the common room finally loomed ahead, and both he and Robin approached it. The scanners detected their approach, and the door slid open to admit them.

And they promptly stopped.

Several moments passed in silence, as neither David nor Robin moved a muscle, standing in the doorway like mannequins. It was David who finally broke the silence… as well as his promise to ask no more questions that day, with, inevitably, one more.

"Robin?" he asked, not looking over at the Titans' leader.

"Yeah, David?" replied Robin, still unmoving himself. David wasn't entirely sure how to phrase this question in a manner that made rational sense, so he decided to go with the literal approach.

"Why is there a twenty foot caterpillar eating the refrigerator?"

Robin considered the matter carefully, clearly weighing the various possibilities and answers that could be provided, and replied with a very reasoned. "I have no idea."

"Just… checking," said David, and he blinked at the gigantic larva-shaped beast that was sitting in the middle of the common room as it seemed to smile and make gurgling noises that sounded almost happy. And as he debated whether or not he should run screaming back down the hallway the way he had come (and if so, precisely what he should be screaming as he ran), the thought came to mind that, whatever else could be said about living in Titan Tower, there was certainly never a dull moment.

And he was _really_ beginning to miss those.

* * *

**Author's Note:** Thank you all for reading this terribly draining chapter. I hope it has been to your enjoyment, and would like to remind you to please to leave a review with your opinion, good or bad, long or short. I once more apologize that this chapter took so damn long to write, and can only say the next one should be up within a much shorter timeframe.


	13. To Reason Why

**Disclaimer:** I do not, never have, and never will own the Teen Titans. I'm a realist.

**Author's Note:** I'm back, and this time only three days behind schedule (rather than two weeks). I hope you are all doing well, and I have another chapter of my story to submit for your edification and (hopefully) approval. This one is... well it's strange. It was not HARD to write, but merely hard to nail down properly into what I wanted it to be. I'm not sure if I did well or ill by it, but that is for you to decide. It is my fond hope you will enjoy reading it, and I look forward to seeing you again soon.

* * *

**Chapter 13: To Reason Why**

_"When I asked these men, these citizen soldiers, how they were able to fight like heroes for so many days without end, how they were able to sustain everything that the finest army in the world could throw at them and keep on fighting, they all told me the same thing. The desire not to let down your buddies was so strong, so binding, that it overwrote all other priorities, in many cases, even survival."_

- Steven Ambrose

**O-O-O**

The training was, by far, the hardest thing he had ever imagined.

A specific moment stood out from early on, from when Robin had asked him to observe some of the Titans' own collective combat training sessions. Robin had worked the other Titans so hard that day that Beast Boy asked, only half in jest, if it was Robin's plan to kill them all before any of Jump City's crooks could. David had laughed then, but after a single _day _of real training of his own under Robin's 'tutelage', not the hour here and hour there he had been receiving previously, but an actual, honest-to-god training day, he had stopped laughing.

After a week, he was starting to think Beast Boy was on to something.

Never in David's life had he experienced or even dreamed of something as punishing and as difficult as this process was. He was not an athlete by any means, nor a fighter in any sense of the word. He had barely ever gotten into a real fight during school or at the various foster centers, and certainly never won one. Now he was expected to learn not merely how to become both of these things at once, but how to become something entirely more than either of them. To accomplish this transformation, to mold David into something new, this was Robin's task now, and Robin, as always, set about it with his customary single-minded dedication towards a goal that might well be impossible, but would be attempted anyway, come what may.

The vast majority of the work was physical in nature, at least at the beginning. David wasn't exactly in _bad_ shape so much as he was not in _any_ shape. Thin and small, David best resembled Beast Boy in terms of build at least, save of course that Beast Boy, even in his human form, was preternaturally lithe and agile, even if he lacked Robin's acrobatic precision and grace. David, though reasonably quick for a kid his age, was nothing of the sort, and possessed the approximate stamina (panic-fueled bursts of adrenaline notwithstanding) of an asthmatic hamster. Accordingly, it was this element that Robin concentrated on first, setting a grueling pace and holding it, until David was certain that every day was going to be his last on this earth. If Robin didn't kill him outright, he would drop dead from exhaustion before it was all through.

There were laps, endless laps to be wearily jogged around the tower, around the island, around the training room, so many that he lost count after three days. There was round after hour-long round of what was politely-termed 'combat training', usually with Robin, occasionally with someone else, a variation which merely changed which one of the Titans would simulate beating the stuffing out of him that day. Despite the fact that it was his powers which had (theoretically) recommended him to this process, the combat training was purely physical to begin with. It consisted of Robin and the others trying out various different combat styles on David, none of which seemed to stick particularly well. Strength and experience aside, David was simply not built for things like boxing or wrestling, nor had he the speed and agility for more subtle options. Robin seemed to have an idea of what he was doing, but David couldn't figure out for the life of him why it was necessary to concentrate so much on hand-to-hand combat rather than on what seemed to him to be the more important aspects, namely his powers.

That is, until one day he asked.

**O-O-O**

"Attack me,"

David hesitated, knowing full well what was about to transpire. Still, there was nothing for it, and he balled his hand into a fist and lunged at Robin as fast as he could. He thought he had done fairly well, not telegraphing the punch whatsoever, and aiming for a point _behind_ Robin rather than Robin himself (as Robin had taught him). His self-congratulation lasted exactly two milliseconds as Robin, as always, sidestepped the blow and lightly tapped him on the back and sent him crashing to the ground to land in a heap on the mat.

"Like I said, always make sure you've got a plan for if the enemy blocks or deflects you. Now try it again, and this time be ready for if I catch your arm."

David tried to will himself through the floor, and when that didn't work, he slowly got back up again. "This is insane," he muttered to himself as he smoothed out his shirt and turned back towards Robin.

"What was that?"

David hesitated. He hadn't intended for Robin to hear that. He looked up to find the Boy Wonder staring him straight in the eye. There was nothing for it but to elaborate.

"I said this is insane," he said, trying to sound more reasonable than he felt. "I mean it's not like I'm actually gonna hit you, right? Even the other Titans can't hit you, I've seen them try, so... what's the point of all this?"

"The point is to teach you how to handle an opponent in close quarters," said Robin. "That's something you need to know."

"Yeah, but..." David trailed off, as though the objection wasn't important enough to warrant discussing, but Robin seemed to take a different view.

"But what?"

David shook his head and sighed. "If I ever _am_ trying to handle someone in close quarters," he said slowly, "then, unless I'm missing something, I'm not gonna go after them with my fist. Shouldn't I just concentrate on blowing stuff up? I mean, no offense, I know this is your thing and all, but why would I ever want to do this martial arts stuff in a real fight if I'm no good at it?"

David expected some kind of long-winded explanation, or perhaps a terse order to try it again. What he did not expect was for Robin to stand there for a moment, considering what he had just said, and then for him to finally shrug.

"Okay."

David hesitated. "Okay?"

"Go ahead," said Robin with a slight smile. "Attack me with your powers."

This couldn't be right. "Seriously?" he asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Completely," said Robin. "Go all out if you want. Whenever you're ready."

It felt like a trick, but then Robin was the boss...

"Er... okay..." he said. "On three?"

Robin's smile broadened and he dropped into a loose ready position. "Whatever you like."

David nodded and began stringing the molecules together in his head in the proper pattern. "One...

David too had tricks up his sleeve, and before he got to three, before he even got to two, his finger suddenly shot out, aimed directly at the mat underneath Robin's feet. The mat shook and groaned and ripped and then exploded into a cloud of stuffing and feathers with a satisfying "BANG". He was careful to modulate the blast properly, as there was no use breaking Robin's ankle or worse. It was powerful enough to knock Robin sprawling, but that was it.

Or rather it would have been, except that Robin wasn't there.

Perhaps he had seen David moving before he had moved or perhaps he had read the intention in his eyes, but either way, Robin sprang into the air the instant David's finger twitched. The explosion went off behind the acrobatic teen, and Robin made use of it, allowing it to push him up and into a flip, flying over David's head like his namesake and landing behind him. David didn't even have a chance to register what had just happened before Robin grabbed him, pivoted, and threw him over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, tossing him easily down face first onto the mat even as bits of debris from the explosion rained down on the both of them like confetti.

It took David a moment or two to realize that he was laying on the ground, again, and another moment or two to replay what had just occurred in his head, trying to figure out just how he had come to be there. By the time he had sorted out the fact that Robin was probably a secret wizard who had teleported out of the way of the explosion (it made perfect sense to him), he looked up to see Robin leaning over, offering him a hand to help him up, with a satisfied grin on his face that might just have had a trace of smugness to it.

"That's why."

**O-O-O**

It only took a few incidents like that one to convince David that he was better off simply doing as he was told and not asking the reasons why, which in a way was fortunate, because it wasn't long before he no longer had the energy to think anymore. Days of relentless, soul-shattering physical training blended into one another and formed a sort of blur from which he never seemed to emerge. After a week or two, it was not uncommon for him to finish up a session so exhausted that he could barely stand, and his sleep habits had suffered accordingly. The first time he had fallen asleep at the dinner table was horrible, in that he had woken up hours later having been placed back in his room and, for a moment, didn't know where he was or what he was doing there. By the time it had become a weekly occurrence, the others had learned to simply leave him there and let him wake up whenever he awoke. He was perpetually at the brink of total physical exhaustion, and his only respite (if it could be called that) came when it was time to practice using his powers.

One might have thought that there were only so many variations on the theme of "blow something up", but Robin once again had thought of nearly everything, and David found himself doing things that he hadn't known he was capable of doing, nor even that they were physically possible. He spent two days going over every single aspect of his own powers with Robin and Raven, from beginning to end and back again, both of the asking him questions he could barely understand regarding how he manipulated the molecules, how the energy was transferred, in what ways it could be shifted, and how it 'felt' to shift it. David wasn't certain if his answers were any help, he knew next to nothing about his own powers after all, but it wasn't long before Robin was talking him through the process of not just detonating objects, but manipulating the explosions to produce the desired effect. He learned how to cause an explosion in only part of an object, sending it flying at high speeds away from the epicenter of the blast rather than merely blowing it to pieces. He learned how to channel the force of the explosions in a given direction, an incredibly tricky process but a vital one, as it would permit him to actually stop an object hurled at him, rather than merely shattering it into fragments, or to limit the damage of an explosion so as not to place everyone nearby in danger. How Robin, who had no powers of his own, knew how to talk him through the insanely difficult process of learning how to manipulate his powers in this way was totally beyond him, and yet David's clumsy, halting descriptions of what it felt like to manipulate molecules of lead rather than carbon, or what it was like to 'compress' molecular energy with his mind were adequate enough for Robin to coach him on what to do and how to do it. Raven was of course very helpful with the technical aspects of using superpowers, as was Starfire and even Beast Boy, but the single, unifying coordinator and guide was Robin, and Robin alone.

Indeed, even as David sweated and ached and cried and dragged himself into the training room for session after session, still he could see that what Robin was doing was something wholly unique. This was not merely some boot camp; there was none of the servile humiliations and petty indignities that a drill instructor would inflict on a recruit to break their spirit and subsume their individuality into that of a larger unit. David's spirit was not the subject here. His stamina, mental, physical, and otherwise, was. When Robin told David to run a lap around the tower or detonate a target with his powers, it was never for the sake of conditioning him to obey orders unquestioningly, but part of a calculated plan, the details of which were known only to Robin. On some days, Robin would tell him precisely what to do and how to do it, and on others he would merely set him a goal, to avoid being hit or to defeat a hundred drones or to crack a thirty-ton block of solid granite in half without spilling the cups of water that were set around it in a ring.

Robin seemed to know David's limits better than David himself did. Sometimes Robin would look over David's tired, trembling form with a practiced eye, and switch from physical to kinetic or mental training just at the moment when David was certain he could do no more without passing out. Other times he would not, and instead tell David to dig deeper and try harder, that he knew he was capable of better, and David believed him not because it flattered his ego to do so, but because Robin simply knew better than he did. Perhaps it was self-fulfilling prophecy, perhaps something else, but when Robin told him he could do better, David would grit his teeth and fight back the migraine that was pounding in his head and the acidic burn that seared through his muscles, and he would. Sometimes it was only incrementally better. Sometimes it still wasn't enough. But the day that he managed, on his ninth attempt, with a percussion orchestra pounding in his head and the contents of his stomach threatening to burst violently out of his throat, to use repeated, shaped-charged explosions to carve a three-foot gash right through that block of solid rock without spilling a single drop of water around it... that day made all the crushing efforts of the previous days worth it.

It was strange. At the time he did it, his primary and overwhelming feeling was one of relief, relief that the task was finally over, relief that he would be allowed to go and collapse and fall asleep. Robin had told him he'd done a good job and Starfire, who had been looking in on the session, had cheered and congratulated him on "successfully bisecting the wicked mineral aggregate", and he'd sort of smiled wanly and stumbled out the door, too tired even to speak. It was late that evening, when Cyborg had managed to rouse him from the torpor he had fallen into to go and get some dinner (it took quite an effort), that he walked into the common room, still tired enough to trip over his own feet, and slumped into a chair like a corpse. There was some kind of conversation going on, with Starfire proudly describing some exploit or another that someone had done that had taken place recently, but he could barely maintain enough focus to avoid stabbing himself with his fork, let alone follow what was being said. Accordingly, it wasn't until a minute or two in that he noticed Beast Boy and Cyborg casting grinning glances in his direction, and he forced himself to focus on the words being spoken, and only then realized that she was talking about what he'd managed to do earlier that day. It was a shock, and the look on his face had obviously been priceless enough that Beast Boy had shot juice out of his nose laughing and Cyborg felt obligated to whip out a camera and record it for posterity, but that barely registered.

What registered was that Starfire had actually been talking about his accomplishment to the rest of them. What registered was Robin remarking that he'd made a lot of progress in the last couple weeks. What registered was Raven turning her head and giving him the slightest nod of acknowledgment as Beast Boy mopped up the spilled juice and said that it was really awesome and he'd have to show him some time and Cyborg asked him what it felt like to finally get through that obstacle. And in the back of his mind, he knew that it was just an exercise, and that Robin would be back to grinding him into powder again tomorrow and that Starfire thought that pretty much everything that _ever _happened was impressive enough to talk about, and that Raven and Beast Boy and Cyborg were just being polite in their own different ways, that it didn't mean anything at all because they were still superheroes and did stuff like this on a daily basis, but despite all that he found, to his surprise, that he actually felt… good. Not great, not outstanding, not like he wanted to jump up and run out for another training session, but good, like he was actually something more than a little league ballplayer who'd snuck his way by fraud into the world series.

Had this been a Hollywood movie, he would likely have used his newfound determination to power through the next day's practice and reach new heights, but this was not a movie, and the next day, he found he was so sore and exhausted that he could barely snap a twig or take a step, and Robin had to cancel the training session for the day to give him a chance to recover, but it still helped nonetheless. Not the praise so much as just the feeling, fleeting though it was, that he was actually doing the right thing by being here and doing this, that he _could_ do this, become this. Robin kept him so busy that he barely had time to question his being in the Tower anymore, but even Robin couldn't do anything about the moments when the Titans' lives were interrupted by a call to go confront some crazed villain.

One might have thought David would welcome those rare moments of peace, when he was alone in the Tower with no exercises to perform or training regimens to undertake, but he did not. For one thing, every call meant that there were dozens if not hundreds or thousands of innocent people in danger, some of whom might die despite the best efforts of all five Titans. One did not have to be a superhero to appreciate that a bomb threat or a paramilitary assault on a populated city was a bad thing, even if it meant a break for him personally. But also, time alone, time to think, meant time for all his fears and doubts to creep back into the fore. It meant that he would sit there on the couch in Titans' Tower and watch on television as the five superheroes did battle with whatever monster or army they were confronting this time, and see them at their most glorious, their most transcendent, and as he did so, his thoughts would swirl around him, repeating over and over the same old claims, that he wasn't in their league, that he was deluding himself and deluding them, that he could never do what they did, be what they were, that they were demigods and he was a normal kid, and that he should slink back off and stop pretending that he could manage this, stop wasting everyone's time with his hubris and his arrogance and his stupidity in even _presuming_ to become a superhero.

And then the Titans would come back home, and tell him of their exploits and their victories, and Robin would tell him it was time to continue working at doing just that. And he would.

Why?

He didn't know. The question defied rational answer, and before long he was beginning to think that part of Robin's strategy was to leave him so tired and so busy that he would never get to ask that question. He could theoretically have stopped at any time, thrown up his hands and declared that it was too much and that he was done. It was never _really_ an option though, and he knew it, not because he was 'driven' to succeed or because he had had a burning desire to become a superhero since age two, but more precisely because it seemed pre-ordained that he would continue trying until he died or failed. He was used to a 'system', to a 'process' that you moved through on your way towards wherever you were going. Bureaucracies and paperwork and transfer requests and records and someone deciding for you what you should do and become, this was what he was used to; this was what his life had been before Cinderblock. And now Robin was showing him a path, a trail. It didn't matter where it led or how steep it was, it was a path, and once he was on it, there was no choice but to walk it to the end, even if it led right off a cliff.

However, Robin was the one leading him down this path, and Robin was too good at this to walk him off a cliff.

Robin never behaved as though there was a risk of David failing to accomplish this monumental task of metamorphing into something new. If David failed to complete an assignment, then he would have to do it again, and again, and again. There was no talk of "flunking", and while he could see Robin getting testy sometimes when he failed to get it right for the eighteenth time, he never pressed it by protesting that Robin was being too hard on him. He knew it would accomplish nothing save for making Robin angry, and while he occasionally questioned the value (and the sanity) of what they were doing, he staunchly forced himself never to question the intensity, if only because he was afraid that Robin would find a way to dial it up yet further. The few times he was tempted to cry out against the punishing schedule or scream at Robin that he was demanding the impossible, he checked himself with a reminder that he was attempting to _do_ the impossible by becoming one of them, that Robin was working at this just as hard as he was, and that, above all, Robin knew better than he did. He still didn't know if he could become a superhero, in fact every time he thought about it, the answer came back 'NO' in a deafening cacophony of evidence and reasons. But Robin seemed to think he could, or else why would he persist with the charade? And as always, Robin knew best…

But of course, that only shifted the question into one that he had never been able to answer since he first arrived here, a question that had been gnawing at him ever since the Titans first announced that he was welcome to stay here in the Tower with them indefinitely. It was a question that had only grown more confusing with every stupendous victory the Titans scored and every favor they had done for him, one that tore at what little confidence he had whenever he let it, one that he had tentatively tried to ask, but had never gotten a straight answer for:

Why were they doing this?

Why? What possible reason could they have for wanting him here when they knew that even at his best, he might (theoretically-speaking) be able to match _some_ of what they could do. He was not some chosen figure destined to lead the world into light or save the universe, for that they seemed to be doing plenty well on their own. The more he saw of their exploits and their lives, the more amazed he was at how well they complimented one another, at how it was that the five of them, so completely different, managed to make this insanely dysfunctional family that they had here work, and whenever he thought of this, he felt like he was once again intruding on them, disrupting everything by his mere presence. It was what had driven him to leave initially, but now that this was no longer an option, he _still_ couldn't figure out what possible reason any of them had for doing this for him. Whatever they all said, it was not merely business as usual. Superpowers were perhaps rare, but they weren't _that_ rare, and he knew that there were other, fully trained metahumans out there, superheroes in their own right that the Titans had befriended and worked with, and yet had never brought into their home and offered to make a part of their team. They were called "Honorary Titans", and he had even (briefly) met one or two of them, people like Aqualad or Bumblebee. None of them had been invited to do what he was trying to do, even though they had years of experience as full-fledged superheroes. Even had it been a simple matter of him having no place else to go, and in need of aid to prevent from being tracked down by Cinderblock, it still made no sense that they would go out on such a limb, put in so much effort, all for the sake of trying to do with him what they could have done in a heartbeat with any number of other candidates. If they were looking for a sixth member, they could have picked anyone. As best he could tell, from his admittedly limited viewpoint, they didn't _need_ a sixth, and in fact they positively shied away from the subject and from his awkward attempts to ask why, why him, why they were willing to go to this much effort on his behalf?

He didn't know. He had no evidence or clue whatsoever as to what their reasons were. None that is, until one day in the common room…

**O-O-O**

It was quieter than usual that day, probably because there were fewer people about. Cyborg had been gone for three days on assignment in Steel City, helping some of the Honorary Titans set themselves up in a tower of their own. Robin was off conferring with the Mayor and the Chief of Police of Jump City, a process which, judging from his reluctance was approximately as pleasant as dental surgery without anesthetic. Starfire had gone with him, though nobody, not even David, needed to ask why she would do such a thing. David had accordingly been granted the day off, and he made use of it as productively as he could, that is to say by sleeping. He had woken up late for the first time in Lord-knew how long, made his way to the common room for something to eat, and sat down to see if there was anything on TV about Cyborg and his adventures in Steel City. He didn't even get that far. No sooner had he sat down on one of the smaller couches near the side of the room than he felt drowsiness flowing over him again, and without even picking up the remote control, he lay back, and fell fast asleep.

He woke up to business as usual.

His eyes snapped open with a start as the door to the common room burst open and there was the sound of two figures rushing inside. It was not hard to figure out who, even though he couldn't see either one of them from where he was laying. The identities were confirmed a moment later when Raven snapped at Beast Boy.

"I don't care when it came out, I'm not playing your stupid video game, got it?"

"C'mon, Raven," pleaded Beast Boy. Super Mega Monkeys 7 needs two players, and you're the only one here! Pleeeeeeeease?"

Raven sounded like she was about ready to take Super Mega Monkeys 7 and _feed_ it to the green changeling, not that this was anything new. "Go bug David then, I'm busy."

"He's asleep in his room!" protested Beast Boy. "Robin said not to wake him up unless there was a fire or something. Cyborg won't be back for two whole weeks! I need to play with _someone_ before then!"

Raven scoffed. "You're an addict, you know that?" she said bitingly. "Can't you just wait for Robin to get back?"

"Robin doesn't have time. He says he has to keep working with David or he'll never get ready."

David caught his breath at that statement, and forced aside the thoughts that immediately rose to the fore, shouting that he was taking up all of Robin's time with his pretentious imitations of a superhero, and that he shouldn't be doing so.

"Well then I guess you're out of luck," said Raven, and she turned to walk over to the counter to read.

Beast Boy refused to give up. "Aw c'mon, Raven. Don't make me do the face…"

"The face works on Starfire, Beast Boy," came the reply, "not on me."

"Oh yeah?" There was the sound of rustling pages, and David lifted his head and peaked over the couch to see Beast Boy in the form of a tiny kitten with oversized eyes standing on top of Raven's open book on the kitchen counter, mewling up at Raven, who looked particularly un-amused. David would have given even money that she was about to throw him out the nearest window (or perhaps straight through the wall), but instead she sighed, and groaned, and shook her head as though calling on the gods to witness her travails.

"If I agree to play _one_ round with you, will you shut up about your stupid video game until Cyborg gets back?"

Beast Boy froze, needing a second to interpret the fact that she had just agreed. When he finally understood, he sprung back into human form so fast that he forgot to get off the counter and took a nosedive off of it onto the ground. Raven rolled her eyes as Beast Boy scrambled back to his feet. "Sweet!" he exclaimed, "this is gonna be so awesome, Raven, you'll see! You'll love this one, it's got eighteen characters, thirty weapons, and the best graphics ever! Once you play it, you're never gonna want to stop!"

"Somehow, I think I'll resist," said Raven deadpan, sarcasm rolling off her tongue thick enough to drown in. "Let's get this over with…"

The two moved towards the television and sat down facing away from David, and David laid his head back down as Beast Boy animatedly explained what the controls and who the characters were, before inserting the game disk. Soon the cartoonish sounds of the gameplay were all that he could hear, and he closed his eyes once again and began to drift back off…

"Um, Raven?"

David cracked an eye back open. Beast Boy's voice was more subdued than before, and his tone more hesitant, much more like the last time David had overheard a conversation between him and Raven.

"Hmm?" said Raven, her attention still focused on the game being played.

"I just… wanted to say thanks."

"Don't let it go to your head," she said. "I'm only playing one round to shut you up."

"No, I meant… for before… for talking to me, out at the rock."

David hadn't the first idea what Beast Boy was talking about, but he _did_ know that Beast Boy liked to spend an awful lot of time out at the rocks near the shore of the island. He'd never gone out there to bother him at such times, but he had seen him from the top of the tower, skipping rocks off the bay's surface, or just staring at the waves.

Raven didn't reply immediately. "Don't mention it," she said finally, "we all have hard days."

"Yeah," said Beast Boy, and his voice had a forlorn note to it. Suddenly, David heard Raven get up from the chair she was sitting in and walk over to where Beast Boy was sitting before sitting back down, presumably next to him.

"What is it?" she asked.

"Hmm? What? Nothing. I'm cool," said Beast Boy. There was a burst of sound from the video game, and David guessed someone had just won a point. Oddly enough, Beast Boy neither reacted with celebratory taunting nor with shocked disbelief, as he normally did when he won or lost a point in these games. Instead the game played on.

"Beast Boy," asked the sorceress, "what is it."

Beast Boy sighed. "It's her birthday."

The game sounds stopped.

Neither Beast Boy nor Raven made a sound, and David felt the vibe in the room shifting, and didn't dare to raise his head to see what was going on. His first clue was Beast Boy muttering a soft "Thanks," though he couldn't see what he was thanking her for.

"Do you still visit her?" asked Raven.

"Sometimes," said Beast Boy. "Just... I kinda figured somebody ought to." Another pause. "D'you think we'll ever be able to change her back?"

"I don't know, Beast Boy," said Raven, and her tone was much more sympathetic than David had ever heard it before. "Maybe, but even if we do - "

"Do you..." interrupted Beast Boy, "Do you hate her for what she did?"

David hadn't the faintest idea who 'she' was or what she had done, but his mind flashed back to that conversation he'd had with Raven, that one night in his room.

_'Something happened.'_

Raven didn't answer immediately. "Not... anymore," she said at length. "She was scared and stupid and made a couple of _really _bad decisions. If I had met Slade when I was younger instead of you guys... I might have wound up the same way."

"What?" asked Beast Boy. "You? No way, Raven. You'd never work for someone like Slade."

Raven's tone darkened, and David could swear he felt the temperature in the room start to drop along with it. "There's a lot you don't know about me," she said, "If the first person I'd met had been someone like Slade..." she trailed off and sighed. "You don't know what I'm capable of."

"Yeah I do," said Beast Boy immediately, "sorta. You're... you're different than Terra was. You're tougher, kind of, and I don't think I've ever seen you get scared. Well except for that time at Halloween..."

"I get scared just like she did," said Raven. "Not admitting it was what made that stuff last Halloween happen."

"Well maybe," said the changeling, "but I know you'd never do what she did, sell out your friends, no matter how scared you got."

More silence followed Beast Boy's last comment, and David dared not even breathe, for fear that he would be discovered eavesdropping. . It was clear enough from Raven and Beast Boy's words that something _had_ happened, something very bad, and though he still wasn't certain what, it all centered around the name 'Terra'.

"Besides," said Beast Boy suddenly with a forced laugh, "you totally _don't_ get scared, 'cept maybe when Starfire's making dinner. Other than that, I don't think I've ever seen you afraid of anything."

Rather than laughing, Raven let out a soft sigh, and David thought for a moment that she wasn't going to respond, but eventually she did.

"Remember when we were down in the cave, and Terra had you pinned with the rock at your throat? Remember what I said to her?"

Beast Boy went silent again at this, and took a second, either to recollect what she had said, or merely to work up the effort to repeat it.

"You said... you said you were... gonna - "

"I said that if she hurt you, it would be the last thing she ever did," said Raven. "I try not to let myself get scared because of what happens when I do, but that time... I was afraid she was actually going to do it."

A second or two of silence.

"Were you?" asked Beast Boy

"Beast Boy, she'd already tried to kill us all, and almost succeeded. Of course I was."

"No," said Beast Boy, "I mean... were you gonna really make it the last thing she ever did?"

Raven didn't even hesitate before replying in a chillingly neutral tone.

"Absolutely."

David couldn't see Raven, but her flat, declarative tone sent a shiver rolling down his spine regardless. Apparently it wasn't just him, as Beast Boy replied in a stunned voice.

"... really?"

"If she had seriously hurt or killed you," said Raven impassively, with only a slight trace of emotion behind the words, "I'd have made her wish that Slade had killed her."

"But... you said you didn't hate her?"

"I don't," said Raven, "but that wouldn't have stopped me. Nothing would have, not Robin, not Slade, nothing."

David remembered the night Raven had come to him, asking about who he really was, and what she had said to him then about Beast Boy, and more specifically how she had said it.

"But... but why, Raven? I mean... you don't even like me. You keep treating me like I'm stupid and you never laugh at any of my jokes or - "

"Beast Boy," said Raven with a sigh of what might have been exasperation, "I treat you like you're stupid because you act stupid, and I don't laugh at your jokes because you're _not funny_."

"But then why would you - "

"Because you're my _friend_, Beast Boy," exclaimed Raven suddenly, as though repeating the obvious. "Because when my emotions got loose in my head you and Cyborg helped me get through it when nobody else could've and when Malchior used me to break out of his prison, you were there to try and cheer me up. Because even when you lost your mind because of those chemicals you still never would have let anything hurt me, whatever Robin thought, and you dragged Adonis halfway across the city and back just to keep me out of his claws. You're annoying and you're immature and you're _really_ not funny, I mean it, but I know that you're always there for me and that you're my friend, Beast Boy, and I'd never let Terra or anybody else hurt you."

There was no reply forthcoming from Beast Boy, and David could practically _hear_ the smirk on Raven's face when she added: "And don't look so surprised, because I've _seen_ you do the same for me."

Several seconds of silence followed, before Beast Boy replied softly. "You really mean that?"

Raven sighed. "It doesn't mean I'm going to stop calling you stupid when you act it," she said, "but yes, I really mean it. You're a good person and a good friend, and take it from me, because I've known a lot of people that aren't." She lowered her voice a bit, some of the harsh edge fading away. "You're my friend, Beast Boy, and I don't have a lot of friends."

"You've got all of us, Raven," said Beast Boy

"I know," said the sorceress almost wistfully, "and I know you think I don't like you, but you're my friend, and no matter how dumb you act or how many windows I have to throw you out of, anyone who tries to hurt you will have to deal with me first. Period."

Raven's voice had no inflection to it, her tone as calm as if she were ordering pizza or reciting a multiplication table, but David knew better by now to mistake that for a lack of resolution, and clearly, so did Beast Boy.

"So uh..." said Beast Boy, "... does that mean you want to play another round?"

"You'd have to glue the controller to my hand," she said, " and that's not a suggestion."

"Aw c'mon, Rae," said Beast Boy in his part-pleading, part-teasing, part-demanding tone, "you know you wanna hang out with your best friend, right?"

David could only imagine Raven's glare and Beast Boy's boundless grin at the last comment. Once again, David expected the next sound he heard to be the crash of Beast Boy being flung through the tower window. Once again, Raven managed to restrain herself somehow, before responding with an unexpected sigh of resignation.

"I guess it won't kill me..."

"Sweet!" exclaimed Beast Boy, and he jumped up and reset the gamestation, which was soon pumping out music and sound effects once again. David decided it might be best to use the cover of the noise to make his exit, before they realized that he had been unintentionally spying on them. As quietly as he could, he got up from the couch he was laying on, and began to creep towards the door. Beast Boy was too fixated on the screen to notice anything else, and Raven seemed to have no idea he was there, and he had almost reached the door when Raven suddenly asked a question, freezing David in place once more.

"Hey, Beast Boy?"

"Yeah?"

"You remember when David first got here, when we were talking about what to do with him, and you said that we were all letting Terra get in the way of making the right choice?"

"Um... yeah?" came Beast Boy's reply, as he paused the game. From where he was standing, David could see Beast Boy turn to Raven quizzically.

"I was just surprised," said Raven. "I don't know if I could have said that if it had been me, especially that soon."

Beast Boy set his controller down and shook his head. "But David's not Terra," he said. "And it's not like we can just never make new friends again because of what she did, you know?" He shrugged, before picking his controller back up. "It's like you said, Raven. We move on, right? They can't _all _be working for the bad guys."

"I guess they can't," said Raven, and something in the way she said it felt... well he didn't know what it felt like, but it felt odd, like there was some reason she had asked what she had other than mere curiosity. "But you didn't think... after what happened, that it might be too much of a risk?"

Beast Boy thought about it for a while, then shook his head. "Yeah," he said, "but I thought it was a bigger risk to not do it."

"What do you mean?" asked Raven, but the question sounded almost fake, as though she were leading him like an attorney, as though she already knew exactly what he meant but wanted him to say it aloud.

"If we hadn't helped David," explained Beast Boy, "then it would've been because we were afraid that what Terra did was gonna happen again, right?"

"Probably," said Raven.

Beast Boy lowered his head. "I just... didn't want to be afraid of that. I didn't want us to be afraid of that. 'Cause if we let ourselves be afraid that that was gonna keep happening... then we wouldn't be us anymore. Then Slade would have won in the end." He shook his head. "Do... d'you get what I'm saying?"

"I think so," said Raven. "But you know that he might turn out to do just what she did, right?"

"He won't," said Beast Boy immediately, and there was an edge to his voice that David had never heard. "He won't do what she did. I just don't believe it, okay?"

"I don't either," said Raven. "I'm just saying, he could."

"He won't," repeated Beast Boy, but his voice was not as certain as his words would indicate, and David got the impression that it wasn't Raven he was trying to convince. "He won't do it. I know he won't." Both Titans fell silent, and David caught his breath once again. It was some time before Beast Boy spoke once more, his voice having returned to normal.

"Besides," said Beast Boy, resuming play, "I like David. He thinks I'm hilarious."

"I seriously doubt he's that dense," said Raven, "and if he does laugh at your jokes he's being polite."

"Pft, whatever, Raven," said Beast Boy in mock scorn. "I am totally funny. Just because you have no sense of - "

"Beast Boy..."

"Erp... I mean... just because you uh... hey nice shot!"

Raven merely shrugged in reply, and David slowly slid towards the door, his eyes still glued on the two Titans, his mind abuzz with everything that he had just heard. The door opened silently at his touch, and he slipped out of it, sliding down the hall as quietly as he could. All the things that he had heard today, all the fragments and half-alluded incidents of the past, all of them spun around inside his head, but not in confusion or chaos. Much of this had confirmed what he already suspected after all. He still did not know who Terra was of course. He did not know what she had done, or why, or how it was that she had come to do it. He had guessed that there had been some kind of incident, pieced together the idea that there was once someone who had pretended to be a Titan so as to destroy them, a reason for why Raven was so defensive about him and had thought him a liar, and Robin so paranoid in tracking his movements, none of these things were surprises..

... but he had never imagined that the reason for all those things, might be the same reason that they had taken the ultimate risk with him.

Despite how little he actually knew, despite having nothing but a name and snatches of a conversation about an event he hadn't been around to witness, it all seemed to fall into place. For days, for weeks, he had agonized over the question of why. Why had they taken the time to do this with him, why had they taken him in, and why were they trying to make him into one of their own. He knew it could not have been because he was particularly skilled or because they needed the firepower. He knew it could not have been merely because Cinderblock displayed an interest in him. All these reasons it could not be, and the real reason had been staring him in the face the entire time.

Raven was right, the risk to them_ had_ been greater than he realized, but they had taken it, not in _spite_ of the fact that they had been burned shortly before by some kind of gross treachery... but _because_ of it.

Because they needed to believe that whatever had happened wouldn't happen again. They needed to believe that if they opened themselves up to a stranger in need, to a new friend, to a potential recruit, that in spite of everything that they had experienced, the result would not be another deadly disaster. Whoever Terra was and whatever she had done, they needed to believe that she was a fluke, because if they couldn't...

David stopped as the last piece of the puzzle snapped into place.

Because if they couldn't believe that, then how could they go out every other day and face down hell-spawned monstrosities and cruel murderous super-villains, and believe, actually _believe_ that they would defeat them and all come back alive, day after day, week after week?

On the face of things, superheroes were suicidally insane, throwing themselves in front of dangers too horrifying to contemplate without a second thought. He had long sat and wondered how they could do such a thing, contain their fear and marshal their bravado and rush straight into the heart of danger to confront the most evil people and beings alive. He had assumed it was a matter of nerves of steel and wills of iron, and perhaps it was… but was it also some degree of willful blindness? Obviously they all knew on _some_ level that they could die, none of them were idiots. But did they actually believe it?

The more he thought about it, the more he doubted that they did.

And it wasn't the only thing they believed. They believed that the five of them, despite being still kids, could make a difference and take responsibility for an entire city. On the face of things, that was absurd. Even if they _were_ a match for the monsters that menaced the city, just how many times could they be expected to cheat death? David had watched enough of their fights on TV by now to know just how close an uncomfortable number of them were. Yet they believed that they were equal to the task. Despite the fact that criminals never ceased to assail them, that the alerts never stopped coming in, they believed that they were making a difference, that despite all the crime and vice and evil they saw, that people were generally good, and deserving of being protected. And they had believed that if they welcomed an outsider into their ranks, took the step to make a new friend, that their efforts would pay off, that they would succeed, that they would make friends and find a new companion in their times of triumph and trouble.

And they had been burned.

That much was obvious. They had opened themselves up and had their guts torn out by this Terra. The tone in Beast Boy's voice, the edge to Raven's words as she described so matter-of-factly how she would have murdered Terra… this was not just another villain. This person had hurt them in a way they had believed they could never be hurt, so deeply and totally that it had shaken them to their core, and shaken those beliefs that had let them do their job. They had survived, obviously. There was no use overstating the matter. They had triumphed over whoever Terra was and beaten her and this 'Slade' character and forged ahead, and fought more battles and won them, but a betrayal like that could not be forgotten overnight. David had been racking his brain to understand how, if they _had_ been betrayed, how they could have dared to open themselves up again. Now he understood. They _had_ to open themselves up again, because they _had_ to believe.

He didn't know if Terra had been another fully-trained meta-human like them, or a kid with powers that she didn't understand like him, but they had decided to _willfully_ ignore precedent, and _intentionally_ take the risk that what had happened to them before was about to happen again. That was no easy feat. It was why Raven had confronted him in his room that evening, why she had threatened to kill him if he hurt Beast Boy again, because Beast Boy had taken whatever Terra had done the worst, and might not be able to take it again. It was why Robin and Cyborg had been watching him so carefully all this time, all the while insisting that they were doing nothing of the sort. They _wanted_ to believe that he was who he said he was, that he would not repay their kindness with a stab in the back, whether or not they could bring themselves to believe it, they _wanted_ to. They _needed_ to.

They needed him to be what they hoped he was, because if he wasn't, then how could they ever trust another person outside of their ad-hoc family again?

They needed him to be real.

They _needed_ him.

Nobody had _ever_ actually needed David for anything before.

Perhaps he was exaggerating. In fact, he was almost _certainly_ exaggerating. This wasn't a bunch of traumatized shell-shock victims after all, it was the Teen Titans, but that didn't mean he was wrong, and in fact it only made it all the more astonishing. All this time, he had been agonizing, rolling around in his head trying to figure out what he had done to _deserve_ this, this chance that they were giving him that he knew he should want but didn't know if he actually wanted. Well he still didn't know if he wanted it or not, but he knew that it wasn't charity and it wasn't a question of having earned it. As Cyborg had said to him a long time ago, 'deserve' had nothing to do with it.

On one level or another, they needed him to be what they were. Not because they needed an extra hand, not because his powers were so overwhelming or even because he had any. They needed him to become like them, just to confirm that it was possible, that they hadn't erred twice in trusting another. And the more he thought about it, the less sure he was that he was making any sense, but the more sure he was that he was right.

So where did that leave him?

For once, a question he knew how to answer. After all, he had left the Tower looking for Raven and Beast Boy because he thought that he could somehow help the Titans by doing so, and the fact that he was wrong hadn't suppressed the urge to do _something_, anything to pay them back for their kindness and patience and a hundred other things that he _knew_ he owed them and _knew_ he couldn't pay back. He had been noncommittal on the subject of becoming a superhero because he wasn't sure if he could do it and he still wasn't, but he was certain of one thing now.

He would become a superhero, like them, or die in the attempt.

They needed to believe. They needed to believe that he would not betray them, not fail them somehow, not because he was the lynchpin to existence or because they needed him for some war, but because they had been hurt badly, and they had survived, and retrenched, and now needed to think that it had not been their fault, that their impulse to help this Terra person had not been wrong, that their impulse to help him had not been wrong. And if he could do that, if he could somehow help them get over whatever had happened, if that were even possible…

If they actually needed him, then he would do everything he could to help them out.

**O-O-O**

The video game continued to warble loud enough to make Raven wish she could just fling the damn thing into the ocean, but Beast Boy was clearly enraptured, and after the talk they had just had, she knew it was worth a bit of headache if it helped him feel better. Terra was on everyone's mind these days, and she supposed that the geokinetic would remain on their minds for the foreseeable future.

But then that need not be so bad.

"Um, Raven?" asked her emerald green companion. Raven adopted an appropriately unconcerned look before replying.

"Yeah, Beast Boy?"

"Uh, just wondering… why do you ask?"

"Hmm?"

"About what I said when we were talking about bringing David in for a while. You never… never asked about that before. How come you asked now?"

Raven slowly turned her head until she was facing the door to the common room, her empathic sense detecting the swirling emotions that surrounded the young psychokinetic teen as he slowly made his way towards the elevator. She was pretty well convinced by now that David meant well, and he had held up pretty well to Robin's training, especially for a kid that had never done anything like this before, but he clearly had a lot to learn…

… such as the fact that empaths didn't have to be able to see you to tell that you were present, and awake.

"No reason," she said with a smirk as she returned to the video game, just in time to score another bonus an instant before Beast Boy. Beast Boy howled in horror and concentrated even harder, desperate to not be shown up by Raven at his own game.

Raven allowed herself a small smile. Perhaps these pointless video games had a use after all…

* * *

**Author's Note:** I thank you all for reading, and beg you to leave me a review that I may profit by your opinion of my humble work. May you find success in all your endeavors, and I hope to see you soon.


	14. The Sound of Drums

**Disclaimer:** I don't own the Teen Titans. I also don't own Journey.

**Author's Note:** I told myself I would have another chapter ready by today, and so I do. I thank you all for returning to read my most humble of stories, and I live and pray that you will like this latest offering. As always, I but ask and plead that you leave me a review by which I may profit from your opinions. It is reviews like yours that enables me to continue with this project, and I shall need all the fuel I can, for I have a punishing writing schedule ahead of me. I shan't take any more of your time today with boring ramblings, but instead I shall thank you all one more time, and say that I look forward to seeing you all for Chapter 15. May you find success in every endeavor...

* * *

**Chapter 14: The Sound of Drums**

_****"And I will cause the noise of thy songs to cease; and the sound of thy harps shall be no more heard. And I will make thee like the top of a rock: thou shalt be a place to spread nets upon; thou shalt be built no more: for I the LORD have spoken it, saith the Lord GOD. Shall not the isles shake at the sound of thy fall, when the wounded cry, when the slaughter is made in the midst of thee?"__  
_

_ - _Ezekiel 26 : 13-15

**O-O-O**

David sat in the armchair with a can of soda in one hand and listened and watched as Beast Boy continued to gesticulate wildly as he narrated the scene from yesterday.

"So Brother Blood's got the rest of us held up in the air with this red glowy stuff all over us, and Cyborg's in front of him, and he's _real_ mad, like yelling and everything and grabbing at Cyborg's circuits and shouting some stuff about finding the part he was looking for. But then all of a sudden, Cyborg turns blue and all these parts start flying off of the other robots and connecting to Cyborg, like magic!"

"Man, I told you already," interrupted Cyborg, "it wasn't magic. I hacked Blood's brain, and used his own powers against him."

"Dude, whatever!" said Beast Boy, happily refusing to be derailed by such minor things as facts. "It was totally awesome anyway. So _then_, Blood freaks out and goes after Cyborg, like he's gonna cut his arms off again, but Cyborg just grabs his wrists, like you see in a movie, and breaks his _hands_ off!"

David winced involuntarily, his eyes flickering over to Cyborg. "You _what_?"

Cyborg chuckled and glanced back up from the camera to avoid running into something. "It wasn't like you're thinkin'. Blood replaced his arms with cybernetic ones, like I've got, but thinner. I just popped his wrists like glass."

"Remind me never to get you mad at me," said David in jest. It wasn't as though he ever needed reminding of that. He glanced back and forth at the five video feeds that were spread across the main screen in the Titans' common room, showing each one of the Titans as they sat in their seats in the various Titan-vehicles on their way back from Steel City. Robin and Cyborg were sharing the T-car. No doubt they had a lot to discuss after the events of the last few days, which left Beast Boy, Starfire, and Raven in the T-ship. To David's surprise (and no doubt to Raven's alarm), Beast Boy appeared to be the one piloting the spaceship, not that this stopped him from spending most of his time recounting their latest adventures into the video camera mounted on the dashboard.

"So when are you guys getting back?" he asked, sitting back in the easychair, ignoring the gurgling sounds that came from the alien monster to his left.

"If we make good time and don't stop on the way, we should be back in Jump City by this afternoon," said Robin. A chorus of groans and protests greeted this news.

"Dude, it's a road trip!" exclaimed Beast Boy, "we don't have to race. Can't we take it easy going back? We just kicked Brother Blood's butt!"

"We're superheroes, Beast Boy," said Robin, "we don't get the luxury of taking vacations." Robin couldn't see Beast Boy and Cyborg both rolling their eyes and lip syncing his exact words as he spoke them, but David could, and he had to stifle his laugh with a cough as Robin returned to business. "Have there been any problems since we left?"

David shook his head. "Nothing the police couldn't handle, at least that's what the news says. It's been pretty quiet."

"And how is Silkie?" asked Starfire suddenly. "Has he been behaving himself in a proper fashion?"

David turned the videophone recorder around to face the watermelon-sized alien larva that was presently curled up on one of the couches, squawking and gurgling to itself, and for a second, he wondered when this sort of thing had become normal. "He looks like he's been doing fine to me," he said, by which he meant that Silkie had not eaten anything larger than himself in some time. Starfire smiled and cooed at the larval worm, which slithered happily off the couch and over to the screen, sitting up and waving its stubby tentacles in the air at the image of Starfire, and David admitted to himself that, once you got used to the weird noises and the voracious appetite, Silkie wasn't _that_ bad as pets went, although invariably whenever he seemed the most cute, it was because he was considering who or what to throw up on.

Beast Boy and Cyborg were still trying to convince Robin to agree to an overnight stop of some kind, talking over one another and, in Beast Boy's case, waving their hands around wildly to describe how awesome the proposed excursion would be, and Raven was rolling her eyes and trying to figure out how to mute the others more or less permanently, and Starfire was adjusting the radio of the T-ship and singing along with the jingles for carpet cleaners and toothpaste, and waving at the image of Silkie that she could see on her videoscreen. It was thinly-organized chaos, as usual, as Beast Boy periodically gave a yelp and grabbed at the flight controls and swerved to avoid plowing into something, and Cyborg steered the T-car with one hand while driving at what looked like about two hundred miles per hour over a dirt back-road, and all five Titans' voices competed with the roaring radios tuned to completely different stations in the two vehicles. And just for a second, David caught himself wishing that the Titans had brought him along.

Of course there had never been a question of that whatsoever. They had gone to Steel City to help Cyborg after a garbled transmission calling for aid had come through the Tower's computer. Whatever was going on was certainly no place for David to be, that much had been agreed to without a word. And given what Beast Boy was telling him about what had happened, he was more certain than ever that it was a very good thing that he has stayed behind. Besides, for once, he had the Tower to himself for an extended period of time. No training regimen, no early wake-up calls, no bone-shattering combat training or migraine-inducing power endurance sessions. He could do whatever he wanted around the Tower, and between the video games, the satellite TV, the endless (and often mystifying) nooks and crannies around the tower, and just the sights it had to offer of the city itself, there was plenty _to _do. Plus, he'd always been good at taking care of himself, or rather he thought he had prior to coming here. At least he'd been good at keeping himself amused and sane. When one moved around as much as a kid in foster care did, it became necessary to cultivate that skill, so given that, having the Tower to himself for a week was like some kind of Christmas bonanza.

... but hearing the usual barrage of sound and shouting and chaos from the speakers served to remind him that, despite all that, it _was_ awfully quiet around here by himself.

"David? Can you hear me?"

David blinked and shook himself out of his daydream to see Robin staring at him from the main screen. "Um... yeah... yeah I read you." he said, leaning forward to speak into the microphone. "What was that?"

"I said, are you sure you're okay there if we take another day to get back?"

Apparently Cyborg and Beast Boy had convinced Robin while David wasn't paying attention. Either that or he had decided it was worth it to shut them both up. It was a toss up as to which.

"Yeah," he said, "yeah it's no problem. Take your time. Everything's fine around here."

"You know what to do if something goes wrong?" asked Robin, for what might have been the twelfth time since they had left. "If something happens?"

David smiled and nodded earnestly, "Surrender to the biggest monster I can see and promise to obey its every command until the end of time, right?"

Beast Boy and Cyborg exploded into laughter, which was unfortunate, as they happened to be the ones driving the various vehicles, and Raven had to wrench a signpost out of the way with her powers or the T-ship would have plowed right through it. Once Cyborg had gotten the T-car back under control, and Robin had stopped getting ready to leap from the passenger seat, he turned back to the camera and frowned. "Seriously," he said, his voice indicating that this was not a laughing matter, "if anything goes wrong, remember - "

David held up one hand to pre-empt him. "Call you guys and run like hell, I know. Don't worry."

"Good," said Robin, sitting back in his chair and adopting a more trademark smirk. "We'll see you when we get there then. And get some rest. We start up again tomorrow."

David groaned loudly and flopped back into the armchair like an exhausted war veteran. "Again?" he asked plaintively. "I don't think I've caught up on sleep from the _last _couple weeks yet."

"Sleep's another thing we don't have the luxury of," said Robin, the predatory smile on his face plainly visible through his mask, "didn't anyone tell you?"

"I must have missed that chapter in the idiot's guide..." said David, rolling his eyes, but oddly enough, despite the histrionics (which were necessary, of course), he found that he didn't mind the idea of starting the routine back up again. Not that it was pleasant to have Robin working him to death in the training room, but it was becoming... _familiar_ sort of.

It was amazing what someone could get used to.

"Yo man, we'll see you when we get back, all right?" said Cyborg, smiling over the steering wheel of the T-car.

"Yeah dude," chimed in Beast Boy exuberantly, "I still gotta tell you all about how I kicked the Titans East's butts."

"You mean how a pair of hyperactive dwarfs beat the stuffing out of you until I split them up?" commented Raven without even looking up from the book she was reading. Beast Boy turned back and shot her a nasty look, and consequently had to pull up sharply to avoid slipping a cyprus tree the instant he turned back.

"We shall see you upon our return!" chimed Starfire, still waving to her pet mutant. "Thank you for agreeing to watch over Silkie! Please, do not permit him to consume any furnature." David couldn't help but wonder how he was supposed to stop him if he chose to do such a thing.

"Have fun," he said, as the Titans shut off their communicators one by one, plunging the Tower into an almost deafening silence. Silkie stopped gurgling and slithered back onto the couch, curling up in a ball and going back to sleep. David set his soda can down on the table and sat back, sighing slowly and staring up at the ceiling. It was strange. He had no problem at all with being on his own, he had been pretty much on his own for as long as he could remember after all, but these past few days had been, well they had been tougher than he expected. Amazing as the gadgetry and the amenities in the Tower were, and grateful as he was for a chance to _sleep_ for once, it was downright unsettling to be sitting in the common room and unable to hear anything besides the refrigerator and the air conditioner, and no matter how many games he played on Cyborg's Gamestation, or how many of Robin's movies (all crime dramas, typical) he watched, the feeling never left him that there was something missing. He had tried drowning the silence out with Beast Boy's CDs played at high volume, or going up to the roof to listen to the seagulls, even headed down to the training room once or twice to blow some targets up, nothing ever really helped.

He didn't know why, and he wasn't about to admit it to them in person or over the communicators, but he was really looking forward to the others getting back to Jump City.

**O-O-O**

In the tomb-like silence of the underground cavern, the sound of footsteps on a metal grate were loud enough to wake the dead, but the tall man did not turn around. Instead he looked straight ahead at the computer display before him, which showed a map of North America, and at the small red dot blinking somewhere over northern Wyoming.

"Is everything ready?"

The tall man looked down at a smaller screen below the map and glanced over the list of figures and facts to be found there. "They're in position," he said evenly, and the man in gold behind him smiled and stepped up to the control panel next to where the tall man was sitting.

"I'll be overseeing the attack."

The tall man hesitated only for the briefest of instants. "I see," he said guardedly, and stood up from the chair. "And why is that?"

"Because I am in charge of this operation," said the man in gold smugly with a self-satisfied smirk on his face, "and because if we manage to kill one of the Titans, I wish to witness it live."

"You don't know how to control them," said the tall man, not an objection, just an observation. "You won't be able to prevent collateral damage."

"And I don't intend to," said the man in gold. "We both made the mistake of underestimating these children more than once. I see no reason to restrain ourselves. Our objective is to kill."

"I _know_ what our objective is," intoned the tall man deeply, crossing his arms. "And what do you suggest I do in the meanwhile?"

"Oversee affairs in Jump," said the man in gold, sitting down in the chair that the tall man had just vacated. "Ensure that everything there goes as planned."

There were several seconds of silence, as the man in gold slid the computer's controls over to himself and the tall man considered what he had just been ordered to do. "As you wish," he said finally, and turned to walk away.

"Do I need to know anything special about these robots?" asked the man in gold.

"That depends," said the tall man, stopping and turning back. "What kind of firing orders did you want?"

"Firing orders?" said the man in gold, as if unfamiliar with the term.

"Rules of engagement," explained the tall man. "The robots can obey more subtle commands than 'kill everything in sight', and I assume you don't want them shooting the girl by accident."

The man in gold smirked at that. "The girl is too resourceful for that. I've been assured of it. No, the gloves are off for this one. Let them kill anything they can."

"Do we at _least _have a priority target?"

The man in gold was silent for a moment, before punching a few commands into the computer terminal before him, bringing up a window on which the faces of all five of the Teen Titans were to be seen. He pointed at one of the faces on the screen with his finger, and the touchscreen highlighted the face and caused its picture to fade to black.

"Robin," said the man in gold. "Tell them to kill Robin if at all possible."

The tall man nodded slowly. "I'll arrange it," he said, and he walked off into the darkness, leaving the man in gold to tend to his operation. He waited until he was nearly to the other side of the badly-lit cavern before he slowly reached into his pocket and drew out a small, yellow, hand-held object the size of a hockey puck. With a touch of his finger, the object popped open, revealing a small screen built into it. With his free hand, the tall man drew an instrument from his other pocket, and inserted it slowly into a pin-sized hole below the screen. The screen flashed static for a moment, and then resolved to an image of a young man wearing a latex mask over his eyes, smiling at out at the tall man, frozen in mid-word.

"Turnabout is fair play, Robin," whispered the tall man, and then he pressed a button, and the screen went black, but only for a second or so.

**O-O-O**

"Incoming transmission."

David lifted his head sharply from the book he had been trying to read without a lot of success, one of Raven's no doubt. He didn't think any of the others were the sort to keep Steven King laying about. On the main screen of the Tower, a light was blinking and a computerized voice was letting him know that another video-call was inbound. Puzzled, David set the book down and pulled the microphone and video recorder over to himself before pressing the "pickup" button.

The screen before him flickered for a second before Robin's face materialized on it. Robin was now in the driver's seat of the T-car, he and Cyborg having apparently switched places.

"Um, hey Robin," said David, a bit surprised to see the Titans' leader barely a couple of hours after his last call. "Everything okay?"

"Just a change of plan," said Robin evenly. "We're actually coming into the city this afternoon."

David's eyes widened. "This afternoon?" he asked, rather surprised. "That's pushing pretty hard."

"We've got things to do," said Robin, looking as serious as he ever did. "We're going to drive right on through and get something to eat when we arrive in Jump City. Why don't you meet us down at the pizza parlor on Main Street, and we'll all get lunch?"

It took David a second to properly interpret that. "Meet you guys?" he repeated slowly, as if hard of hearing. "Really?"

"Sure," Robin said, and the image flickered as he smirked a bit. "It'll be fun. Meet us at the parlor at 1 o'clock."

"Um... right!" said David, suddenly feeling much more energetic than he had in a long while. He hadn't left the tower in weeks, not since the incident with Adonis, and even then it had been surreptitious, practically behind Robin's back. He was so excited that he almost forgot to ask a reasonably important question.

"Wait, Robin... how do I get there from the Tower?"

"Take my bicycle if you want," said Robin. "It worked last time, didn't it?"

David blushed slightly at the reminder. "Thanks," he said. "I'll er... I see you guys there I guess!"

"See you at one," said Robin, and the screen went black again.

David glanced up at the clock mounted above the viewscreen, and tried to remember how far it was from the Tower to the shore through the underground tunnel that connected the two. Silkie was staring at him almost expectantly, and he smiled down at the little bug and gently (very gently, the thing had tried to eat his hand more than once), patted it on the head.

"Star'll be back soon, Silkie," he said, having no idea if the mutant larva could understand him. Silkie gurgled and slid over to the side of the couch, and David walked back to the kitchen and picked up one of the cans of pink sludge marked "Imitation Zorka Berries" that Starfire had told him was the only thing Silkie should be allowed to eat. He popped the lid off the can with a can opener, and set it down next to Silkie, who immediately dove headfirst into the can and was soon happily munching away. Leaving the little mutant to finish, David grabbed his windbreaker (it was really Beast Boy's but he'd been wearing it for long enough to think of it as his own) off of one of the stools under the kitchen table, and walked out of the common room, towards the elevator down to the garage.

It was shaping up to be a good day.

**O-O-O**

Robin sat back in the passenger seat of the T-car and shut his eyes just for a moment. The muted sound of Beast Boy and Raven arguing about how loud to set the music in the T-ship hovered vaguely on the edge of his consciousness, as did the more immediate rhythm of Cyborg's hip hop CD playing in the T-car before him. Cyborg had volunteered to drive all the way back to Jump, probably because he didn't trust the T-car in any hands but his. At any rate, with the others off in the T-ship, the trip would give the two of them a chance to talk, something he thought they probably needed to do after what had happened with Brother Blood, but so far, neither of them had felt like starting up _that _conversation.

"So where're we stoppin' man?" asked Cyborg from the driver's seat.

Robin opened his eyes again and looked around at the mountains and trees that zoomed by outside the T-car. He glanced at his map. "Yellowstone Park's not far off," he said. "We could try there."

"Sounds good," said Cyborg, and he pressed the intercom button to talk to the others in the T-ship overhead. "Y'all hear that?"

"Yeah dude!" came the Beast Boy's voice back. "It'll be awesome! We can go hiking, have a campfire, make hot dogs..."

"Mosquitos and smoke," said Raven with as little enthusiasm as she could muster. "Woopie."

"This 'camping' sounds wondrous!" said Starfire, more than making up for Raven's sarcasm. "May we see the great water spouts of the Yellowstone? Or relate stories of men with hooks for hands while shining flashlights into our faces? These are the traditional activities of 'camping', no?"

"Sure thing, Star," said Cyborg with a smile, and he switched off the intercom, leaving the others to argue the relative merits of the various things they could do once they arrived at the park. A moment later, he turned the volume on the music down to a low murmur, such that he could be heard without having to shout.

"Look man," he said, "I never said it..."

"You don't have to," said Robin, shutting his eyes again.

"Still. Thanks for bailing me out of that mess. And thanks for... for lettin' me handle it."

"You were the best person for the job," said Robin, and he knew it was true, though that wasn't the only reason he had turned the team over to Cyborg for the mission. "You were the one who could stop Brother Blood. The Titans East owe you one."

"Yeah well, I owe you guys one," said Cyborg. "So, will you do me a favor? If I ever start acting stupid again like that thing over the phone, just smack me upside the head will ya?"

Robin chuckled as he crossed his arms and leaned the seat back. "Sure."

The hum of the engines was all that could be heard for a few minutes as neither Cyborg nor Robin said anything, until finally Cyborg broke the silence with a hesitant question.

"Hey man... uh... I'm... not gonna have to get initiated _again_ am I?"

Robin cracked one eye open and looked over at Cyborg with a sly grin.

"Aw _man_! Come on! It took me a week last time to get the silly string outta my circuits! Don't I get like a pass or something for what I did to Brother Blood?"

Robin laughed and sat back up. "I'll talk it over with the others. Maybe we can let you off with just the wig and the - "

A loud red light flashed on the dashboard of the T-car, and a small buzzer sounded. Robin stopped speaking, and Cyborg glanced down and pressed a button, causing a small heads up display to extend up from behind the steering wheel, revealing a topographical map of the surrounding area with two blue and one red dot on it.

"What is it?" asked Robin, leaning over to see.

"Not sure," said Cyborg. "A power signature of some kind, pretty big one, from up ahead."

"A town maybe?" suggested Robin, glancing up at the half-metal teen, "or a factory".

Cyborg shook his head. "We're inside the park already. The map doesn't show anything way out here, just trees and..."

Another red dot appeared on the topographical display, then another, then three more, then a dozen. Within seconds, the display was thick with red dots, each one indicating a power signature up ahead. "What the..." said Cyborg staring at the screen, and Robin lifted his head to look out the windshield at the road ahead, and as he did so, he saw a tiny flash of light and a small bright object fly up out of the trees ahead in an arc towards the T-ship thundering overhead...

**O-O-O**

It was Saturday.

David had completely lost track of the days while staying within the Tower, and thus it wasn't until he arrived at the park near the pizza parlor that he realized it even was a weekend. The place was packed thickly with families and revelers, out enjoying the weekend. The restaurants and cafes near the waterfront were packed solid, the pizza parlor itself literally overflowing with hungry tourists and locals. David wondered for a second how they were going to get a table; before it struck him that the Teen Titans would probably warrant a reserved spot.

He felt the energy of the crowds around him as he slowly pedaled through them all. Nobody paid him even the slightest mind, and for that he was thankful, even if he knew it wasn't going to last long. Once the rest of the Titans showed up, it would be kind of hard to remain anonymous. Not every random kid on the street got to have lunch with the...

He stopped peddling for a second and put his feet down to stop himself as he reconsidered what he had just thought.

'The rest of the Titans?'

Now why the hell had he...

"David!"

David spun around and nearly tripped over the bicycle. He glanced through the mob of faces off to his right before one appeared that he recognized, and then a surprised smile came over his face as a tall, thin, blond girl a year or two older than him jogged up the grassy hillside towards where he was standing, waving her hand to catch his attention.

"Long time no see," said Carrie with a smile as she stopped on the side of the path. She was wearing a jumpsuit with a Japanese-looking name on it and a high school mascot, a cartoonish octopus, emblazoned on the front.

"Hey!" said David, smiling back as he dismounted the bike. "Yeah, sorry, I've been kinda busy."

"I figured," said Carrie. "What are you doing out here? I thought they never let you leave the Tower?"

"Close enough," said David, "but the others are coming back from some mission off in Steel City, and I'm meeting them for lunch."

"The others?"

"The... the Titans," he corrected himself. "Sorry." 'Why in the world did I call them _that_?' he wondered.

"Oh really?" said Carrie, her eyes widening with what David took to be surprise that the Titans were about to show up here, in public, although David knew that they spent a great deal of time just wandering the city publicly. Robin always explained it as showing the flag, letting themselves be seen and noticed as a deterrent to criminals, but David knew better than to believe that this was the only reason.

"Well I already had lunch," said Carrie, "but, you wanna just hang out until your friends get here?"

David was rather taken aback by this proposal, and it showed. "Uh… I…"

Carrie smiled. "C'mon, I'll get you something from the soda fountain next to the bookstore. I still owe you for that rescue, remember? And I want to know what happened to you after that werewolf thing attacked."

David looked around for a second, as if the Titans were about to materialize out of thin air (you never knew), and then smiled. "Sure," he said, "sounds good." And parking the bicycle on a bike rack nearby, he followed Carrie into the soda fountain.

**O-O-O**

"Just a small-town girl! Living in a _lonely world_! She took the midnight train going annnyyyywheeeeeeeeere!"

Raven was in hell.

She was locked inside the T-ship with a hyperactive alien and an even more hyperactive changeling, both of whom were taking turns singing at the top of their lungs along with whatever song was being played. It didn't seem to matter to Beast Boy what genre of music it was, rap, country, disco, electronic. He sang them all, and he sang them all terribly, his voice cracking every other line and as far off tune as he could possibly get without breaking the laws of physics. But the worst, hands down the absolute worst of all, was 80s rock. Beast Boy seemed to know every single song ever produced in that decade, and every word in them. It was worse than fingernails on a blackboard, and it wasn't made any better by Starfire joining Beast Boy in a harmony of the damned whenever they came to a song that she knew. No amount of frantic pounding on the mute button or meditative technique would keep the sound away. She was getting ready to melt the radio or teleport outside and fly along by herself.

"Just a city boy! Born'n'raised in _South Detroit_! He took the midnight train going annnyyyywheeeeeeeeeere!"

"Will you two _please_ be quiet!" snapped Raven, knowing it was hopeless but forcing herself to try anyhow. "I can't even think in here."

"Oh do sing along with us, Raven!" exclaimed Starfire joyously enough to give Raven diabetes. "We can alter the music playing device to emit a song you are familiar with! It is wondrous fun pretending to be a singer!"

"Yeah, Raven! Let's hear it!"

"Not a chance," she said darkly, and she lowered her eyes back to the book in her lap. Beast Boy merely shrugged and resumed.

"A singer in a smoky room, smell of wine and _cheap perfume_! For a dime they can share the night, it goes on and on and on and on…"

"Smile."

Beast Boy interrupted an energetic air guitar session to twist around in his seat and look at Raven. "What?"

"The line is 'for a _smile_ they can share the night'. If you're going to sing, get the words right at least."

A millisecond too late, Raven realized she had walked right into a trap.

"HA!" shouted Beast Boy, loud enough to drown out the guitar chorus. "You _do_ know the words!"

"I've had to listen to you sing it badly a thousand times already," said Raven sullenly, refusing to meet Beast Boy's gaze. "And shouldn't you watch where you're flying?"

"C'mon, Raven, get the next line!" said Beast Boy, paying no mind to her advice. Privately, Raven wondered what they had drugged her with to get her to agree to fly with Beast Boy as pilot.

"No way."

"Please! I bet you're really good!"

"I _don't sing_, Beast Boy," said Raven with enough emphasis to hammer a nail, "and I don't like Journey even if I did."

"So what _do_ you like?" asked Beast Boy, gesturing at the CD binder sandwiched next to his seat. "I've got like half the music in the world here."

"I like _peace and quiet_!" she shouted, clenching her fists into balls and feeling the dark energy coating her eyes and hands. Beast Boy yelped and winced as if expecting to get hit and Starfire fell silent, glancing back and forth between her friends. Raven snarled to herself and forced the energy away, but said nothing, returning to her book, and for a time, there was no sound except the blaring stereo.

"I can turn it off if you want," ventured Beast Boy timidly, and she could have kicked herself for reacting like that _again_.

"Whatever," she said softly. "Just don't fly into anything."

"Raven," said Beast Boy, putting on airs and adopting a pseudo-intellectual tone, "I've been flying since I was three. I know just what I'm doing."

Raven was about to make a sarcastic comment in response, but right about then there was a bright flash of light from outside her window, and the T-ship's front right engine disintegrated into a hail of flying pieces.

**O-O-O**

"Strangers, waiting, up and down the _boulevard_. Their shadows, searching, in the niiieeeiiight…"

The amateur cover band singer wailed into his microphone, as the crowd that had gathered to watch him and his friends laughed and cheered and sang along and occasionally tossed money into the open guitar case in front of them. David and Carrie stood above the crowd on the sidewalk, looking down at the grassy dell in which the band was playing. David held a vanilla milkshake in a plastic cup in one hand, and was leaning against the metal railing separating the street from the dell, watching the musicians playing.

"Wow…" said Carrie, who was paying no attention to the music. "But… you're all right, right?"

"Yeah," said David, taking a sip of the milkshake. "He didn't hit anything important, least that's what Raven said. I got lucky."

"I'll say you did…" said Carrie, and she turned back around to face the dell once again. "Well I'm glad you're all right."

"Thanks," said David, and he shook his head. "All part of the job I guess."

"So now you're gonna be a superhero?"

David took a long, deep breath, and let it out slowly. "I'm gonna try," he said finally.

"You don't sound too excited. What's the matter?"

He shook his head and laughed. "I'm not really sure..." he said. "It's a little bit…I dunno…"

"Daunting?" said Carrie, finishing David's sentence for him with a guess.

David blinked and looked up. "Yeah, sort of. Like this is all way too big for me."

"I can imagine," said Carrie. "But… well you've got powers, right?"

"There's more to it than just powers. There's… it's really hard to explain. It's like… they just… don't even think about what could happen to them. They go out and they fight these monsters or psychopaths who would kill them if they got the chance, just… _because_! And not just that but, they… believe, they _totally_ believe that they can take anything that comes at them, without any problem. Alien battlefleets, mutant Godzilla things, armies of robots. Even if they're _right_…" he glanced up into the sky, as if looking for a sign of something. "I don't know how they can do that, but they do it. And I just don't… I don't know if _I_ can, you know."

Carrie didn't say anything, but simply watched as David lowered his head again and went back to watching the band play. After a moment or so, she gently put a hand on his shoulder, sort of in support, and smiled.

"Well they must know what they're doing with you, right?" she asked. "They sound like they're pretty competent to me."

David nodded slowly. "Yeah, they are. They're… they're _really_ good. I mean _scary_ good. That werewolf thing that attacked us? Beast Boy took him down in like two minutes, _alone_. Raven can just… I don't even know _what_ Raven can do but anything that gets in her way just gets paved over like it's made of paper. And Robin…" he shook his head and chuckled. "Robin can take on all the rest of them, at once, without _any_ powers. And he's like your age. Maybe."

Carrie laughed at the description, and gripped David's shoulder tighter. "Well it sounds to me like, if you've got friends like that, you don't really need to worry about much of anything. So what do you say you just try to relax huh?"

David laughed and nodded slowly. "I'll try," he said. "Thanks."

"Don't mention it," said Carrie, and she gestured with her head towards the rest of the park. "C'mon," she said, "let's go see if the crowds have thinned out."

David nodded and was about to follow her, when he suddenly remembered what he was doing out here in the first place. "Wait," he said, "d'you know what time it is? I don't have a watch…"

Carrie glanced at her wristwatch. "It's about half past one," she said. "Why?"

David blinked and looked confused for a second. "It's just… I was supposed to meet them at one. They didn't… we didn't miss them did we?"

Carrie smiled. "I… think we would have noticed if the Teen Titans had shown up. The tourists would have made enough noise to wake the dead." David nodded slowly, but the worry was obviously still apparent on his face, and Carrie sighed and laughed in mock-exasperation. "I'm sure they're just running a little late," she said. "Don't worry about it."

David chuckled at his own paranoia. Carrie was undoubtedly right. In fact they had probably called the Tower to tell him they were going to be late, but as he was already out here, and had no way of contacting them directly, he would have to wait until they showed up to find out what happened.

Besides, he rationalized. One o'clock _had_ seemed awfully fast for them to get back to Jump, even with the T-car and T-ship…

As they walked along, the warbling sounds of the lead singer's voice filtered up to them.

"Working hard, to get my fill! Everybody _wants_ a thri-ill! Payin' anything to roll the dice, just _one…_ _more_… _time_!"

The singer was good, David thought to himself, as were the guitarists, but the drummer needed a little work. He was out of rhythm with the other musicians, particularly his bass line, a heavy jackhammer beat that seemed a bit out of place for a power ballad like this. It was loud and strong enough to feel, even at this distance.

"They need a new drummer," he commented to Carrie offhand, and when she stopped suddenly, he worried for a second that she knew the drummer somehow, that he had just inadvertently insulted her boyfriend or whatnot. "I… mean… I just meant that…"

"David," said Carrie, and her voice was quiet, almost a whisper as she reached back without looking and grabbed his shirt. He stopped, puzzled, and it was then that he realized that the music had stopped, but the drumming hadn't.

… and it wasn't coming from the dell.

David listened and felt as the low heavy drumbeat coursed through the ground and through his body, echoing across the park, making people stop and turn to look for what could be causing it, and he felt an icy fist grip down around his head and freeze his blood solid as Carrie slowly turned back to look at him. Her sky-blue eyes were wide and fearful, and very slowly, both of them turned their heads to look up one of the major boulevards that led towards the park, as the sound of the heavy drum beat began to sharpen and grow louder, and mix with the faint sounds of glass shattering and metal being rent that were forever seared into David's memory like childhood nightmares.

"No," whispered David, a horrified plea addressed to any deities that might be listening, "No, no, _no_, oh _God_ no!"

Slowly, from down the boulevard, a giant, grey, hulking shape loomed into view, its footsteps echoing like the sound of drums, alive, intact, repaired, a juggernaut, moving with even and steady strides down the street towards them, its red eyes like fiery coals boring straight into David as if it could transfix him with its gaze and reduce him to ash, a monster of steel and silicates, a creature out for blood and revenge, and as David and Carrie both stared at it, and the all-too-familiar sounds of panic and screaming began to break out all around them, the monster broke out into a run, its footfalls casting debris and dust up like the impact of artillery shells, and it raised one hand into the air, and opened its mouth wide, and it screamed.

"_DEVASTATOR!"_

**O-O-O**

The music was muffled, quiet, for the feed had to be transmitted a long distance, and he had amplified the foreground more than the background so as to hear what they were saying, but when the first missile slammed into the T-ship's engine, the man in gold grinned broadly, and turned up the volume, flooding the cave with soaring guitar riffs and melodies, and as he watched over the screen the three Titans inside the spacecraft scrambling in panic to try and right themselves even as the ship began to descend in smoke and flames, he felt the excitement of the moment coming over him, and the lyrics seemed to float through him as he watched greedily.

"Some will win! Some will lose!"

The green changeling's eyes widened in stunned horror as the T-ship's nose fell, revealing a broad green forest below, from which two hundred surface-to-air missiles identical to the one that had just blown off the engine were rising into the air like meteors in reverse from every direction. He pulled uselessly at the controls, but there was no altering the ship's direction. It was on a crash land course, but it would not get there.

"Some are born to _sing_ the bluuu-uues!"

"What the _hell_?" shouted Cyborg as the T-ship's engine was vaporized. He slammed on the accelerator as Robin snatched up the dashboard radio and frantically called for his friends to respond.

"Beast Boy! Starfire! Raven! Can you hear me? Eject! Eject!"

"Oh _shit_!" yelled Cyborg at the top of his lungs. "_Look out!_"

The T-car swerved and fishtailed as Cyborg slammed on the brakes, for fifty yards ahead of the car, three hulking armored robots had stepped out into the road. The robots were humanoid, and in their hands they held massive six-barreled Gatling guns, all of them already spinning. And just as Robin realized what was about to happen, all three guns spat fire like dragons, and the windshield of the T-car exploded into his face, followed by a barrage of shells.

"Oh the movie never ends, it goes on, and on, and on, and –"

Even as he saw the T-car swerve under a hail of machine canon fire and spin out of control, the music in the underground chamber cut out as the first missile crashed straight into the primary cockpit of the T-ship and consumed it instantly with a 10,000 degree blast of thermite plasma. The broken spaceship seemed to hang in mid-air for just a second, its remaining engines fighting a losing battle with gravity to keep it aloft, and then an instant later, a broad grin crossed the face of the man in gold, as thirty more missiles slammed into the ship from every direction and in one, cataclysmic explosion, blotted it out of the sky.

"Don't stop believing," said the man in gold to the silent screens that showed him the destruction his agents had wrought. And as he said it, the man in gold pressed a button which issued a command to the two hundred and fifty six armed war-bots that were hidden in the trees near the location of the remaining Titans to engage all survivors of the assault, and slaughter them all.

At least one of the Titans, if not more, would no doubt survive all this. But he only had to kill one of them…

... and he found it hard to imagine that at least one was not already dead.

* * *

**Author's Note: ** Please, leave a review behind, for they are of such help and comfort while I am struggling to write further, that I cannot state their value. I sincerely hope you have enjoyed this chapter, and I shall see you all in Chapter 15!


	15. Lines in the Sand

**Disclaimer:** I do not own the Teen Titans, and thus there is no reason to kill me for their cancellation.

**Author's Note:** I'm gonna catch hell for this one...

This chapter, ladies and gentlemen, took me longer to write in terms of actual time spent typing on a keyboard, than any other I have ever written. I do not pretend to know why. At times it soared, and at times it was torture, but always I had to write entire sections of prose that wound up being cut or junked or torn to pieces and placed elsewhere. I nearly ended the chapter halfway through it, but felt that the place it ends now is actually a better location. Overall however, I have NO doubt that many of you are going to be angry with me for some of the liberties and circumstances I've applied here. All I can say is that I encourage you all to make your opinions known to me via the review system. It is by that means alone that I can improve, and anything that felt false to you, I can explain my rationales for in greater detail through by review replies than I could ever hope to here. Thank you all, and I hope you enjoy this latest chapter of my story.

* * *

**Chapter 15: Lines in the Sand**

_"It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog"_

- Mark Twain_  
_

**O-O-O**

He stood amidst the chaos and stared down the barrel of the gun.

The people around them were screaming, panicking, fleeing in every direction, abandoning their cars and belongings and running for their lives, but Cinderblock was taking no more notice of them than a stampeding elephant would of a swarm of ants scurrying beneath its feet. He marched relentlessly down the street, kicking cars aside as he walked past, caring nothing for if they were occupied or who he might hit with them. His beady orange eyes were fixed on his target, and from his mouth issued a blood-chilling roar, a single word, one David had burned into his memory, one he had prayed he'd never hear again.

"_DEVASTATOR!_"

"Oh my _god_..."

Carrie was staring at Cinderblock as he stormed down the street towards them, her eyes wide with astonishment, frozen in place as though staring into the headlights of a fast-approaching freight train. David, whose reaction the first two times he had met Cinderblock had been reasonably similar, managed to snap out of it in time to grab Carrie by the wrist.

"RUN!"

They ran.

The streets were emptying quickly as residents and tourists dove into the nearest buildings or fled down side streets; anything to get out of the path of Cinderblock. Some threw themselves into the waters of Jump City Bay, others ducked behind parked cars and mailboxes or even leaped into dumpsters, all of them hoping the monster would just pass them by. Terrified though he was, David knew better than to imitate the other civilians. Cinderblock was unquestionably here for only one reason, and there was no hiding, not now, not from this. He had to drag Carrie only for a few steps before she too began running on her own power, and they ran as fast as they could down the street and towards...

... towards what exactly?

His mind was screaming at him to run, just to run, that it didn't matter where he ran to as long as it wasn't here, but deep inside his stomach he felt a terrible cold knot of fear forming. This time there might well be no evading Cinderblock at all. He could hear the thunderous footfalls of the concrete-and-steel juggernaut as it pursued him, and he realized slowly and with growing panic that this time the Titans would not be coming to his rescue. The Titans could have been a thousand miles away for all he knew, and Cinderblock would catch up with him in less than a minute. He needed to think of something, some place to go, some place to hide, some place Cinderblock couldn't...

Someone grabbed his arm and nearly pulled him off his feet to the side, and he snapped out of his thoughts to see that Carrie had ducked into an almost-hidden alleyway and dragged him into it. The alley was deserted for the moment, and without a word, Carrie scrambled into a dark corner, shadowed by the buildings around it, and crouched behind a trash can, pulling David down next to her as she did so.

"What _is_ that thing?" asked Carrie breathlessly brushing her hair out of her eyes with one hand and steadying herself against the wall with the other.

"It's Cinderblock," said David in a hollow voice. He was staring at the entrance of the alley, as though expecting Cinderblock to burst into it at any moment, but though the footfalls were still audible, they were now more irregular. It appeared that Cinderblock had lost track of where they were when they suddenly vanished into the alley, and was now trying to reacquire them.

"Who's..." began Carrie, and then she thought better of it and switched to a more important question. "What does he _want?_"

David turned nervously to face Carrie, his voice quivering as he spoke.

"Me."

While David heard her breath catch, just for a second, she did not scream or run away, though it took her a second to compose herself enough to ask the next question.

"So what do we do?"

"I have no idea..." he admitted quickly, clutching the edge of the trash can hard enough to bend the aluminum. "Lemme... lemme think for a second..."

"Aren't the Titans going to show up and - "

"I don't think so," he said. "I think... I think they..." he didn't know _what_ to think about where the Titans were, but it was clear now that this was all a setup, a trap to get him out in the open where Cinderblock could take a crack at him.

"So then... what are we gonna do?"

He closed his eyes and clenched his fists hard around the lip of the trash can and tried to focus, tried to think clearly. Cinderblock was after him, and the Titans couldn't help. He needed some kind of a plan, and fast, and he tried to control his fear long enough to generate one.

"We need to... get to the Tower," he said after a moment or so. "There's security systems there, stuff Cyborg built. I think... I think they might be able to stop Cinderblock." It was not perhaps the most brilliant or inspired of battle plans, but it was better than sitting in an alley and waiting to be crushed like beetles.

Apparently Carrie agreed, as she made no argument, but instead raised her head to glance up and down the alley. "How do we get to the Tower?" she asked. "Isn't it on an island?"

"There's a tunnel, under the bay," said David rapidly, expecting Cinderblock to round the corner at any moment. "It comes out at the waterfront, onto Battery Street."

This news made Carrie hesitate. "David," she said, "that's ten blocks from here. We'll never make it that far without - "

"I know!" exclaimed David breathlessly, cutting her off and glancing ever-more-nervously up the alley, "but I don't know what else to do."

"Well aren't you a..." began Carrie, her voice catching, "... a meta... whatever? A superhero? Can't you do something?"

"Not by _myself_!" he responded with urgency. "He'll rip us _both _to pieces! We_ have_ to get back to the tower before he - "

David was in turn cut off, but not by Carrie. Instead his voice failed as a thunderous roar echoed down the alleyway from somewhere out in the street beyond, loud enough to rattle the windows overhead. It was followed in short order by the sound of metal being rent and glass being shattered, mixed with a chorus of high-pitched screams. David's heart skipped a beat as he heard the bloodcurdling screams, and before he knew what he was doing, he was sprinting down the alleyway towards the street, Carrie hot on his heels, and he ground to a halt just next to the entrance and stuck his head out to see what was happening.

It was a scene straight out of a nightmare. Cinderblock, temporarily cheated of his quarry, had apparently decided to take his rage out on a red and silver Jump City municipal transit bus, filled to capacity with panicked, terrified civilians. The front part of the bus had been peeled off like a sardine can lid and tossed into the street, and the bus driver lay motionless on the ground next to it, the radio with which he had desperately tried to summon aid still held in his hand. Cinderblock was reaching inside, groping around with his huge, concrete hand for a victim to snare. With a roar of victory, the monster's fist clenched around a little girl in one of the front seats, and she was dragged screaming out of the bus. The girl's mother shrieked for help, desperately scrambling over the ruined front section of the bus to get to her daughter, but Cinderblock ignored her, and let out a primal roar as he prepared to spike the struggling child onto the pavement like a football. And faced with all this, David did the only thing he could think of to do.

He reached out with his mind to a piece of pavement a dozen feet behind Cinderblock, and he detonated it.

The blast was not very impressive, barely even audible over everything else, but Cinderblock heard it, and he instantly stopped his roaring and turned around, all else forgotten in a heartbeat. For a brief instant, Cinderblock and David stared at one another, and then a leering grin spread across the giant's face, and with no further thought for anything but his target, Cinderblock dropped the little girl onto the pavement, bruised but unharmed, lifted his finger to point straight at David and shouted his eternal battle-cry.

"DEVASTATOR!"

"David..."

David did not respond to Carrie, for Cinderblock had divested himself of the little girl, and consequently, he no longer had to settle merely for getting Cinderblock's attention. Whether or not he could_stop _Cinderblock, he would have to at least slow the monster down if they were to make an escape. He extended one hand forward, and clenched his fist, trying desperately to keep his concentration as Cinderblock stomped towards him. He felt Carrie jerk back in fear next to him, but he threw his fingers out, palm forward, as though he were signing for an explosion, and as if in mimicry a fire hydrant sitting on the sidewalk next to Cinderblock blew up. The water within burst forth as a cloud of pressurized steam, instantly shrouding the entire area in a dense, thick fog. Visibility dropped to nothing in a split second, and David altered his perception such that he was no longer staring at cloud, but at molecules of water floating in those of air, and behind them, a lumbering mass of silicates and rock, stumbling in a circle, clearly disoriented.

"Come on!" he shouted to Carrie, who needed no encouragement, and the two teens ran as fast as they could down the street away from the confused juggernaut. Momentary the confusion proved, for David could soon hear Cinderblock stomping after them, his footfalls causing the very ground to shake. He expected at any moment to feel Cinderblock grabbing him from behind, and his fear pressed him to run faster, ever faster, and so it was that he did not notice when Cinderblock's footfalls stopped all of a sudden.

Fortunately Carrie did.

"Look out!" she shouted, and she practically tackled David, throwing both of them to the ground as an SUV passed over their heads and rolled down the street ahead. David landed hard on the pavement, tearing his jacket's elbow out, and rolled over onto his back in time to see Cinderblock pick up a motorcycle and lob it towards them. Almost automatically, he reached upwards with one hand and with his mind and commanded the gasoline inside the motorcycle's gas tank to detonate. The bike exploded into a fireball a dozen yards away, sending flaming debris raining down on them like confetti. Gasoline fumes and acrid smoke swirled around them as David and Carrie scrambled back to their feet, and with Cinderblock momentarily distracted by the unexpected blast, the two teens raced around the corner.

Coughing and gasping, David forced himself to keep running, down one block after another, even as the sound of the footfalls behind them resumed. He knew that they needed more time. Even running flat-out, they could not hope to outrun Cinderblock for long. Their only hope was to delay him long enough to get to...

They rounded one more corner onto Battery street, and stopped.

"Oh god..." said Carrie, her voice turned hollow and thin. She glanced to David, as if for guidance as to what they should do now, but David was standing in a stunned daze, unable to speak or even believe what he was seeing.

Battery street was teeming with people.

Hundreds of people, mostly civilians, all were gathered before David and Carrie like footage from the aftermath of some great disaster. Reporters stood on the sides of the crowd, speaking earnestly into microphones and TV cameras, relaying the details of what was happening. Police were trying to herd the crowd into some sort of order, EMTs were administering first aid to the injured, but David's eyes were drawn not to any of them, but off to the side, where there stood a large gaggle of children, some as old as David or Carrie, some as young as kindergartners. The kids looked reasonably nondescript, all ages, all races, all sexes represented within them, but what stood out was that here and there within the group of children stood a handful of adults, each of which wore a collared black shirt with white lettering boldly printed across the front for all to see, shirts that David himself had always thought looked incredibly stupid, which seemed to serve only to draw attention to the unique status of the children these adults were chaperoning whenever they were allowed out on weekend excursions...

The shirts read "Department of Child Services"

For a few moments, David actually forgot about Cinderblock. This could not be happening. The only possible way back to Titan's Tower was blocked by a horde of civilians that had just... materialized? This was some kind of sick joke being played by the universe, and he half expected to see the civilians all vanish the instant he blinked his eyes. And worse yet, DCS was here? He knew that the DCS people often took the foster kids to places like public parks or other free venues for kids' entertainment on weekends, weather permitting, but the co-incidence that he should run into them _here_ of all places was so incalculably unfathomable that he suspected he was seeing things. To his abject horror, he realized that he recognized half a dozen of the older kids, other veterans of the state foster care system he had known from this orphanage or that one, though thankfully, none of them seemed to have noticed him yet.

And quite soon, bigger issues intervened.

The sound of Cinderblock's approaching footsteps was soon quite easily detectable, and predictably, panic shot through the civilians as they realized what was coming. Some tried to run, but the crowd was thick enough, and the exits from the street few enough, that there was no way the area would clear before Cinderblock hit them. Behind the refugees was hidden the tunnel that led under the bay to the Tower itself, but David knew that there was no question of getting there now. Cinderblock would hack a path straight through the panicked crowd and kill dozens if not hundreds, many of them people he knew. He turned to Carrie, to see if she had any better ideas as to what had to be done now, but she appeared equally stunned to silence, and merely turned to look at him with the same question written on her face, and slowly, the realization that they had just run completely out of options began to settle into his stomach like a lump of lead.

They could no longer escape, not without causing the deaths of hundreds of people. There were no more side streets to dart down, and even if there were, it would not serve to get them away from Cinderblock, for the way to the tunnel was blocked by the screaming, frenzied crowd. Cinderblock was advancing up behind them, and when he reached the crowd, he would commit a hideous massacre that would make his previous crimes look like parking tickets. The handful of police on-hand were not equipped to stop Cinderblock, nor were the civilians going to be able to get away before Cinderblock smashed into them.

So Cinderblock had to be stopped.

Both of them seemed to understand what was about to happen at the same time, and it was Carrie who spoke up first.

"I... thought you said you couldn't do anything by yourself," she said nervously, as both she and David turned their backs to the screaming crowd and faced up the street in Cinderblock's direction.

David felt queasy, he was beginning to shiver, and not with cold. "I did," he managed to whisper, trying to stop his teeth from chattering.

She nodded understandingly and looked back up the street. "Is there... something I can do...?"

David shook his head. "Not unless you have superpowers that I don't know about..." he said, with no laugh to accompany the gallows humor. Every approaching footstep felt like a gunshot straight to his heart, and he was afraid he was going to pass out right here.

Carrie turned her head to face him and forced a smile, putting a hand on his shoulder and gripping tightly, in support. He put his hand atop hers and squeezed, closing his eyes and wishing he knew how to pray or meditate or do anything to still the racing fear that was coursing through him. "You can do this," said Carrie in a low voice that was almost a whisper. "I know you can do it. The Titans know you can do it. You _can _stop him."

He tried to respond with a joke or a lighthearted comment, or even just a thank you, but the best he could manage was a weak smile. His fingers were trembling as he squeezed Carrie's hand extra hard, and then he let go and walked a few paces forward into the middle of the street, facing Cinderblock's direction, as Carrie slowly withdrew to the side of the street, and took cover behind a parked car.

Cinderblock was now in view, moving with even, unhurried strides towards a quarry who could no longer run, and David watched as the living monolith finally stepped out of the smoke and dust and stopped twenty feet ahead of him, leering down at the insignificant creature that had caused it so much bother. The crowd behind David gave a cry of alarm that quickly faded into whispers as the civilians realized that there was someone standing between them and Cinderblock, someone none of them could immediately recall having seen before, but whose very presence was enough to make Cinderblock hesitate.

"Devastator...", said Cinderblock with a low, guttural growl of malice as he glared down at his prey.

His mouth was dry, and his voice was weak, but David stared up at the engine of all the pain and death that had surrounded him for months on end, and replied with a soft voice.

"No..."

Cinderblock seemed unconvinced, to say the least, and snorted, growling at David like some kind of over-sized attack dog, but much as he wanted to run and hide, he did not back down. Instead he regarded his adversary, bitter anger starting to rise in his throat as he thought of all that Cinderblock had done, all the helpless people slaughtered in the name of whatever mad quest Cinderblock was on, and he raised his hand slightly and felt the molecular structures of the air and the ground and the objects around him ready to bend to his will. And then he raised his eyes to look Cinderblock in the face, and clenched his teeth as he spat out a final word. Robin or Beast Boy or Cyborg might have thought up a witty catchphrase to use here, one that would show Cinderblock that they weren't afraid of him, and that would impress upon him that to tempt their wrath was a dangerous prospect, but David _was_ afraid, and Cinderblock _had_ tempted his wrath before, and knew what it was like. He was fooling no-one. So he simply hissed out his own frightened challenge through his clenched teeth.

"Get away from me or I'll kill you!"

If Cinderblock was intimidated, he gave no sign, growling and snarling at David like a feral wolverine, before letting out a savage roar and lunging forward at the same time that David detonated the manhole cover underneath him.

And then it got messy.

**O-O-O**

Robin awoke to find himself wreathed in smoke and the muffled sound of gunfire.

He was sitting in the T-car, that much he knew, and he automatically forced his mind to play back the events that had just transpired, viewing them as one would footage from a crime scene, not letting supposition or panic get in the way as he gave his head time to clear and trusted that it would of its own accord. Slowly the details of the situation slid into focus. The jagged remains of shatterproof glass along the edge of the windshield, the deflated airbag sitting in his lap, the flames flickering outside the passenger window, all of these things told him, before he had even had time to remember what had happened, that he was indeed sitting in the T-car, that there had been an accident. He tried to concentrate on his own body, see if there was any pain that he wasn't noticing yet. His nerves were such that he actually had to concentrate on pain in order to really feel it, but other than aches and what would no doubt become bruises, there was nothing. All of his limbs moved when he told them to. He was all right.

So where were the others?

He reached down to unbuckle his seat belt and found that a piece of shrapnel had pinned it in place. With a single gesture, he pulled a birdarang out of his belt and sliced the restraints off of him, the motion so automatic that he did not even have to think about it, and could concentrate instead on remembering what happened. They were on the road, traveling back to Jump City. There had been a power spike ahead. A missile had struck the T-ship. Robots had attacked the car. Cyborg had swerved off the shoulder and…

Robin's eyes opened up wide behind his mask. The T-ship…

He grabbed at the sides of the shattered windshield and pulled himself out of the car, his kevlar-laced gloves repelling the broken glass, and he leaped out onto the grass, turned a somersault and stood up in one motion. Immediately he was checking his surroundings. Broken, crumpled bodies lay scattered around the car itself, robotic bodies, each one showing signs of extreme trauma to the torsos and heads. One had a hole the size of a beach ball blasted through it, another's head had been batted clean off and was sitting twenty yards away from its body, the imprint of a giant metal fist stamped into its lifeless red eye. More sounds of gunfire were coming from his right, and he drew his staff from the pouch on his back in one hand and pulled a communicator out with the other.

"Cyborg!" he called into the communicator. "Starfire! Raven! Beast Boy! Can anyone hear me?"

Static.

They were not dead. He refused to allow himself to even think that. Their communicators were broken or they were busy fighting the other robots and couldn't reach them to respond. He needed to rally them somehow, regroup and assess what they were actually facing, and without waiting to formulate a better plan than that, he turned and ran towards the trees from which the gunfire was coming. And as he did this, he heard a harsh mechanical sound like a garbage disposal or a blender turned on to high speeds and thrown into a bathtub of water, and the knot inside his stomach loosened a bit, because he knew what made that sound.

Cyborg burst out of the trees, running as fast as he could towards the smashed T-car, and seemed surprised to see Robin awake, alive, and running towards _him_, but did he not stop. Every dozen paces or so, he turned back to fire his sonic cannon into the bushes and trees from whence he had emerged, sending shafts of bluish energy stabbing through the undergrowth at unseen foes. Whatever was chasing him seemed to think better of it, and he was able to run the rest of the way over to Robin unmolested, breathlessly reciting what he knew so far.

"I got knocked outta the car when we went off the road," he said. "I tried to get to you, but there was too many of 'em, so I led 'em back into the woods. There's dozens out there!"

"Did you see the others?" asked Robin quickly. "Did you see where the T-ship went down?"

"The ship didn't go down man, it blew up in mid-air. I got knocked off the road before I could see if the others bailed out, and they're not responding to my calls."

"We have to find them," said Robin tersely. "We have to regroup and try to - "

A crashing of branches and brush cut Robin off as a firing line of half a dozen robots broke through the line of underbrush ahead, six-barreled miniguns and rocket launchers affixed to their limbs. Cyborg let out a yell and dove to one side, firing his sonic cannon and blasting the head off of one of the bots, even as the others opened fire, sending hails of slugs and streaking missiles soaring towards the two superheroes.

Robin flung himself to the ground as a fusillade of shells passed overhead, and rolled to the side as missiles impacted the dirt near him, sending showers of earth raining down. Snatching an explosive birdarang from his belt, he flung it at the robots, catching one square in the chest and sending it crumpling to the ground. A tree loomed ahead, and he darted for it, taking cover behind its massive trunk. Cyborg was out in the open blasting away at the robots with his sonic weaponry, slugs from the miniguns pinging off his armored frame even as missiles streaked past. Having lost track of Robin, the remaining robots turned on the metallic Titan, and Robin sensed an opening.

He knew never to hesitate when he sensed an opening.

Racing out from behind the tree, Robin sprinted at the nearest robot, who turned to bring his machine gun back around onto Robin. Too late. Robin leaped high into the air and flipped, bringing his staff down onto the robot's head with all his might and momentum, crushing it like a grape. As the robot fell, its neighbor took a shot with a rocket launcher, but the missile had no time to track its target, and missed high, spiraling off into the trees, and Robin landed behind his fallen enemy and extended the staff like a spear, catching the robot under the arm and upending it. Robin stepped over the downed robot, dropping a timed explosive onto it as he passed, and with his left hand, drew two more birdarangs and hurled them like shiruken at the two remaining robots. One was hit in the face, and fell instantly with a missing head. The other was struck in the arm, and lasted but a moment longer as the explosion of the birdarang set off the ammunition it carried within its rocket launcher, and blew the robot to pieces.

Cyborg had dents all over his front and side armor from where the heavy slugs of the robots' miniguns had struck him, but he remained unbowed, and he raced back over to where Robin was standing in the midst of the smashed robots. Cyborg's scanners were deployed, and he waved his arm slowly back and forth in front of the woods, as Robin watched for signs of more enemy.

"I don't get it," said Cyborg. "There were at least a hundred and fifty signals on the T-car's scanner when we got jumped, but I haven't seen more than a dozen or two robots coming this way. Where's all the others?"

As if in answer to Cyborg's question, a loud blast echoed through the forest from somewhere ahead and to the right, and there was a green flash followed by a puff of smoke and the sound of much gunfire. As the two heroes watched, an entire robot, weapons and all, arced up into the air high enough to be seen over the tree canopy, and was summarily vaporized by a beam of bright green energy that flashed up from somewhere on the ground.

"Starfire!" cried Robin, and he took off into the woods towards the location of the blast, using his staff like a machete to swat brush and branches aside as he ran. Cyborg followed after him, ripping through trees and bushes as he continued to scan for the robots. One or two more enemies tried to intercept, but Robin did not even pause to deal with them, and hurled birdarangs out of either hand as he sprinted past. It was barely thirty seconds later before he burst out of the brush into a large, open clearing.

Starfire was in the center of the open space, in mid-air, her clothing and hair singed black, but her eyes and fists glowing green with righteous fury. Dozens of robots stood all around her in a loose circle, and missiles and hosepipes of waspish projectiles streaked through the air from their guns. Already at least twenty more bots lay smashed on the ground, many of them rent to pieces and cast about like the broken playthings of a clumsy giant, and more were joining them as Starfire swooped and spun and twisted and dove and cried out in her own language as she flung starbolts into the robots with their hands, and consumed them to ashes with beams of energy from her eyes. Always though, more came out of the woods, firing full tilt at anything they could see, and some of them carried electric net launchers, several of which she nimbly avoided before blasting those that had fired them into piles of melted circuitry.

Robin didn't hesitate. "Cyborg! Cover me!"

He charged into the maelstrom like a possessed demon, stabbing one robot in the back with his staff and slamming the war machine face first down into the ground, before using it's fallen body as a pivot to pole vault forward and into another one. His titanium-soled boots rang like churchbells as they collided with the second robot's head, snapping its servos and shutting it down. The nearby robots now noticed him, and they began to turn to bring him down as well, but suddenly Cyborg was upon them, wielding an entire uprooted tree like a two-handed club, tossing robots aside like rubber balls as he swung it back and forth. Still others took aim at Robin, but he sprung like a grasshopper and twisted like a contortionist, tossing more explosive birdarangs whenever he could, striking robot after robot with his staff and his boots and even his fists, always careful to keep his target between the other robots and himself. Still the shots flew uncomfortably close. A missile nearly took his head off before Starfire atomized the shooter with a starbolt, and a burst of minigun fire tore holes through his cape like swiss cheese, and creased his shoulder close enough to raise a blister, but Cyborg crushed the robot like a sardine can with his uprooted tree before it could correct its aim.

Yet more robots poured from the woods, stepping over the fallen bodies of their brethren to fire and fire and fire some more. A missile struck Cyborg in the shoulder and knocked him down, his armor peeled back and jagged, but Cyborg merely yelled even louder and retaliated with a blast of his sonic cannon so intense that it melted three of the robots into slag, and shattered the arm of a fourth. A near miss by a missile caught Robin as he was flipping through the air, and sent him crashing into a tree, but his instincts served him well, and by the time he had hit the ground he was ready to leap again. He didn't know how many of the enemy there were, or where Beast Boy and Raven were at, but he knew they couldn't stop now, they had to drive back this assault if any of them were to survive this day.

But as he finished smashing another robot to pieces with a flurry of blows from his staff, already planning on how to spin and take down the next one, as well as trying to imagine where Raven and Beast Boy could have gotten to, he heard Starfire scream, and his blood froze.

He turned around to see that Starfire had darted low to the ground to evade more missiles, and a robot from within the woods had launched another electrified net at her, one she had not seen in time. With a cry of pain, she halted in mid-air as though she had collided with an invisible wall and plunged into the ground like a falling rock. The robot stepped forward to finish Starfire off, but the Tamaranean was made of sterner stuff than it expected, and Starfire scrambled her way back to her feet and tore the metal fibre net in half like it was tissue paper, before spinning around and belting the robot who had launched it in the face with her fist, tearing its head off and sending it bouncing across the clearing. By then however, the other robots nearby had managed to re-target her, and a target on the ground was much easier than one in the air. Three of them opened fire on Starfire point blank with miniguns, and with an aborted cry, Starfire was thrown off her feet and flung to the ground by the force of the shells.

"_STARFIRE_!"

**O-O-O**

The manhole cover was solid iron, and it exploded like a land mine, blasting upwards with all the force David could channel, and catching Cinderblock right where the solar plexus should have been, save of course that Cinderblock had no such thing. The iron fragments pinged off of him like water droplets, and he raised his fists and charged.

So much for plan A.

David jumped to his side as Cinderblock brought his fists down together on the point where he had been standing, gouging out a divot in the ground large enough to hide a refrigerator in. He hit the ground and slid, tearing his jacket's sleeve, before scrambling back up to his feet, and turning back around to face Cinderblock. It had taken the monster that long to make certain that he hadn't actually crushed David, and to realize he was still standing elsewhere, but as soon as he did, he bellowed once again, sending a involuntary shout of horror through the crowd gathered behind the two combatants. Backing hastily away from Cinderblock, David felt his heart pounding somewhere around his throat, and trying to think of something quickly, darted behind an abandoned Toyota in the middle of the street. Cinderblock could either try and crush his way through it, or pick it up, and either way, he could use its full gas tank as a weapon. The reasoning seemed sound, except Cinderblock stomped over and kicked it aside with a single blow, sending it bouncing back up the street the way both David and Cinderblock had come. Desperately, David fell back again, up onto the side walk, and as he did so he aimed his finger at the ground and caused a chunk of asphalt to freeze and quiver, and explode under Cinderblock's feet. Cinderblock stumbled and tripped and fell, but in falling, he reached out and grabbed David's foot, yanking it out from under him and spilling him onto the ground as well.

"Devastator!" shouted Cinderblock as David squirmed and scrambled to try and get away while Cinderblock grabbed for him with his other hand. Desperately, David waved his hands at a storefront window nearby, which shattered and exploded outward, showering both him and Cinderblock with broken glass. Reflexively, Cinderblock pulled his other hand back to protect his eyes, and David managed to wrench his foot free and scramble back and away, shedding shattered glass like a waterfall, his jacket cut to ribbons by the sharp glass fragments.

Up loomed Cinderblock once more, towering and defiant, and he raised both fists slowly before shoving them downwards and thrusting out his chest and roaring. Streetlights exploded, for once without David's input, while the very force of the roar nearly bowled him over, and he had to steady himself against another car to avoid falling. Any second now, Cinderblock would charge, and David for the life of him couldn't see what he was going to stop him with. There was nothing explosive or otherwise conducive to this sort of thing to be seen, and Cinderblock couldn't be stopped by a -

He glanced up.

Cinderblock stomped forward, and David had to scramble back, over the parked car's hood, which Cinderblock peremptorily overturned as he growled and snarled like a wood saw. David reached out with his left hand, pointing at something behind Cinderblock, but the cement and concrete juggernaut did not possess the intelligence to check and see what David was up to, and it pressed ahead, raising a balled fist which it prepared to bring down onto David to pound him into jelly. Before it could do so however, David snapped his fingers and shouted with the effort, and the base of a telephone pole behind Cinderblock burst into splinters and fragments as though it had contained a bomb. The fragments did nothing whatsoever to Cinderblock, nor did the explosion itself, but the pole toppled over like a bowling pin, and crashed down onto Cinderblock's head. Even this would have been nothing, a mere nuisance to one such as he, but for the fact that when the pole hit Cinderblock, it bounced, and fell off of him to the side, and in doing so, it dragged the live electrical wires that it was holding up across Cinderblock's face.

And _that_ had an effect.

Cinderblock let out a horrific, wailing scream as twenty thousand volts of electricity coursed through him, and he staggered, and stumbled backwards, and fell to the ground writhing. For a brief second, David thought he might just have done it, but it was only a few seconds later that Cinderblock managed to kick the live wires off of himself, and staggered back to his feet, lividly angry and practically _shaking _with rage. As David watched in horror, Cinderblock lifted the telephone pole, and snapped the wires connecting it to the others, leaving a length of steel cable about twenty feet long still trailing from the end of the pole. And then with roars of vengeance and death in his throat, Cinderblock swung the pole at David, who was standing too far away to be hit by the pole, but consequently didn't realize his own danger until it was too late.

David threw his hands up to protect his face, and jumped back, but in vain, as the metal wires attached to the telephone pole lashed at him like a whip. He screamed as his arms and forehead were sliced open by the still crackling wires, and the jolt of electricity they delivered literally blew him off his feet and onto his back on the ground. Blood dripped into his eyes, blocking his sight, and his arms felt like they were on fire. Desperately he tried to blink or brush away the blood and smoke so that he could see what was happening, and finally he resorted to his other senses, feeling out with his mind for the tell-tale mass of solid silicates that represented the brutish monster that was trying to kill him. The instant he did, he cried out again, this time in fear, as Cinderblock was standing directly over him, the telephone pole held up like a giant pestle, and he was preparing to bring it down to crush him underneath it.

Unable to do anything else, David rolled over to his side, and the telephone pole came down next to him, missing by inches. The bottom third of the pole shattered under the impact, and the wires detached, but Cinderblock still held a fifteen foot long piece, and he hefted it once more like a club as David shakily got back to his feet. Cinderblock swung the pole at him wildly, missing high, then right, as David fell back, no longer trying to find something effective, but simply something that would _stop_ him. A mailbox burst, sending letters and packages flying through the air like feathers from a bird. A parked car's tires ignited and exploded next to Cinderblock's feet, followed shortly thereafter by the car they were attached to, but nothing seemed to phase the enraged monstrosity, and Cinderblock swung again and again. Quick enough to dodge Cinderblock's ponderous swings, at least for the moment, David was still searching for something else to detonate when Cinderblock, instead of swinging his club once more, jabbed at him with the tip of it, catching him in the chest like a speared fist and tossing him back like a toy.

He slammed into the side of a Porsche, hard enough to dent the door and shatter the car's window above him, and he lay there winded, stunned, his lungs on fire, blood running freely down the side of his face. There he lay, moaning softly, his chest throbbing and burning, and when he looked up, he blearily saw Cinderblock, now standing still, looking pleased with himself at having apparently defeated his enemy. And then, implacably as ever, the nearly-unharmed monster began to walk towards him.

He couldn't breathe. He could barely see. He was certain at least one of his ribs was broken from the impact, and it hurt to move, and hurt to sit still. His brain was telling him to get up and get out of the way, to find something else to do to Cinderblock, but the best he could do was to slowly stagger to his feet, leaning against the Porsche he had been thrown into. He wanted to run, but couldn't get his balance back, and besides, where was he going to run to? Cinderblock was faster than he was, and the only escape route meant leading him straight through the crowd of civilians.

... and that's when he realized that it was awfully quiet.

It was an odd thing to realize, given the circumstances, but the fact that, Cinderblock aside, he hadn't heard any noise in a while from what had not long ago been a screaming, panicked mob, prompted him to make the unforgivably stupid mistake of turning his back on Cinderblock for a second and looking back at the crowd. It was larger than he had thought, hundreds and hundreds of people of all ages standing and hiding behind cover, all of them silent, all of them staring at him.

That part stopped him short. They were all looking at him. Not at Cinderblock. At him. Every pair of eyes that he saw was fixed on him, and in them he saw fear and surprise, of course, but also something else, but he couldn't tell what. So good usually at watching and gauging people's reactions, this one was hard to interpret. And it wasn't until he turned his head slightly and saw all of the other foster kids and the social workers from the DCS staring at him with wide eyes and gaping mouths, that it really clicked.

It was wonder.

Wonder and awe and amazement was dancing in the eyes of every single one of the foster kids, from the youngest to the oldest. Some of them he recognized, vaguely, from elsewhere, and some he did not, and he could not tell if they recognized him as one of them, as one of their own little group of orphans and runaways and wards of the state, but he suspected that most of them didn't. And the reason for that was suddenly clear. He wasn't one of them any longer. They were standing off to the side of the crowd, and nobody was paying them the slightest mind, not even the very monster that he was afraid was going to kill them. They were unseen, un-noticed, anonymous, as he was, as he had always been, as he had always wanted to be.

But not now.

Every eye, from the tourists and residents of the city, to the police and medical personnel, every single eye was on him, with only the occasional glance aimed at his nemesis to ensure it wasn't threatening them directly yet. Every man, woman, child, everyone that he could see was watching him, staring at him, willing him silently to keep them safe or to beat Cinderblock back to the hole he had crawled out of. They didn't see a terrified kid, desperately trying to fight off a monster that was totally out of his class. They didn't know that he was scared witless, unprepared for a challenge like this, that Cinderblock was almost certainly about to kill him. They saw someone larger than they were, a champion, a protector, something that _could_ stop Cinderblock. They wanted him to fight. They wanted him to win. Their worry, their amazement, their fear... it was all for him.

Behind him loomed a giant shadow, gathering up like an ocean breaker about to thunder down on his head, and he half-turned to look back at Cinderblock, who was holding his telephone pole/bludgeon high in the air with both hands. David's expression didn't change, and he made no move to evade as the monster roared one last roar of victory, and swung the telephone pole down like an executioner's axe. Dozens of people cried out in alarm, screaming a warning to run, to dodge, or anything, but David simply closed his eyes.

And that's when the entire telephone pole exploded.

Flames and shrapnel burst into the air as Cinderblock's weapon disintegrated in his hands into a hail of flying wood splinters, and he gave a surprised yelp of pain and astonishment as the blast shoved him back several steps. Bits of burning wood plunged out of the air onto the street, the buildings, the bay, and into the crowd, who fended them off with briefcases and jackets and umbrellas. David, less than four feet from the epicenter of the blast shuddered as bits of wood hit him and knocked him back a pace or two, and he bit back a cry as a large splinter embedded itself in his upper arm, quivering like an arrow and forming a slowly expanding red stain on his shirtsleeve and what was left of his tattered jacket. But when he opened his eyes again, he saw Cinderblock, standing back from him, his arms and torso covered in so many splinters that he resembled a porcupine, and his right hand mangled by the blast wave. And he couldn't be certain, but he thought that for a second, he saw what might have been fear in the monster's gaze.

But what he _was_ certain of, were the cheers emanating from behind him, and the cries of "let him have it!" and "get the bastard!" from some of the more aggressive onlookers. David didn't pay them_too_ much mind, after all he was still in fairly extreme pain, his lungs were still aflame, his forehead and arms still leaking blood that ran down his body onto the ground, and Cinderblock was still stronger, faster, tougher, and a hell of a lot less afraid than he was. But the cries of the crowd seemed to wrap around him like a warm blanket, and took the edge off the fear, and the spikes off the pain, and he found that he could walk, and move, and he stepped a few steps forward, and stared at Cinderblock, armed with the realization that however bad the odds were, he wasn't yet dead.

It wasn't exactly confidence, but it was something.

**O-O-O**

The electricity seared through her like fire in her veins, and she cried out without realizing she had, as the joy of flight evaporated and was replaced with agonizing pain. Only dimly did she realize she was falling, and the impact with the grassy ground was barely tangible next to the agony of the electric net, but while she could not feel the joy of flight or really the joy of anything in such a state, but she could still feel the boundless confidence that flowed through her whenever she had need for strength, and more importantly, the agony lent itself well to the righteous fury that powered her starbolts. It was partly for this reason that Tamaranean warriors were so feared by their enemies. Pain tended to make them more dangerous.

This was, obviously, a lesson lost on the mechanical assassin that had done this to her.

She shouted a wordless cry of defiance, and forcing her way to her feet, ripped the electrified restraint apart and cast it to the ground. The robotic assailant which had projected it at her was at hand, and she lunged towards it with one glowing fist, tearing its mal-formed head from its shoulders and letting its body crumple to the ground like a Wuserloop in mating season. Behind her there was the sound of more enemies, and she spun round to engage them, starbolts at the ready in her hands, but as she turned, she heard the sound of gears and machinery spinning, and then a harsh, grating noise, like that of a disposer of garbage.

And then something hit her.

Starfire screamed once again as something, a thousand somethings, projectiles, heavy and cold and solid metal, ripped into her abdomen and chest and sent her toppling over onto the ground. She clutched at her stomach, and felt a hot, wet, liquid flowing over her, and she knew it to be blood. The impact had knocked most of the air out of her lungs, and she could not breathe, though fortunately, she did not need to. Dazed and bleeding, she lifted her head slightly, enough to watch as three of the robots with the spinning projectile weapons strode up to her, and lowered their weapons towards her face. Once more the rotating projectile launchers began to spin, and she gasps and raised a hand to conjure a starbolt.

But she didn't get that far.

There was a blur of motion, and suddenly Robin appeared as though conjured by magic, his staff swinging underneath the robots' weapons and forcing them all skyward, causing the bursts of metallic projectiles to pass harmlessly overhead. The robots turned on Robin, but he struck them with his staff again and again, the staff whipping and flailing about in his hands like the tail of a scorpion. One robot fell back with its eyes demolished, firing its weapon blindly into the sky and ground, before a beam of blue energy struck it in the side and and tore out the sparkling materials from which its organs were created. The second's weapon was wrenched from its grasp and fell to the ground, and it swung its long, spindly arms at Robin like the clumsy motions of a man who had imbibed too much of the alcohol. Robin ducked and spun around the robot's uncoordinated strikes, and draw a birdarang to slash open its neck. No blood ran forth, but the robot toppled onto the ground. The last robot was already spinning its projectile weapon at Robin, but Starfire had by now managed to conjure a starbolt, and with a flick of her wrist, she threw it into the robot's chest, blasting a hole through it as wide as Silkie, and it too fell lifeless to the grass.

No sooner had the last robot fallen, than Robin was rushing over to her, his eyes leaking tears from behind his mask. "Starfire!" he shouted, sliding to a stop and dropping his staff. Cyborg was coming up behind him, but as he approached, she pushed the pain of her injuries to the back of her mind and smiled broadly as she threw her arms around Robin's neck.

"Robin!" she cried happily, and only in the nick of time did she remember to reign in her strength to avoid causing damage to Robin's skeleton (again). It was several moments before she realized that Robin was not responding to her, and when she looked up, she saw his eyes wide in astonishment, and Cyborg standing behind him, looking equally shocked.

"Friends... you are unharmed, yes?"

Robin did not answer the question, staring at her as though she was undergoing another transformation. "How... are... what? Are you all right?"

"I am not seriously hurt," she said, standing up, brushing the metallic projectiles off of her skirt as she did so. The cuts from the projectiles still throbbed, but the bleeding was already beginning to stop. Still Cyborg and Robin were staring at her strangely, and she worried if perhaps she had done something that she was not supposed to do…

"Is something the matter?"

"Star," said Cyborg in a quiet voice, "those were miniguns…"

She turned and looked at the broken robots. "They do not appear small to me…" she commented.

"They should've cut you in half!" exclaimed Cyborg, "You got hit with two hundred rounds, how are you all right?"

"It doesn't matter, as long as you're all right…" said Robin, his voice already returned to the tone he used whenever he was giving orders. "Are you able to move?"

"I will be fine," she assured Robin, still not quite certain what all the worry had been about. It wasn't as though the projectiles were fired particularly _hard_.

"Starfire, where are Raven and Beast Boy?"

Starfire suddenly a bitter coldness flowing through her. "You mean… they are not with you?"

"You were the one in the ship, Star. What happened?"

"I… do not know what happened," she said, trying to recollect as best she could what she had seen. "The engine of the T-ship exploded, and there were missiles about us. Beast Boy was attempting to land the ship when they began to hit, and my seat was ejected from the rest of the ship. I was attacked by these robots when I arrived on the ground. I did not see where Beast Boy and Raven went…"

Starfire saw the fear in Robin and Cyborg's eyes as she spoke, and a moment later, she realized what they were afraid of.

"But… are they not… have you not found them yet? Where did their seats land?"

"They're not responding to the communicators," said Robin. "We don't know if they ejected or not.

"But… surely they must have… if my seat was thrown out of the ship, should not theirs have also been?"

Cyborg was pressing buttons on his arm, and reading something from the screen built into it. "Your seat didn't eject, Star… there's transponders built into the ejection system that broadcast right to my scanners. If you'd ejected, I'd have seen it. I think you got blown out of the ship."

"But then… Beast Boy and Raven?"

"I didn't read _any_ ejections."

Starfire felt something catch in her throat. It couldn't be. Cyborg couldn't mean that…

"They're not dead,"

Robin's mask made it impossible to tell what he was thinking, but his voice was as steady as she had ever heard it. "Both of them can escape the T-ship without having to eject, and if they had a chance to see the missiles coming, then they could have gotten out. We just have to find them."

Robin sounded so certain that the cold feeling in Starfire's stomach began to recede, and she brushed herself off. "I shall seek them from the air. They cannot have gone far."

"No, Star," said Robin. "They have surface-to-air missiles. We can't risk that. We'll have to search for them on foot."

"I'll use my scanners," said Cyborg, already pressing more buttons. "Beast Boy could be anything, but Raven should show up. C'mon."

Cyborg led the way into the forest, and at Robin's insistence, she went second, leaving Robin to bring up the rear. She did not allow herself to think that they might not find Raven and Beast Boy alive. Robin did not believe they were dead, and neither would she.

But she did hope they would find them soon, and remove all doubt.

**O-O-O**

"Come and get me."

More startled than hurt, Cinderblock tore the larger bits of wood out of his hide with broad strokes of his arms, and his beady eyes narrowed as he glared down at the young psychokinetic, but David was long past the point of running away at a glare. Despite his injuries and the pain they entailed, despite the blood still leaking into his eyes, he continued to stand in the middle of the street, trying to stay upright, one hand pointed at the ground before Cinderblock, where a strip of asphalt had frozen solid by his will. He did not remove his eyes from his foe, nor so much as twitch a finger. It was perhaps all hopeless, in fact it was _probably_ all hopeless, but even if he couldn't stop Cinderblock, he knew he could hurt him, and he knew that Cinderblock knew that too. The civilians were watching from behind their cover. Many had managed to flee, but some remained behind, though God only knew why. Ironically though, given his penchant for going un-noticed, he was glad they did. It helped, a little, to know that he wasn't about to die alone…

… in one sense or another.

Cinderblock lunged forward all of a sudden like a springing panther, hoping to clear David's frozen chunk of asphalt before the young kineticist could react. Unfortunately for Cinderblock, David didn't _have_ to react, simply release the energy he had already stored, and the ensuing blast upset Cinderblock's lunge, causing him to fall flat on his face on the ground. This elicited a cheer from some of the civilians behind him, and David felt his blood beginning to run hot as the fear began to give way to anger.

"Devastator…" he said, borrowing the term from Cinderblock for the occasion, his voice half-choked with pain and furious anger at all that Cinderblock had done and was doing. "That's me, isn't it? I'm the one you want? You wanted to find Devastator… get Devastator…"

Cinderblock for once did not repeat his favorite catchphrase, and he instead reached up and tore the hood off a sedan sitting nearby, throwing it at David like a discus as he scrambled back to his feet. David ducked low, and the hood passed overhead, but as he ducked he turned, and extended his hand, causing part of the hood to explode. It arced up into the air and over the heads of the other people, before plunging down into the bay behind them harmlessly. No sooner had this happened, than David turned back to Cinderblock, and pointed a finger at the now-exposed engine block of the car the hood had come from. It flew to pieces like a fragmentation bomb, knocking Cinderblock back another pair of steps. Cinderblock looked... worried now, still defiant, still ready to kill, but clearly this was more resistance than he had been anticipating.

"You want to kill me?" asked David, as he stepped forward again, trembling once more, this time with a mixture of fear and indignation. "You could have killed me before, but you _didn't_! And now you're here to kill me? Kill Devastator? Is that it? Sixty people dead already because of you, and that's not enough, you've got to start ripping busses apart and throwing rocks into crowds? _What do__ you want with me?_"

Cinderblock did not answer, instead racing forward again, fists held high. David did not even glance to his side as he shot his hand out and blew the base off another telephone pole, which crashed to the ground in ruins ahead of Cinderblock. The rampaging monster hesitated, grinding to a halt, as he regarded the live wires sparking on it, and kicked it aside carefully, to avoid contacting the electric current.

David was clearly livid now, his face flushed red with more than just the blood on his forehead, and he kept his gaze to the concrete monster and shouted to be heard above the crowd behind him. "You want Devastator?" he screamed, his voice shrill and furious, as he planted his feet securely the way that Robin had taught him to when preparing to receive a charge from an enemy. "You want Devastator? _I'll show you the goddamned Devastator!"_

All further words were lost in the cacophony of the explosions that followed.

Cinderblock howled, howled in pain and surprise and rage as pineapple-sized pieces of his own body cracked and froze and exploded all across himself, blasting divots in his concrete hide as though he was being shot with anti-tank weaponry. Explosion after explosion racked his form, and he staggered, but did not fall, and in a blind fury he charged David, ignoring the blasts that sent bits of stone and cement flying in every direction. Focused intently on generating these explosions, a task which would have been well beyond him in this mental state only months ago, David saw his own danger only in the nick of time, and he threw himself to the side of the street just as Cinderblock brought his fist down on the place he had been standing.

He landed in the gutter, which was somehow appropriate, perhaps, and he got back up as fast as he could and turned to see Cinderblock bearing down on him again, equally livid it appeared. He could have run, perhaps, dodged this strike as he had the last, and come up with another plan, but he glanced to his side at a minivan parked nearby, and instead of retreating and trying to find a better plan, he marshaled what energy he had left inside him, and pointed his finger at the tires on the passenger side of the minivan, and blew them up.

Both tires exploded in unison, and the car was propelled into the air and sideways, a simple physics reaction whose purpose was immediately apparent, as the car collided with Cinderblock head on, and arrested his advance instantaneously, knocking him onto his back and landing atop him, pinning him to the ground. David felt his legs give out, and he collapsed onto the sidewalk. Footsteps, normal footsteps were coming up behind him, but he did not turn to look at who was making them. Cinderblock was roaring and trying to shove the multi-ton vehicle off of himself, and David slowly extended his hand, closed his eyes, and focused on the fuel tank, clenching every muscle in his body and letting out a savage cry of pain and fury as he shoved the energy in the gasoline tank one last time.

KABOOM!

Cinderblock's roars were subsumed in the explosion, as the vehicle burst into flames and exploded like a car bomb, casting pieces of itself in every direction. Utterly spent, David flopped onto the ground like a corpse, barely able to keep himself sitting up. His head pounded like a timpani drum, his forehead bled profusely, as did his arm, and several other spots where he had cut himself or scraped his skin off on the asphalt. He felt someone touching him on the shoulder, a strong grip, and he looked up wearily, to see Carrie staring down at him. She might have been trying to say something, but the roaring flames, and the other background noise made it hard for him to hear, to say nothing of the fact that he felt rather like a boned fish. She reached down and grabbed him around his chest, and pulled him up to his feet as best she could, and he cried out and clutched his side as his broken ribs jarred with the motion.

"Come on," she said, "we need to get you to - "

Carrie was cut off, by a all-too-familiar sound. A roar.

The roar was low, and guttural, and unmistakably malevolent, a bitter, sick roar from a beast that was now well past the pale of anger. Carrie froze, and David's breath caught. Surely not even Cinderblock could possibly sustain…

The burning wreckage of the minivan fell aside, as a giant, cracked, concrete fist was shoved it off of the thing it had landed upon. And slowly, like Nosferatu rising from his coffin, Cinderblock sat up. His body was broken and mangled, his hide shattered, his face cracked, but his eyes burnt like miniature suns, like nuclear explosions contained within his boxy head. And right now they were burning in pure, unadulterated, vengeful rage.

"No…"

But no words of David's however sincerely felt, could banish this thing that simply refused to fall. The civilians who remained shouted and pointed and stumbled back, even as Cinderblock began to slowly pick his way out of the ruins of the destroyed minivan. David had no idea what to do now. He could barely stand, the pain of his injuries was almost debilitating, and what's worse, he wasn't certain that he could conjure the energy for another explosion, not for one large enough to take out Cinderblock.

Carrie, for her part, did not wait around to see what Cinderblock intended to do, but draping one of David's arms over her shoulder, she moved down the street as fast as she could, away from Cinderblock, but they hadn't gone more than twenty yards before David simply collapsed in the center of the street and fell to his knees, unable to rise further.

"Come on!" she said, kneeling down next to him. "We have to get going! Cinderblock is…"

But David wasn't listening. His rage and adrenaline were spent, and he could barely keep his eyes open. His senses reached out, and he felt the world spinning, his perception floating back and forth from visual to molecular. He could feel the molecules of the asphalt beneath him, of the steel of the nearby cars, but he could not so much as twinge any of them. He had nothing left, nothing powerful enough to stop…

…

He noticed something.

"David? David, can you hear me? We have to go! I know you're hurt, but we have to get out of here before…"

"J.C.G.E."

Carrie stopped short. "What?"

David blinked, and raised his head to look Carrie in the face, and he was actually smiling, like a little kid who knew a secret that nobody else knew. "J.C.G.E" he said, as though the meaning were perfectly obvious, and using Carrie as a support, he slowly forced his way back to his feet.

"Carrie," he said as he stood up again, his voice adopting a tone of urgency. "I need your help. I need you to do something."

Carrie did not appear to like the sound of this. "What?"

"I need you to get everyone back. _Way_ back."

"What are you talking about?"

"All the other civilians. Get them back from here, as far back as they can go. Get them all moving and then run. Run as fast as you can."

Carrie hesitated. "What are you going to do?"

David closed his eyes and took a slow, deep breath to steady himself. "Something really stupid…" he said, "Just trust me. Run!"

Carrie plainly did not understand, but with only another second's hesitation, she turned and ran, shouting to everyone who could hear to do the same. The civilians, seeing Cinderblock back on his feet and slowly approaching, needed little encouragement, and David took one more glance back at them, before he returned his gaze, one last time, to Cinderblock.

Cinderblock was standing again, moving towards David with a single, bloody purpose in mind, limping, and clearly damaged, but alive, and mostly intact. Nothing David had done, not his best, most violent explosions, nothing had managed to stop Cinderblock, but David did not retreat. He could not have done so if he had wanted to. He crouched instead, lowering one hand to the ground, and planting it on the asphalt, fingers splayed, as he lifted the other hand into the air, balled into a fist. Cinderblock was roaring again, shaking the very ground with every footstep, charging like a maddened bull, but David simply watched him, watching him approaching like an oncoming train. Inside his head, he forced himself to focus, to marshal all his remaining energy for one more explosion. It did not have to be large, in fact it did not have to do anything special at all. All he needed was one more spark in the right place…

Cinderblock was barely a dozen paces away now, screaming his head off and lining up to deliver a running kick, to punt David like a football. David pressed, pressed as hard as he could with his mind, and then as he felt himself crossing that critical threshold , he brought his other hand down like a hammer, and struck the ground with it.

For a moment, nothing happened.

And then a low, sonorous rumbling sound was heard, like that of an earthquake or landslide, and the street shook, and heaved, an began to crack. Cinderblock lost his footing and stumbled to a halt, looking this way and that, to try and pinpoint what was happening, and in his confusion, he glanced back down at David, who was smiling even as he crouched as low as he could to the ground, and braced himself for the impact.

And then it hit.

Chasms split in the asphalt beneath Cinderblock's feet, and from them came gouts of fire that burst hundreds of feet into the air, high enough to scorch the undersides of the news helicopters floating overhead. David saw Cinderblock's enraged, confused expression turn to abject terror as the very ground beneath his feet rose and cracked, and crumbled, and then burst, and the entire street that they were standing on went off like a volcano. Cinderblock had time to scream, just for a split second, a scream of pain and terror and fear so similar to the ones he had been inspiring in hundreds of others, not least the beaten, bleeding young kineticist sitting before him, and then a fireball the size of a four-story building erupted out of the street, and Cinderblock vanished from sight.

It was only a split second later that David felt the piece of asphalt he was crouched upon give way before the titanic explosion. He had time only to crouch as low as he could before the blast wave hit him, and then everything went black.

* * *

**Author's Note:** Just a final reminder to please leave a review with your views on the chapter, that I may defend the decisions I made above, and beg your forgiveness for those you disagreed with. I have no doubt such decisions were legion. Thank you all.


	16. Comrades in Arms

**Disclaimer:** Now more than ever, I own nothing whatsoever.

**Author's Note:** Greetings everyone. I'm terribly sorry this chapter took so long to write, but I was waylaid midway through it by a nasty flu bug, and was totally unable to write for more than a week. I am recovered now, and have finished the chapter, though a week later than I had planned to. It is my fond hope that you will enjoy it, and forgive me for its tardiness, as I simply could not write it any sooner. Please, remember to leave a review, long or short, such that I can profit from your opinion and fortify myself for future chapters. I do not know what else to say about this chapter, and thus I shall let it speak for itself, to its triumph or ruin, as always. Many liberties are taken within it, some of which some may find inappropriate. To each their own. Thank you all for reading, and I hope this finds you happy, well, and free of the accursed flu bug.

* * *

**Chapter 16: Comrades in Arms**

_"We have such a theory now; we can solve any moral problem, on any level. Self-interest, love of family, duty to country . . . But all moral problems can be illustrated by one misquotation: 'Greater love hath no man than a mother cat dying to defend her kittens.' Once you understand the problem facing that cat and how she solved it, you will then be ready to examine yourself and learn how high up the moral ladder you are capable of climbing."_

** - **Robert Heinlein, "Starship Troopers"**  
**

**O-O-O**

Static.

Every monitor, every uplink showed the same thing, a flickering of motion from the broken figure facing Cinderblock, and then a single bright flash which cut to static as the CCTV camera providing the video feed was either severed from its transmitter or (more likely) atomized in what looked to be a military-grade explosion, and no matter how many times the Tall Man played back the feed, no matter how carefully he peered at it, frame by frame, he could not discern what in God's name had gone wrong.

But something _had _gone _very_ wrong.

He cycled through all three cameras once again. No feed. No picture. No clue as to what had happened. He punched another command into his computer, and the feed switched to a news helicopter hovering above the battle. Nothing again. Clouds of dense brown smoke obscured all possible views of the battlefield, and the orange glow of fires beneath the shroud made it clear that this would remain the case for a long time, at the least. With growing irritation, the Tall Man brought up a 3D schematic of the street and the surrounding areas, and told the computer to cross-match Cinderblock's transponder onto the map. Nothing happened. He repeated the command, with the same result, and then asked the computer to acknowledge. The computer's crisp response was that Cinderblock's transponder was no longer signaling.

"What _insanity _is this?" came the voice of the Man in Gold from the other side of the cavern. "Restore the picture!"

"The cameras have all been destroyed," called back the Tall Man. "I can't restore the picture."

"Then find another camera!"

"There _is_ no other camera!" shouted the Tall Man. "This is not Britain! They aren't security cameras on every corner!"

"So then we have no way of knowing what happened?" asked the Man in Gold with fury and desperation rising in his voice.

"Not unless you have some magical means of viewing the site that you haven't mentioned. All communications in the area are down. I can't raise Cinderblock or anyone else."

"What about your vaunted agent?"

"What part of 'anyone else' was unclear to you?" retorted the Tall Man angrily. "The air is filled with debris and static. No signal is coming through."

"Wondrous..." said the Man in Gold, now beginning to pace along the other side of the cavern. "Then what about the Tamaranean?"

"What about her?" asked the Tall Man without looking up.

"How is it she is not dead? She took a full barrage from machine cannons loaded with depleted uranium rounds, did she not?"

"I don't know how she survived it. Tamaraneans are built to withstand the pressures of outer space and cosmic rays. They may well be proof against even depleted - "

"You said these shells would work!"

"I said they stood the best _chance_ of working! There's a reason I never used projectile weapons!"

"_You're_ supposed to be the damned expert on this!" shouted the Man in Gold accusingly.

"There _is_ no expert on slaughtering the Titans!" retaliated the Tall Man, losing his patience. "If I knew with certainty how to kill them, they would _long_ since be dead!"

Several seconds of silence reigned before the Man in Gold loudly stomped back over to his computer and sat down. "Find out what happened on the waterfront, and make certain nothing further goes wrong," he snapped. "I'm going to get something out of the debacle in Yellowstone one way or another."

"If Starfire is proof against the uranium shells," said the Tall Man guardedly, "then it might be a wiser plan to abort the operation until we can..."

"_No_!" snapped the Man in Gold. "I will _have_ one of them dead today, and let the others consider the fates that await them. If not Robin or Starfire, then one I can reach."

"And how are you going to do that?" asked the Tall Man, clearly none too enamored with the tone in the Man in Gold's voice.

"Simple," snapped the Man in Gold. "I'm going to kill the changeling before they can gather together."

"But what of Raven?"

"What of her?"

"Well you can't very well kill _her_, so how will you get at - "

"I will throw all two hundred robots at them simultaneously and bury them _both _under an avalanche of steel before their friends can intervene," snarled the Man in Gold, gripping the computer controls tightly enough to bend iron. "I will cast her down with a tidal wave of fire and force her and the rest of them to watch as I _crucify_ Beast Boy before their very eyes!"

There was a note of hesitation in the Tall Man's voice as he replied to this bloodthirsty prediction.

"If you kill Raven," he said, "accidentally or otherwise, you _know_ what will happen to - "

"I will _not_ kill Raven!" snapped the Man in Gold as he whirled around in his chair to face the Tall Man, his eyes positively glowing with hate, and his face a mask of frustration and rage. "But I will make her and all the others understand just what it is to be helpless, alone, and surrounded by the deaths of those they care about. I will make her and all the others understand that they are _all _doomed."

The Man in Gold returned to his command console and began giving orders to his proxy army. "And if I can manage it," he said, his voice a harsh rasp flaying the very air, "I will hammer that lesson home with the changeling's severed limbs."

**O-O-O**

Raven materialized inside a maelstrom of fire and lead.

Acrid smoke billowed from the burning remains of the T-ship, and cast the entire area into an inky shroud. Figures strode about left and right, before and behind, hulking figures the size of silverback gorillas, armed with all manner of lethal weaponry. Their guns spat fire and metal into the air, crisscrossing the area with streams of projectiles and the smoky contrails of high explosive rockets. The good news was that the robots did not seem to be firing at her, so much as at the entire area, blanketing it in fire in the hopes of annihilating whatever had survived the crash. The bad news was that there was enough fire here for them to do it.

Explosions and the sharp sound of nearby bullets caused her to dive to the ground, sketching up a shield of black energy as she did so. Instantly she realized this was a mistake. The bullets snapping over her head bounced off the shield as though made of rubber, but in doing so, they flew up into the air like red-hot sparks against the darkening sky, revealing for all to see that here there was something that was deflecting the fire.

Which of course was a perfect invitation to direct more fire her way.

The shield shuddered under the impacts of hundreds of shells, and a near miss from a rocket nearly brought it down before she redoubled her concentration and forced the shield to hold. Another robot stepped up to the horizon, visible against the sky, and loosed another rocket her way, but she waved her hand and tore the projectile apart with dark energy before it was had covered even half the distance to her. With one hand, she maintained the shield, while with the other, she uprooted an entire tree with her telekinetic powers, and hurled it into the skylined robot before it could reload.

More rockets flew at her, some passing uncomfortably close. A direct hit might break through her shield, and so she turned towards a large flaming section of the T-ship, and with a flick of her wrist she threw it, sight unseen, in the direction that most of the fire was coming from. It never landed. Four rockets hit it simultaneously and blew it to bits while it was still in mid-air, but the cover was enough to give her a second to act in. She dropped her shield, and without it the wind caught her cloak and unfurled it like a flag seconds before she took to the air, revealing her position for all to see unfortunately, but then what she planned to do would have obviated any attempts at remaining hidden anyhow.

The gunfire followed her into the sky, and she soared up and around, twisting about the trails of shells as rockets spun after her, seeking a target that was giving off no heat to follow. As the robots on the ground struggled to adjust to an airborne target, she stopped suddenly and turned on them, raising her hands and calling on her magical words in the dead language of her home planet to suffuse her mind and body with power.

"Azarath, Metrion, _Zinthos!_"

Two beams of black energy flew from her hands down into the ground like negative searchlights, churning up the ground where they struck and casting dirt and debris in every direction. Two of the robots failed to evade the beams and were promptly ripped to pieces like toys in a tornado. Still others were forced to fall back, spraying their weapons wildly into the air. Concentrating on her counterattack, Raven could not simultaneously keep up a shield, and she felt a tug on her cloak as a half dozen shells drilled holes straight through it, while a flying piece of white hot shrapnel from an airburst rocket cut across her temple, leaving a red gash behind that oozed blood like a wet sponge. Cringing and biting her lip, she walked the beams of black energy back and forth, consuming robot after robot in the localized telekenetic storms, until the remainder fell back into the trees, apparently in retreat.

Quickly she sailed back down to the ground and landed, wiping the blood from above her eyes and wishing that she had time to properly heal the cut, but there were more urgent matters to attend to. Quickly she ran back over what had happened. She remembered Starfire's section of the ship being torn off of the rest of the ship by a missile and sent spiraling down towards the ground, and there just been enough time for her to phase through her cockpit bubble and into Beast Boy's, grab him by the wrist, and teleport them both out of the T-ship. There had not been enough time however for her to select a location or ensure that they moved together, she had been forced to launch him and herself through space sight unseen. Consequently, she had no idea where Beast Boy had wound up, nor what had happened to Starfire, let alone to Robin and Cyborg. She needed to find them. She needed to make sure they were all right.

Quieting her emotions as best she could, she reached out with her empathic sense, looking for her friends. Her vision went black as she felt and searched with other senses than sight or hearing, searching for any of the other Titans. With all the adrenaline and surprise that was still working its way out of her system, she could only seek so far, and within the relatively limited range of her sensory powers, she could only detect one of the others, a dim, faint sign, but instantly obvious to her as a familiar face would be, a warm, garrulous, comforting presence that she seemed to spend half her time at the Tower actively blocking out, tinged vaguely green to her empathic sight. Beast Boy.

A wave of relief flooded over her as soon as she detected that Beast Boy was nearby and alive. It lasted only half a second before turning to ashes as she realized that he wasn't moving, and that the signals she was picking up were flooded with pain. Her guts seemed to freeze and a spike of fear that would not be pushed aside drove into her heart as she caught her breath, and before she even realized what she was doing, Raven was racing off towards the signal, flying barely a foot above the ground like a guided missile, overtaking one or two fleeing robots whose heads she tore from their torsos with a single gesture and a flash of darkness, not even hesitating to ensure that they were dead. Branches lashed at her from all directions as she flew, and she generated another shield ahead of herself to plow through them with, like a bulldozer's blade. There was no time for subtlety. She had to make sure Beast Boy was...

"No..."

She came out of the trees into an area of desolation and ruin. An area the size of a baseball diamond had been summarily cleared of trees, most of them blown down like matchsticks, all facing outwards from the epicenter of whatever had happened. And in the center of the devastation lay Beast Boy.

Beast Boy lay motionless in the middle of the destruction, covered in scorched debris and fallen branches, his right leg bent backwards with a gruesome compound fracture, a white fragment of bone actually visible, sticking through his green skin like a spike. His purple and black uniform was torn and tinged red, as was the grass, or what was left of it, beneath his crumpled form. His face was covered in cuts, most of them bleeding freely, but worst by far were the injuries to his stomach and ribs. His entire torso was swollen, the emerald green skin already turning a dark ugly purple from the massive internal hemorrhaging.

"Great Azar..." whispered Raven in shock as she landed and knelt down next to her stricken teammate. As gently as she could, Raven placed her hands on his chest, trying to feel the extent of his injuries. It was worse than she thought. His ribs weren't so much broken as they were shattered, he was wheezing from what was certainly a punctured lung, and despite her caution, and despite his unconsciousness, Beast Boy winced and moaned softly in pain at even the lightest touch.

There were too many injuries, and she had no time to treat them all. They were in the middle of a war zone, and they had to get out of here, find the others, and get back to Jump City ASAP before whatever was attacking them came back to finish the job. Racking her brain, she whispered a handful of words in Sumerian, Latin, and various alien tongues, calling on a healing spell to try and staunch the internal bleeding which, if left unchecked, could kill him in minutes. With as little pressure as she could apply, she placed her hands on Beast Boy and transfered the energy of the spell into him, her hands glowing an icy blue. Beast Boy shuddered and let out a whimper that seemed far more animal than human, but the swelling subsided a little, and the bruises stopped spreading, although by now they covered most of his torso, tinging his skin a muddy brown mottled with purple. As the magic took effect, Raven pulled her communicator off of her belt and flipped it open. Static. Urgently, she pressed several buttons, but nothing came up. Perhaps the robots were jamming their signals, though Cyborg had claimed that was impossible, that he had built the system to rotate frequencies often enough to make conventional jamming useless. As though anything they ever fought was 'conventional'. Regardless, it meant that for the moment, she was on her own, and would have to figure out how to get Beast Boy and herself out of this.

The obvious answer was to teleport them both back to the Tower, but Jump City was a thousand miles away from where they were right now, and at that distance, teleportation became extremely dangerous if not prepared properly, which would take precious time that Beast Boy might not have. Beast Boy was smaller than she was, and she was confident she could carry him without difficulty, but there was no telling what that might do to him, as merely shifting his position could make his injuries worse, if that were even possible. There was always telekinesis of course, using her powers to carry him more gently than she could ever do herself, but her half-imbued, half-magical telekinetic powers were unstable at the best of times, and with the worry and fear that was even now crowding at the borders of her mind, there was too much risk of accidentally jarring him or worse. Perhaps she could try and find the others, but they were outside the range of her empathy, and thus to find them without her communicator, she would have to leave Beast Boy here, with an army of armed robots roaming the area.

"C'mon, _think,_" she commanded herself through clenched teeth. Beast Boy was still moaning softly, even through his deep unconsciousness, and his breathing sounded like a clogged drain. Blood ran from the corner of his mouth, red blood that looked darker than it should have been, but Raven didn't know if that was normal for him or not. She needed the others here, especially Cyborg, who knew Beast Boy's mutated physiology better than anyone else, and would know what to do with him. But Cyborg wasn't here, and she had to do _something_ now or else...

The sounds of heavy footsteps brought her head up in the momentary hope that Cyborg and the others had found them, but an instant before she saw what had made them, she realized that had it been Cyborg or anyone else, her empathy would have warned her that they were coming. As it was, she felt nothing, no emotions whatsoever from anything around her save for her own and Beast Boy's, which could only mean that whatever was approaching had no emotions at all.

And she knew what that meant.

On the edge of the clearing, first one, then several, then many armored figures appeared, their red eyes sweeping back and forth, searching for anything out of the ordinary. Raven's eyes widened but she suppressed any sound she might have normally made and immediately crouched as low as she could, laying on her stomach on the ground next to Beast Boy with her head lifted just enough to watch what the robots were doing. She held her breath, repeating her mantra in her head over and over to try and calm herself down. There were at least two dozen robots out there, and while she was... reasonably confident that she could handle that many, there was no telling how many more might be laying in wait within the trees, and in the confusion and chaos of a battle, a single stray shot could -

"... R... Rae...?"

Raven started and turned her head to her fallen teammate. Beast Boy's eyes remained closed, his teeth and fists clenched hard from what she took to be pain, but he was stirring slightly, and whispering words incoherently, not awake, but not fully unconscious either.

"Shh!" she hushed urgently. The auditory sensors in those robots might well be strong enough to pick up even these soft words. They were even now spreading out, searching around the periphery of the clearing, though none of them appeared to be ready to move towards the center of it. In a minute or so they might pass them by. She might even have chanced a short-range teleport, just something to get them both out of the way, but one of the robots had strayed uncomfortably close, and there was too much risk that if she moved to teleport them it would spot them before she could finish.

"Rae lookout... there's..."

Stilted snatches of what Beast Boy had been saying right before the explosion, or was it? Raven didn't recall any talking, but then she had been busy. She reached down for his hand and took it in hers, the best she could do now without attracting the attention of the robots. He squeezed it as hard as he could, 'probably because of the pain', she thought, and she did not pull away, not even when he squeezed hard enough to hurt her hand. She tried to think of a spell, anything she could do to help him here and now, something to dull the pain perhaps, but anything she could do would involve noise and movement, and the robots would set on them in an instant if she dared to...

"RAVEN!" Beast Boy cried out suddenly, writhing on the ground in agony and anguish, "RAVEN, NO!"

Raven's breath caught and her eyes widened in horror as Beast Boy cried out, his voice so thin and weak that even at full volume it was barely louder than the birds chirping in the trees around the clearing, but as she watched, the robot nearest them froze, and turned towards the sound of Beast Boy's voice, and then raised its gatling gun, the barrels already spinning up to deliver their lethal stream of projectiles.

She had no choice.

Raven raised her hand, and a blast of dark energy screamed out of it like a bird's talon, striking the robot in its midsection and ripping a hole through it the size of a beach ball. Sparking and crackling, the robot was dead long before it hit the ground, and yet Raven knew with terrible certainty what would happen next, and even as she scrambled to her feet again, freeing her hand from Beast Boy's grip, she saw all of the robots around the periphery of the clearing turning towards them and beginning to open fire.

"No!" she shouted, and she raised both hands, calling on her powers, with no further need of stealth. A hemispherical shield of pure blackness flashed into existence around her and Beast Boy both, only to be pelted an instant later by a veritable deluge of firepower. Tens of thousands of rounds ricocheted off the shield in every direction, perforating the foliage nearby and arcing into the sky like fireworks. Rockets impacted on the shield and exploded with tremendous force, shaking her concentration and nearly knocking her back from the shield. There was no chance of evading the shots. Even if she could take to the air again, that would leave Beast Boy defenseless, and so it was a contest of will versus mass, and she gritted her teeth and poured on the power and desperately _forced _the shield to hold, even as more robots emerged from the woods, blasting away with reckless abandon at her and Beast Boy.

"_I_... _won't_... _let you_..._hurt him_!" she yelled back at the robots without even realizing that she was doing so, and she leaned forward into the shield, focusing all her will and energy, desperately pressing back harder and harder. Sweat rolled down her face, tears formed in her eyes at the exertion and at the power burning through her veins and nerves like an electrical current. Shaken and battered, the shield nevertheless held out, and for a brief moment, Raven thought that she just might be able to drive the robotic army back.

And then seven rockets hit the shield simultaneously.

Had they come in one at a time, she might have been able to hold, but all seven struck within a quarter second, and the combined blast overwhelmed her concentration and shattered the shield like a pane of glass. Raven was thrown bodily aside, hurled into the ground on the opposite side of the clearing as though pitched there by some convulsion of the earth. She landed face down, hard, tasting blood and dirt and grass on her tongue, but no sooner had she hit than she scrambled back to her feet in a near-panic. Without the shield, Beast Boy was totally vulnerable to the robots. She had to get back over to him, help him, drive them off _somehow_. Something grabbed her arm, something metallic and cold and unfeeling, and she snarled and struck at it with her powers, ripping off the arm of the robot that had seized her and ramming the severed limb through its unblinking red eye. Whirling around without even checking that it was truly disposed of, she spun back towards Beast Boy and her heart froze solid.

Robots_, hundreds_ of robots were streaming into the clearing, moving with an even, unhurried, relentless pace that indicated that they or their masters had every confidence in victory. Dozens of them were already moving between her and Beast Boy, cutting her off from him. Dozens more were advancing on Beast Boy's position. Not a single one had opened fire, despite the fact that standing in the open as she was, she presented an absolutely unmissable target for them to fire at. Right now however, it was not her own vulnerability that was foremost on her mind, for the robots were closing in on Beast Boy, and if they got to him...

She lashed out, desperately, incoherently, her fear for her friend gaining the upper hand over her self control, black energies soaring out and decimating everything within yards of her. Robots fell with their heads ripped off, with their weapons bent inwards, with their circuitry torn to shreds or blown to bits in a pyroclastic barrage, A few desultory shots were fired her way, none of them fatal, none of them intended to be, but she did not even notice them. She did not notice the metal slug tear through her shoulder, ignored the near-miss explosions that knocked her off her feet again and again, desperate fury compelling her to stem the tide any way she could, but it was not enough. For every robot she brought down, three more stepped forward, wielding concussion grenades and taser rifles and electrified nets, and they dis-concernedly shot her again and again with these weapons, caring nothing for how many robots she might destroy, knocking her about and stunning her repeatedly until she could barely stand, tottering, unable to reach Beast Boy, unable to stop them.

"No! Don't touch him!" she cried, but they predictably ignored her, and another concussion grenade brought her to the ground two dozen yards from Beast Boy. She struggled to rise again, but then there were a dozen or more robots all around her, on top of her, pinning her to the ground. She did not ask herself why they hadn't shot to kill, for she feared she actually knew the answer already. It wasn't her that they wanted. One of the robots was standing above Beast Boy now, and the ones between Raven and Beast Boy parted slowly, intentionally, giving her a clear view with which to watch. She struggled all the more desperately, fighting with every ounce of her power, her emotions running wild in her head, and the robot above Beast Boy exploded like an over-wound clockwork toy, as did the one that stepped forward to take its place, but one of the enemies pinning her slammed its arm into her back and broke her concentration if not her ribs, then bent down and physically forced her head back so that she would have no choice but to watch yet another robot picking Beast Boy up by his head.

She screamed now, a wordless scream of terror that sent vibrations through the ground, as the robot lifted Beast Boy's senseless form into the air. Two more robots stepped forward, and took hold of the changeling's wrists, and braced themselves, and the robots on top of Raven forced her head forward, forced her to drink up every single detail, as time seemed to hang motionless for her. All the world began to fade away, all but Beast Boy and the robots that held him, as everything else passed into darkness, and she opened her mouth to scream once more, but no sound emerged. Her worst fears were coming to life, right before her eyes, and deep inside her, she felt something straining, beating at the bars of its cage, roaring to be let out. Unbridled emotions, fear, rage, desperation, and some she could not identify, all of these danced within her mind and around her thoughts, and their cacophony drowned out all else. And then suddenly the robots were no longer holding her arms, their grips on her wrists crumbling like stale bread, and dimly she knew she should get up and help Beast Boy, but the cascading emotions where overwhelming her, and the last thing she saw was the robots holding Beast Boy turning towards her and backing up before everything faded into a red haze...

**O-O-O**

"Robin, calling Beast Boy and Raven! Can anyone hear me? Robin, calling anyone!"

"Forget it man," said Cyborg, still tinkering with the shell that he had dug out of his chestplate. "The frequency's jammed, right across the whole spectrum. _I_ can't even pick you up."

They had been making their way through the trees for quite some time, twenty minutes at least, but so far had yet to detect a sign of either Raven or Beast Boy, and Robin was becoming more and more worried. He knew the others were too of course, but he was bad at dealing with it. While Starfire wore a suitably concerned expression, and kept making very brief forays above the forest canopy, and Cyborg scanned constantly for their missing teammates, and intermittently played with the shells that the robots had shot him and Starfire with, Robin was forced to simply keep walking, unable to search by any means other than his own ears and eyes.

"There's something weird here..." said Cyborg after a while, and Robin glanced back to see what he meant, only to find Cyborg staring in puzzlement at the armor-piercing slug laying in his oversized hand.

"What?" asked Robin. He wanted to yell at Cyborg that whatever it was was not more important than finding Raven or Beast Boy, but he knew that Cyborg was doing everything he could in that regard, and that this might be important too.

"These shells," said Cyborg, "I can't figure 'em out..."

"What's wrong with them?"

Cyborg nervously tossed the shell up and down in his hand as though flipping a coin. "They're depleted uranium," he said. "High velocity, armor piercing shells. They should've gone through me and Starfire like Beast Boy through a plate o' tofu, but they didn't even crack my armor, and they barely cut Star..."

Robin glanced at the massive dents that had been hammered into Cyborg's frame, and felt the holes drilled through his own titanium polymer cape. "They looked like they hit hard enough to me," he said.

"Oh they hurt," said Cyborg, shrugging it off as though he'd had worse, which was certainly true, "and I mean, they'd probably go right through you or..." he pointedly didn't finish his sentence. "But... I mean I'm armored, and Starfire's an alien. She can survive in a vacuum or getting hit with a wrecking ball. Normal bullets just shatter when they either one of us. But this stuff... this stuff's different. Military-grade armor-piercing rounds. This stuff can cut through tank armor."

"So..."

"I don't know man... something strange is going on. If I had to go hunting for someone like me or Star, these are the rounds I'd be using. They _should've_ worked, but they didn't, and I don't know why. He threw the shell from one hand to another with a loud 'clank'. "It just don't make any damn sense..."

Starfire descended from above, brushing leaves and twigs out of her face and hair as she landed. "There is much smoke in the air," she said, "and I could find no trace of Beast Boy or Raven from there. Perhaps if I attempted to fly higher..."

"No, Star," insisted Robin for the fifth time. "It's too dangerous. These robots have surface-to-air missiles, and if they lock onto you, they could blow you out of the sky." Even as he said this, Robin knew it might well be the wrong call, but after what had happened back before with Starfire and the Robots, and the revelation that but for some property none of them understood, Starfire would be dead now, he was loathe to send her into the teeth of that much firepower again, even if it might mean finding Beast Boy and Raven faster.

'Of course it might also mean losing her along with them,' he said to himself.

"Well we gotta do _something_ man," said Cyborg. "BB and Raven could be anywhere, and we sure as hell ain't gonna find them wandering through the trees like this.

'He's right,' thought Robin, but he couldn't see a way to do it without getting all of them blown out of the sky by the same weapons that had destroyed the T-ship. Not even the transponders built into the communicators were helping at all. They couldn't risk splitting up, and only one of them could fly. They needed a new plan.

Fortunately, that was one of Robin's better points.

He took a few moments to think it over, weighed the various options, and then turned back to Cyborg and Starfire and took a deep breath.

"Okay," he said, "here's what we do. First - "

That was as far as he got.

A thousand machine guns exploded into life somewhere off to the left, followed by the whine and explosion of rockets being fired at a target. Mixed in with the sound were shouts and screams, too far away to be understood, save for the voice. Raven's voice. All three Titans looked at one another for an instant, and then all three bolted off towards the noise.

Robin lost sight of Starfire and Cyborg almost instantly as he swatted the foliage aside with his staff and sprinted, full speed, through the dense undergrowth. The roaring sounds of battle and explosions seemed tantalizingly close, and yet they got no louder, in fact they seemed to be tapering off. A minute or so after they had fallen silent, Robin pulled up short before a large grove of trees to try and listen for any further sounds, but there was nothing audible to be heard, save for Starfire and Cyborg emerging behind him. All three glanced around, listening for any sign, but detecting nothing.

"I do not understand," said Starfire. "The voice we heard was clearly belonging to Raven! Where could she have gotten to?"

"Uh... guys?" said Cyborg in a very apprehensive tone, and he pointed ahead right, and up. Robin saw Starfire follow his extended finger with her gaze and her eyes widened as she gasped, clasped a hand over her mouth, and actually took a step back. Robin now turned, to face the direction the others were looking, and no sooner had he done so than his mouth fell open wide and his staff fell to his side as his hand went limp.

"_Holy_..."

**O-O-O**

The street was choked with smoke and fumes, thick enough to burn the eyes of any witnesses, and render futile any attempt at determining the totality of what had happened. The restricted visibility could not however conceal the terrible destruction that had been wrought in the center of the street. Cars lay overturned on their sides and hoods, or wrapped in knots around light poles and the corners of buildings. Man-sized and larger pieces of asphalt, concrete, and even bedrock were laying strewn about as if a volcano had cast them down. Everything was in ruins, from the fronts of buildings, to the electricity and telephone poles that now lay fallen in the street like a blown-down grove of trees, to the fountains of water jetting up from the severed water pipes and fire hydrants. Fires burned quietly all over the place, on awnings, inside cars, and amidst the twisted remains of newspaper racks. Such few civilians as remained in the area were stunned almost to the point of catatonia, shell-shocked and covered with ash and dust, like the survivors of some natural disaster.

All that is, but one.

"David?"

Among the small number of stunned police and civilians, a single one, a teenaged girl, was actively roaming through the ruins, searching for the perpetrator of this cataclysmic event, by which was meant not the gigantic concrete behemoth called "Cinderblock" that had begun the metahuman confrontation that had taken place here today, but the undersized, psychokinetic kid that had ended it. The explosion had enveloped both assailant and assailed, and none knew what had become of either, and so Carrie called David's name, and picked through the ruins as best she could, before she finally spotted a scrap of dark green windbreaker sticking out from under several massive chunks of ripped up asphalt.

"David!" she called out, and she made her way over to where the piece of jacket was buried, only to find something she likely did not expect.

David was laying on the ground on his back, mostly buried by a pile of debris as well as a piece of asphalt the size of a large bookshelf. This much was not surprising. What _was_ surprising, no doubt both to the young metahuman laying there, as well as to the girl who was looking for him, was that he appeared to be alive...

... and conscious.

"David, can you hear me?" asked Carrie with a note of urgency, and as if to quiet her fear, David coughed once, before slowly opening his eyes. His gaze was unfocussed and somewhat vacant, as if he was having a devil of a time remembering what had just happened, but then she supposed that much could be forgiven.

"Are you all right?" she asked, not even bothering to imagine just how ridiculous a question that was, given the circumstances.

David coughed several more times, trying to move his arms and failing. "I... I dunno..." he said weakly, "I can't... can't move..."

"You're pinned under the rubble," replied Carrie. "I'll go get some - "

There was a loud 'CRACK', like a gunshot, and the piece of asphalt that was pinning David to the ground broke in half like a cracker. Carrie took a step back, but David let out no cry, merely taking a deep breath and letting it out as the pressure on his chest was somewhat relieved. "Could you... gimme a hand?" he asked haltingly, wincing as he tried to push the remaining bits of rubble of of himself. He was plainly not equal to the task, but Carrie knelt down next to him and helped shove and clear the debris off. Despite the violence of the explosion that had just happened, David didn't _look_ much worse for wear, or rather no worse than he had appeared prior to doing... whatever he had done.

The rubble disposed of, Carrie very gently helped David sit up. He was badly shaken, certainly, probably had a concussion if not worse, but he seemed to be at least reasonably alert and clearly still had enough left in him to use his powers, albeit not with as much... gusto as previously demonstrated.

"Are you okay?" he asked.

David looked worried when he asked, and Carrie tried to smile. "I'm fine," she said, "I got behind a building."

David breathed a sigh of what looked like relief. "And... everyone else?"

"I made everyone get way back. I don't think anyone got hurt... well... except..."

Both of them turned back and looked at the gigantic crater several dozen yards ahead that had been gouged into the street like the aftermath of a meteor's impact. Forty feet wide, and deep enough that they could not see the bottom from where they were sitting, it loomed like a gigantic abyss, and cars and other bits of debris lay scattered all around its lip, or hanging precariously over the edge. Smoke and the flickering orange glow of flames still emerged from the crater, as though it were a volcanic caldera filled with magma. There was no sign whatsoever of Cinderblock.

David took all this in, and then slowly turned to Carrie, looking very worried once again, if not actually scared. He asked his next question in a loud whisper, as though afraid of the answer.

"Do you think I got him?"

Carrie took one look at the flaming debris scattered about the street, at the shattered windows, the broken streetlights, the overturned cars that looked like they had been folded in half by giants, or thrown around like toys, one look at the gaping, yawning crater large enough to swallow a house, one look at the smoke spiraling up into the heavens in the vague, rough form of a mushroom cloud, and turned back to David, who had asked the question with as much earnest and sincerity as he could, and began to laugh.

It was only a second or so before David also perceived the absurdity of what he had just asked, and burst into laughter as well. Perhaps it was merely a release of tension or catharsis, or anything else, but right now, both of them seemed to find it the funniest thing in the world, and clearly not even the jarring pain in David's chest as he laughed could make him stop.

Half a minute or so passed before Carrie stood back up and carefully helped David to his feet. He was wobbly certainly, and his balance had clearly been thrown in loops, but he could stand, or at least stand with help. Once both of them were on their feet, both David and Carrie took a long look around the ruined scene, which was just beginning to emerge from the smoky gloom into which it had been plunged. If anything, it made the damage look even more extensive. It was a good thing that Jump City carried metahuman insurance...

"What did you _do_ to him?" asked Carrie, as they looked around at the scene of devastation.

David smiled and chuckled softly, wincing as this caused his ribs to protest. "J. C. G. E..." he said slowly.

Carrie did not understand. "What's J. C. G. E.?" she asked.

David pointed to his left at a manhole cover that had become half embedded in a brick wall, thrown into the building like a ninja star into a post. The manhole cover was stamped with the letters "J. C. G. E."

"Jump City Gas & Electric," said David weakly, explaining as best he could. "I saw it... while we were trying to get away, and it just sorta... hit me. I couldn't bring him down with my own explosions." He looked back up at the gaping wound carved into the ground. "So I thought... maybe I could use something else instead."

"What did you use?" asked Carrie, a note of what might have been awe or fear creeping into her voice.

"I set off a gas main," said David evenly, without turning his head. "It just took a spark..."

"A _gas main_!"

"Yeah..." said David with a hollow laugh. "Told ya it was stupid..."

"But... a gas main did all this?"

"It was a _really _big one," said David with a shudder. "A pipeline. I think the city's probably gonna need to replace it."

"You _think_?" asked Carrie sarcastically, but the joke didn't go over too well. Neither one of them said a word for a while, simply staring at the crater. Carrie thought David looked as though he half-expected Cinderblock to come roaring out of the hole in the street yet again, not that he could really be blamed for it.

"Do you think... is he in there?"

"I didn't see him land," said Carrie, "but I don't hear him."

David nodded slowly and let his breath out slowly. "I'm gonna take a look then..."

Carrie looked at him apprehensively. "Are you sure? Shouldn't you wait for the police or the army or something?"

"No," said David, shaking his head, "I don't... I can't let him... get away again. I just... I don't want him coming back. I don't want him _ever_ coming back. So I... I have to be sure."

David still looked like a scared field mouse, but then she knew full well that looks could be deceiving. He had just blown a hole the size of a small yacht in the ground bringing Cinderblock down, and she could understand the impulse to not want to have to go through that again. It was more than that though. This thing had been chasing David for months now, forcing him to go to ground, cutting him off from a normal life. This was a chance to end it all.

"All right..." she said. "Do you want me to come with- "

"No," he said. "I'll... I'll be okay."

"You don't look okay. What if Cinderblock's still active?" It was highly unlikely, but possible after all.

"I don't know," said David. "But if he is... could you stop him?"

Carrie didn't respond immediately. When she did, it was with a sigh. "All right," she said. "Be careful..."

David nodded slowly. "I'll try," he said, and then slowly, as though he were climbing Mt. Everest, David began to pick his way through the wreckage towards the crater. Carrie watched him move off and vanish into the smoke and dust, and once he was finally out of sight, slowly backed away towards the side of the main street, slipped into an alleyway, and vanished.

**O-O-O**

David made his way slowly through the ruined street, climbing as best he could over the shattered pieces of street and sidewalk, and moving around the burnt out cars and collapsed building fronts. He took his time getting around them, indeed he had no choice. Everything ached at best, and at worst pounded hideously with every movement. He hadn't gone more than three dozen steps before he was regretting asking Carrie not to come with him, but when he turned back, she was no longer visible in the cloud of smoke and debris, and he had no choice but to press ahead. _Why_ he had no choice was a question he did not ask.

He knew the answer anyway.

The lip of the crater loomed ahead, foreboding and dark, like the entrance to some kind of underworld. From within was the roaring of flames, no doubt from the severed gas line. He thought he could hear something else inside as well, something low and grating, like the sound of heavy stones being dragged across one another. Once more, he hesitated, not sure if he should peer over the edge into the abyss, not sure what he would do if the monster within it was ambulatory. His arm still hung near-useless at his side, still leaked blood from the now-snapped wood fragment that had been driven into it. His face still burned from the electrical whipping that Cinderblock had inflicted. His ribs still stabbed at him painfully with every breath, and he knew that if Cinderblock was still active, that there was nothing he could do to stop him. His powers were all but expended, his energy gone, his body broken and crushed. He knew that Carrie was probably right. He should wait for the army before proceeding.

But then... the army might not come until a superhero had checked the area out... and even if they did, Cinderblock had escaped once before. He would not... he could not go through all of this again. And so with a air of finality, David walked up to the edge of the crater, and looked down into it.

And no sooner had he done so, than he realized he needn't have worried.

Cinderblock lay in the crater, on his back, staring up at the sky, but the monster, the nightmare, the hellspawned fiend that had haunted David's footsteps and nightmares for two months was no longer any threat to anyone. All four of Cinderblock's limbs had been shattered like pottery, and such stumps as remained twitched semi-randomly, like the legs of a turtle rolled onto its back. Cinderblock's torso was barely recognizable, gouged and pitted and cracked gruesomely, to the point where a thick, viscous black ichor-substance was oozing out of him. Not even when David had blown off Cinderblock's hand had he seen the concrete behemoth release so much as a single drop of blood, and this alone was enough to show him that he had managed to hurt Cinderblock worse by far than anything previous.

The monster's head, undersized for its body, was also cracked and pitted, but more or less intact, though one eye was dark and cold. The other stared up at David unblinkingly, and there was still malevolence in that gaze, but there was also fear, and shock, and perhaps even pain, though it was hard to read anything into Cinderblock's beady eyes. For once however, the gaze no longer filled David with fear. This beast was no longer a threat, not to him, not now. Cinderblock was beaten.

Weariness flooded over him, and without really thinking about it, he sat down on the lip of the crater, dangling his legs over the side. It was about twenty feet deep, and fires still burned within it from the broken gas main, but none of them close enough to scorch him. He sat there, not sure of what else he was supposed to do, and waited for the pain to fade out or for someone to come and find him, and stared at Cinderblock.

"What did you want?" he asked, more to himself than to anyone else. "What did you want with me?" He had asked the question before, during the battle, in anger, but there was no more anger now. He was too tired for it. It was merely a question, one Cinderblock had steadily refused to answer, one he supposed he was unlikely to ever hear the answer to.

To his surprise, Cinderblock opened his mouth, and weakly grumbled the all-too-familiar phrase he had seemed so fond of bellowing not long ago. "Devastator..." said Cinderblock, in the voice of an echo in the mountains, the shadow of something fierce and powerful, but only the shadow.

David sighed softly, still trying to breathe the fire out of his lungs, and looked around at the street, now becoming visible again as the breeze began to clear the smoke from the area. It looked like the aftermath of some kind of violent war, save only for the merciful lack of any dead bodies laying in the ruins. Carrie had managed to get them all back in time. For that he was thankful.

"Yeah," he said quietly, again addressing himself more than Cinderblock. "I know..."

**O-O-O**

Beast Boy had no idea where he was.

He knew that he was alive, mostly because if he was dead, he would not be in so much pain, or so he assumed. Everything seemed to be on fire; his body was cloaked in a searing, unrelenting pain that was so intense it brought tears to his eyes and made it impossible for him to determine what form he was in now, not that it would have mattered. He couldn't shapeshift like this in any event, couldn't even move, and his eyes were swollen shut with cracked eyelids that seemed to have daggers stuck through them. All he could do was listen to the strange and unidentifiable noises around him: an intense roar like a wind tunnel or an air current, partly (but only partly) masking the crackling of fires burning nearby, the harsh grinding of metal-on-metal and the sickening crunches that sounded like splintering bone.

The noise grew in volume until it was deafening, and yet nothing struck, though the agonizing pain remained, and finally, Beast Boy cracked one eye open, blinking away the tears that attended such an effort, and above him, and around him, he saw wind.

He literally saw wind.

No gust of air, nor even a stormy blast, this wind was alive, violent, and unquestionably malevolent. The very air itself felt cold, not like a breeze during winter, but like it was sucking the very heat out of everything nearby. Beast Boy didn't know what was going on, but behind the wall of wind, he saw a number of grey figures that looked familiar somehow, and some of them were flying through the air, and some of them were backing up, firing their weapons at something above him, and some of them were laying in pieces on the ground, motionless and lifeless, but soon the wind was blowing so hard that he could not even see that, swirling and stripping the ground bare like a tornado, barely inches away from his face, but not touching him. And as he tried to reconcile this with anything from his addled memory, Beast Boy slowly turned his head to his side and looked up, and there he saw a living nightmare.

A tower was looming over him, a dark, black and purple tower, with red glowing lights atop it, round and imposing and around it swirled a maelstrom of lightning, fire, and pitch darkness that seemed to move like a living thing. And from the tower came sounds, frightening, cruel sounds that left him quivering without knowing why. From the base of the tower snaked tendrils of pure black that flowed above him and towards the figures in grey, snatching them up by the dozens and flinging them helplessly about like rag dolls. Streaks of yellow fire and orange blossoms appeared all around the tower, but they seemed to have no effect, as the whirling winds blew them off course and spun them away along with everything else. There were words, words that sounded alien yet familiar, coming from overhead, but try as he might, Beast Boy could not make them out.

He could not tell if he was awake or dreaming, if this was all some sort of hallucination or some other kind of delusion, or if he was really seeing it. Part of his brain seemed to recognize this, seemed to be telling him that he knew what was happening here intimately, that it had all happened before, and would all happen again. Unfortunately, injured and battered as he was, he could no more identify what was happening than he could tell where he was, and even now, even with all the destruction and violence raging about, all he could do was to remain awake, barely. And soon, all too soon in fact, he could no longer even do that, as the pain began to fade out into a comfortable numbness, and he felt himself drifting away once more.

And as he passed back into unconsciousness, he decided that he was certain he did recognize what was happening, and that when he woke up, he would have to remember to ask Raven about what had happened to him…

**O-O-O**

It was over all too quickly, though not quickly enough for Robin's taste.

The thing that had loomed up over the trees, the towering creature that was Raven, and at the same time was not her, had taken all of them by surprise. They had all seen it before of course, once, over a year ago in a routine battle with Doctor Light that had turned out to be far from routine when it was all said and done. Doctor Light had pushed Raven too far and had wound up nearly _eaten_ for his trouble when something broke loose inside Raven's mind and had dragged him kicking and screaming into her cloak to be subjected to God-knew-what horrors. That time had been scary enough, particularly for Cyborg and Beast Boy, but this… this was on a whole other scale.

The sky grew dark, the clouds threatened ominously, and tentacles the size of boa constrictors lashed the air like whips, grabbing robots and hurling them through the air like toys. They fired back with their machine cannons and rockets, but the rockets were torn out of the air by shields and nebulous, semi-invisible forms of shifting blackness. Above it all loomed Raven, as tall as the tallest trees, her four eyes glowing blood red, her powers going mad, tearing up everything in sight and ripping it to shreds, robots, trees, rocks, dirt, bushes, everything, like a black storm of vengeance sating itself with the blood of its enemies.

They had tried to call to her, to no effect. They had even fired starbolts and shots from Cyborg's cannon into the air to try and get her to snap out of the rage, but she took no more notice of them than she did of the insects in the trees she uprooted. They had tried to make their way towards her, but it was no use. Everything within two hundred yards was being scoured to bedrock or torn to shreds by dark energies. Something terrible had been unleashed from within Raven, something vicious, wrathful, primal, and there was nothing they could do besides take cover and wait for the storm to lift.

And inevitably, it did.

All at once it seemed, the darkness vanished, and the air returned to normal, and the tentacles and tendrils and wisps of black energy dissolved and were no more. An instant later, all three Titans burst into the clearing Raven had been looming over, and found a scene of desolation.

Everything, absolutely everything had been destroyed. Trees had been blown to splinters, robots ripped apart and left to festoon the stumps of gigantic evergreens with their sparkling circuitry. Of the hundreds of bots that had arrayed themselves against Raven, not a single one remained visible, though likely many had been ordered to retreat rather than get themselves destroyed uselessly. Everything had been blown outwards from the center of the clearing, like the debris pattern from a bomb, and predictably, it was in the center of the clearing that they found them.

Raven and Beast Boy both lay upon the ground and neither one was moving. Beast Boy's face, chest, and arms were covered in dark bruises so profound that Robin took them for dirt initially and tried to brush them off, only for Beast Boy to give a sharp cry in his sleep and cringe away from him. His injuries were hideous, but they were older than this. No bruises could have developed this quickly. It wasn't Raven that had done this to him, it was something else. Raven herself was laying on her stomach, perpendicular to Beast Boy, out cold, no doubt with the effort of having just drained her normally dammed powers dry. Her skin, always pale, now looked almost deathly so, and her shoulder was red with blood from a gunshot wound that went straight through it. Electrical burns and bruises covered her back and sides, and she did not so much as stir or move a muscle when Cyborg gently bent down to pick her up. Both she and more precisely Beast Boy clearly needed immediate medical attention. They all needed to get home. _Now_.

And yet even with the chaos of the surroundings, and the urgency of the situation, Robin could not help but notice that even as her powers finally gave out, Raven had fallen with her arms and shoulders draped over Beast Boy almost protectively, and her head laying on her cheek atop Beast Boy's bruised stomach, as though he were a pillow. Nor could he help but notice that despite the terrible, sensitive bruises that made Beast Boy cringe and cry and write at even the lightest touch, he had made no move to shift Raven once her head had landed atop him.

But of course, that was all just coincidence, or so Raven would no doubt claim. Right now, Robin just hoped that Raven would live to claim it… and that Beast Boy would live to tease her about it.

**O-O-O**

David had been in the medical bay of the Tower many, many times, usually as a patient. This was no exception. What was different however was that this time, he was not the one laying on the medical table, surrounded by other people, all of whom were wondering if he was going to wake up or not. This time he was standing next to Starfire, watching Beast Boy, who was lying comatose on the bed, as badly beaten as anyone David had ever seen, even in films. This time, Robin and Cyborg were standing off in the corner, whispering to one another about Beast Boy's chances, rather than his own. This time, Raven was not hovering overhead, chanting her mantra and telling him to be quiet, but instead was nowhere to be seen, Starfire having assured him that she was "recovering" from whatever the hell had happened out there in Yellowstone Park earlier that day. This time, he had gotten himself into a hell of a mess, this was true, but for once, it appeared that he was not the only one.

To be honest, he preferred it the other way.

Shifting his throbbing arm uneasily under the bandages and splint, David watched the oscilloscope line flicker high then low, high then low, and tried to tell himself that it wasn't as bad as it looked. It certainly couldn't be _worse_. The casts and the neck brace were bad enough, the IV and the machinery made the whole process look quite serious, but somehow it was the bandages over Beast Boy's eyes that worried him the most. It made Beast Boy look like a mummy rather than the emerald-skinned superhero he had come to know. None of the aforementioned emerald skin was visible now at any rate, all of it either swathed in bandages, or stained an ugly purple by the internal bleeding, bleeding that _appeared_ to have stopped, but that nobody could be certain was not continuing. Not until Beast Boy either died or recovered enough to wake up at least, which was not exactly the most re-assuring set of options.

Starfire had bandages around her midsection, but smaller ones. Cyborg's damage was all cosmetic, if you could call dents and metal fractures cosmetic, and Robin, as always, had come through the entire ordeal almost unscathed but for a few bumps, bruises, cuts, and welts. Then again, he glanced back at Robin, whispering with Cyborg against the wall, or up at Starfire, who had more worry in her eyes than David had ever seen before, and he thought perhaps that "unscathed" was the wrong word to be using here.

He had sat by the crater and watched Cinderblock lay helplessly within it for… forever as far as he knew. His watch was smashed, no clocks were visible, and it had felt like a year or more before the paramedics and the police had finally arrived. When they had, it was as though they expected him to climb down into the crater and pick Cinderblock up or something, for all of them acted extremely reticent and reluctant to do anything without him telling them to. At another time, he might have made some observation about how they were treating him much like they treated the Titans whenever they were abroad in the city, but to be frank, his mind hadn't been in the game, and in the end, after the paramedics had done their work, and the police had fetched a crane to lift what was left of Cinderblock out of the ruin of the street, he had just asked the ambulance to take him back to the Tower, rather than to a hospital, as would have been sane.

They did so without so much as a word of protest, and David was too tired to wonder why.

His fatigue had not lasted though, for even as the ambulance was taking him back to the Tower, the Titans had arrived, Starfire carrying the entire T-car, along with all four of the other Titans over her head like a sack of potatoes, and dropping it off on the roof of the tower itself. One look at the wrecked car had told him that something _had_ gone terribly wrong with the rest of them, and he had told the ambulance to leave him on the shore of the bay, and taken the tunnel back to the Tower basement, where he ran into Robin, Starfire, and Cyborg, all trying to get the medical bay ready to receive Beast Boy and Raven.

That was hours ago.

Now it was nearly nine o'clock in the evening, and none of them had yet left the small circle of light that delineated the medical bay of the Tower basement. Beast Boy had been stabilized, and Raven was hovering above another bed, slowly healing herself with her own powers (or so the others explained) but none of the others had made any motion to go back upstairs and catch some sleep. David guessed that they would all be staying down here for the night. None of them were likely to be able to sleep. David certainly wasn't going to. Not after today.

Not after all this.

"You are… all right? Friend David? Is there anything more we may do to assist you?"

"I'm okay," said David. By comparison at least, he certainly was. He could still walk, he had the use of three of his limbs, and he wasn't bleeding to death internally. Robin had suggested early on that Beast Boy might need to be taken to a real hospital for surgery to repair the internal damage that he had incurred, but Cyborg had pointed out that not only was Beast Boy's physiology completely alien to most doctors, but that his blood type was totally incompatible with any other living thing's, and that the doctors couldn't possibly perform surgery on him without any blood to give him. He looked as though he'd already lost more than half of his own anyhow.

"Has he ever… gotten hurt this bad before?" It sounded stupid when he said it, but he did not retract the question. Starfire hardly could tell the difference between what sounded wrong and didn't anyhow.

"Not since I arrived on this planet, no," admitted Starfire with an admirable calm to her voice, "but… Beast Boy is very resilient in all ways, and I have no doubt that he shall soon begin recovering from… this."

She did not sound as though she had no doubt, but David nodded. Not long ago, he had assumed that the Titans were completely invulnerable. He wished he still could assume that.

"David?"

David turned his head towards Robin, who had spoken last. Robin was beckoning him over, and he walked over towards him and Cyborg, slowly so as not to fall over.

"Are you gonna be all right?" asked Robin. "We can set up another…"

"I'll be fine," said David. The absolute last thing he wanted to do right now was to add to their worries or their troubles. As soon as Beast Boy and Raven were stabilized, Cyborg had gone over him carefully, splinting up his arm, bandaging his face and ribs, and making sure that he wasn't about to collapse on them either, but he had refused to let them drag another medical bed out of storage. Perhaps he was being stubborn, but he simply didn't want that now.

Robin nodded. "I wanted to say earlier, but didn't get the chance. You did… very well out there."

All this had actually managed to drive what had happened with Cinderblock from David's mind, albeit temporarily. This statement brought it all back. "Really?"

"Absolutely," said Robin, and he seemed to mean it too, which was almost scary. Being as he was Robin, he immediately qualified the praise with criticism. "Of course you took needless risks, you picked your battlefield too close to civilians, you allowed another civilian to put herself in danger on your behalf, and you got pretty badly beaten up… but all that aside, you did very, very well, especially since it was an ambush."

David had expected the critique. Indeed he had known most of those things were true even as he was doing them, but there was an item missing from the light that surprised him.

"So you're… you're not mad that I went out there in the first place?" It seemed a reasonable question, given the argument last time.

But Robin merely shook his head. "This was a setup," he said. "We all fell for it. We all… paid for it." He glanced over at Beast Boy and at Starfire standing over him. "It's not just about you and Cinderblock anymore. It's about all of us, and I think whoever's behind it is after something more than just you."

It was not exactly refreshing news that the conspiracy against him was larger and more powerful than anyone had thought, but oddly enough, it _was_ somewhat refreshing to learn that he and he alone was not the sole focus of their efforts, terrible as it made David feel to admit it.

Cyborg seemed to sense David's discomfort, and laid his heavy hand as gently as he could on David's shoulder. "We're _gonna_ catch these guys," said Cyborg in a clear, even tone that masked a cold fury more intense than David had ever heard before. None of them were taking what had happened to Beast Boy well. "We're gonna catch these guys and make damn sure they can't get at you or us or anyone else_ever_ again."

Robin crossed his arms. "That's right," he said. "We won't let them get away with this."

"I know," said David quietly, and to some extent or another he did, but… it didn't _feel_ like as certain a thing as Robin and Cyborg were saying. Everything felt like it had derailed somehow.

"Besides," said Robin. "Thanks to you, we finally have a lead. Cinderblock can lead us back to whoever is responsible for this, if we can convince him to talk."

"Let me try," said Cyborg darkly. "I'll get Blockhead to talk all right…"

Robin was about to say something else, but his communicator beeped and he opened it up and stepped aside, leaving David and Cyborg alone. Neither one said much for a minute or so, looking over at Starfire, maintaining her silent vigil, and at Beast Boy, motionless and quiet for once.

"You know what's weird?" said Cyborg at last.

"What?"

"All this… and we still got lucky."

David raised an eyebrow. "We did?"

Cyborg sighed and took a small metal slug out from a pocket, rolling it around in his hand. "Those bots were firing these at us. These are armor piercing slugs, high velocity, high kinetic power. They're designed to go straight through tank armor. I took a whole bunch of them back there. Starfire got shot pretty bad too. That's why her stomach's all cut up."

David slowly picked up the slug and turned it over in his hand. "Yeah?"

"Yeah," said Cyborg, "but the weird thing is… the bullets went straight through Raven's shoulder and all, but they didn't punch through me or through Starfire, or even through Raven when she went all berserk on us, and I can't figure out why not. Not without some time to look the slugs over. I mean, depleted uranium usually goes through armor like paper so – "

"Depleted uranium?" asked David, confused.

"Yeah man, that's a DU shell there. Don't worry about radiation though, they're called depleted for a reason. Military uses 'em in all sorts of – "

"Um… Cyborg?" said David. "This isn't uranium."

Cyborg hesitated. "What? What are you talkin' about? Of course it's uranium."

"No," said David, "I can… tell what stuff's made of, remember? This isn't uranium at all. This is lead."

"Man… I know what you can do," said Cyborg, now becoming a bit agitated, "but trust me, that _is_ uranium. I even ran a scan on it when I dug it out of my arm."

"Well… maybe the outside is," said David. "I don't recognize that part, but look…"

He took the shell and set it on the table, and concentrated for a moment before cracking it in half with a sharp puff of smoke. Picking up one half of the slug, David held up the cross-section to Cyborg. From this angle it was clear that the shell was comprised of a thin outer layer made of one metal, and a thick, inner layer made of another.

"If the stuff on the outside is uranium," said David, "then it's just coated with uranium. The stuff inside is lead. Robin's been making me work with lead for two weeks. I know it in my sleep."

Gently, Cyborg took the shell half and stared at it in disbelief. "But… that don't… that don't make no _sense_!" he exclaimed, turning it over in his hand. "Why the hell would you make an armor piercing shell out of _lead_?"

"Maybe… it wasn't supposed to be armor piercing?"

"Of course it was supposed to be armor piercing. They wouldn't'a used uranium at all if it wasn't. DU's expensive stuff man, especially nowadays. But why the hell would you go through all the trouble of getting some and then filling the shell up with lead?"

"Does it make a difference?" asked David.

"It totally screws everything up," said Cyborg. "The flight characteristics, muzzle velocity, penetration power, everything. No wonder the shells didn't penetrate, they were shooting at us with lead slugs. But why the hell would anyone make them out to look like DU unless…" he trailed off, and his face suddenly got a look of realization on it.

"Unless?" asked David, barely able to follow what Cyborg had said.

"… unless, they were trying to make the shells _look_ like DU. Unless… daaaamn!"

"What?"

"These aren't normal slugs, and they ain't armor piercers either. These are fakes."

"Fakes?"

"Fake AP ammo," said Cyborg, and despite the situation, he grinned a bit, and flipped the shell like a coil in his hand. "Whoever came up with these little babies must've pretended they were armor piercing, and that they'd work on me and Starfire. Without powers like yours or a live fire test against armored targets, nobody'd ever be able to tell the difference. He chuckled a bit, and slid both halves of the shell back into his pocket. "Someone conned the guys who did this, sold 'em a bunch of fakes. Prob'ly told 'em they were the next best thing to kryptonite, when all they are is the same old lead stuff that any thug uses. Man, I love it when the crooks screw each other for a change."

David still wasn't sure he understood, but Cyborg seemed somewhat relieved to have solved at least one mystery. Robin came walking back over towards them, having apparently finished with his call, and Cyborg turned to let him know what they had discovered, but one look at Robin's face was enough to quiet him down.

"David," said Robin. "There's… something you should know about."

"What?" asked David, already becoming apprehensive. Robin looked, if possible, grimmer than he had before. This did not bode well.

"I just got word from the Jump City penitentiary. Ten minutes ago, something blasted its way into the jail and broke into Cinderblock's cell."

"_WHAT_?" shouted David loudly enough to make Starfire jump and turn around to see who was being murdered. David did not even notice. His head was spinning already. This could not possibly be happening. Not after all that. Cinderblock could not be… he couldn't be gone! Not again! How long was he supposed to be running from that monster?

"Don't… don't tell me he got loose," said David weakly, absolutely certain that this was precisely what Robin was about to tell him. "Oh god… please… don't… don't tell me he's escaped! Not again!"

Robin however closed his eyes and slowly shook his head. Cyborg and Starfire looked quizzically at one another, and David hesitated in the midst of panic mode, as Robin's voice lowered and changed to a more somber tone.

"No," said Robin quietly, and the seriousness of his voice flowed through David like the deep tolling of a bell. "He's dead."

Those were the last words David actually understood for quite some time. Robin's explanation of how the assailants had broken into Cinderblock's cell and attacked him and vanished without ever appearing on a security camera fell on deaf ears, as David shakily sat down in a chair, stunned by the news. And as Robin promised that, despite the setback, this would not deter them from finding whoever was responsible for the assault, David found that the only thing he could really think of now was that, now certainly, if not before, all of them would be spending the night down in the infirmary.

And he doubted very much he was going to get any sleep at all.

* * *

**Author's Note: **A simple reminder to please leave a review with your opinion or observations concerning what you just read. Thank you all once more, and good luck with all your endeavors!


	17. The Devil in the Dark

**Disclaimer:** I do not, as always, own anything relating to the Teen Titans.

**Author's Note**: Hello there once again everyone, and once more, I must apologize for my tardiness in the preparation of this chapter. I meant to complete it much earlier, I did, but this last month I signed a lease on a new apartment and had to spend a week or more moving in and setting everything up. This, in addition to a number of work and other duties I had to tend to and could not neglect, forced me to pause in writing this story. My pause however is now complete, and I am thereby with your permission, posting my latest chapter. It is... a strange one, which is all I will say. I felt that Chapter 16 provided a nice place to break for a little while before resuming in a slightly new direction, and that this chapter represents the beginning of the next "segment" within the story. Your mileage, as always, may vary. Please leave reviews with your comments and insights, whether you enjoyed the chapter or hated it, for this chapter included many experimental elements I am eager to hear feedback on. Thank you all once again, and I shall see you for Chapter 18.

* * *

**Chapter 17: The Devil in the Dark **

_"Beware of staring into the abyss, for the abyss begins to stare back."**  
**_ - Friedrich Nietzsche

**O-O-O**

"Serving the Greater Jump City area since 1972, this is Action 5 News at 11 from the KJCN news center. Bringing you all the news, all the time."

The dignified news anchor sat in his chair in front of a broad desk on which neat stacks of paper were arranged in rows. Behind him was a sprawling newsroom filled with what were apparently bustling reporters, all banging away on computers or rushing from one desk to another with what was no-doubt vital work and information. The anchorman took no notice of this, smoothing out his silver hair for a moment before facing the camera with a serious expression, befitting someone of his stature, or so he imagined.

"Good evening," said the anchor, "and welcome to Action 5 News. Our top story for this evening, The Battle of Battery Street: Fallout and Reaction. One week later, and still no answers have been provided to the media or to the public concerning the pitched battle that erupted last Saturday on the waterfront of Jump City Bay on Battery Street between the notorious rogue construct known as Cinderblock, and an as-yet unidentified metahuman teenager, known only at present as "Devastator", the term used to describe him by Cinderblock, overheard by eyewitnesses to the engagement only moments before the battle began. For the third day in a row, Jump City Police Chief Amos Brown refused to answer reporters' questions today regarding the identity of this 'Devastator' as well what events might have lead to the confrontation on Battery Street, and Cinderblock's subsequent death in the Jump City municipal jail under circumstances that are, to say the least, unclear."

The camera switched to a recording of a massive black man in a senior Police Officer's dress uniform, standing at a podium hastily erected in front of the Jump City Police headquarters and addressing the collected media. The police chief looked as though there were few places on earth he wished to be less than this one, but with a scowl and a deep, gravelly voice, he spoke quickly and to the point.

"At this time, the investigation into what took place on Battery Street last Saturday afternoon is ongoing. We are presently working with the Teen Titans to ensure that no danger remains to the public at large. I am not going to comment now on the status of our investigation."

The reporters exploded, piling their questions atop one another in a cacophony of noise.

"Chief Brown, what of the reports that Jump City Jail suffered a breakout attempt shortly after the conclusion of the fight?"

"Why were the Teen Titans not on hand to apprehend Cinderblock when the attack broke out?"

"Are the police treating Cinderblock's death as a murder case?"

"Has there been any confirmation of the rumors that this "Devastator" has been sighted around the city on other occasions?"

"When can we speak to the Titans?"

None of these questions were answered, and Chief Brown let the reporters howl only for a few seconds before throwing up his hands and turning away from the podium with a low "No comment," leaving the rest of the questions to drown in the general din that ensued. The camera cut back to the news anchor.

"No comment," said the anchor, "and thus, no answers for us, nor for the people of Jump City concerning this latest and potentially most deadly attack on our families, children, and well-being. For more on this story, we now take you live to KJCN reporter Talia Conrade on Battery Street itself, where cleanup and repairs are still underway."

The scene shifted to a young woman standing in front of a huge hole gouged into the street, with earth-moving equipment scattered around it and large cranes lifting sections of pipe into the depths of the crater.

"Tom, I'm standing here at the corner of Battery and Plymouth streets where a week ago the notorious wanted criminal Cinderblock was apparently defeated by a teenaged metahuman he identified only as 'Devastator'. While the public have still not been told anything regarding the identity, nature, or whereabouts of this unknown metahuman, we spent the day looking for witnesses who could corroborate any of the many rumors floating around the city concerning the incident, and asking residents of Jump City what their opinion was on being caught in the cross-fire of yet another metahuman incident."

The television feed switched from live to recorded as a cavalcade of assorted civilians began voicing their views and opinions on what had happened.

"All I'm saying is, if we're gonna live here, we should have some kinda say about who gets to come in here and start tearing up the neighborhood. I'm not trying to sound ungrateful, but come on, don't these guys have anywhere better to do this sorta thing? Someone could've been hurt, you know?"

"So I heard this big 'bang' sound, right? And I turned back up the street to look, and there's this... kid... standing in the middle of the road there, and the big guy just stares at him and calls him "Devastator", so then I run behind the car and..."

"... knocked the power _and_ the gas out to half the goddamn waterfront! They're all menaces, you ask me? How'm I s'possed to run my business with these kids thinking they can just bring the power lines down any time they want to?"

"... threw it right at me! I thought I was gonna die, but then the boy just reached back and sort of waved his hand at it, and part of the hood blew up and the rest went flying off into the bay. I don't know if he can hear this, but _thank you_! And if you're ever in Fresno look up Joe MacLaughlin and I'll buy you a..."

"That wasn't just some kid there, youknowwhatI'msayin? This guy takes a BLEEP-in' telephone pole to the face and just keeps on tickin', you know? And then he blows the BLEEP-in' street out from under the mother BLEEP. Like he's orderin' BLEEP-in' pizza. I don't know if it was him that killed the rat bastard, but if he was, I say good BLEEP-in' riddance. About time we got someone in here who knows how to put these sons of BLEEP-es down for good. Cuz' I'll ask you one question missy, are you losin' any sleep over that concrete BLEEP-er' gettin' what he deserved? You better BLEEP-in' believe I ain't!"

"Hero my ass, that kid didn't care one bit about the rest of us or he wouldn't have fought it there in the middle of the street with a thousand people around. Now the Titans, _they _would have done this the right way, without putting all of us in danger. In fact I bet the reason we haven't seen that kid around since the battle is because they locked him up in that Tower of theirs where he belongs."

"This is all a confirmation of what I've been saying for years. With the culture of violence that we've allowed to fester in this society, is it any surprise that metahumans feel that they have no choice but to settle their differences with a public battle? I'm not saying that it couldn't have been worse, certainly, but surely with a little more attention from the authorities we could resolve these kinds of confrontations without the need for violent displays..."

"Oh please, one little fight and we're all supposed to care about some new metahuman running around? Sweetheart, there's dozens of these guys show up every other week. And 'Devastator'? Give me a goddamn break here. These names just get worse and worse. What's next, 'Big-gun-man'?"

"I was there, lady. I saw that kid take down something that would've had the _SWAT_ _team_running for cover. This pox-on-both-their-houses crap is just that. Those two blew half the roadway to pieces trying to kill one another in the middle of a crowded street, but there was what? Two dozen people hurt, and only one killed? You think that's because Cinderblock held back or something? The Titans do this stuff all the time, and nobody thinks twice about it, but this kid shows up and pulls off a stunt like this by himself and suddenly you people are running around like it's all some hidden mystery and he could be out to kill us all. There's no mystery here. The Titans couldn't handle this one for some damn reason, so this kid did. And as for anyone who still wants to whine about what happened last year..."

The camera finally flashed back to the reporter, who continued to look stoically out at the viewers.

"As you can see, the events of last Saturday have engendered great differences of opinion within the community, both as to the meaning behind the battle itself, and its implications for the future of our city. However, as of this time, pending further revelations by either the Teen Titans, the Jump City Police Department, or other city officials, it appears that the questions surrounding the Battle of Battery Street will remain unanswered for the present. For KJCN 5 News, I'm Talia Conrade. Back to you Tom."

**O-O-O**

The wind was stiff and fresh as it blew across the Tower's roof, gathering up the innumerable tiny pebbles that were scattered across it and rolling them around and over one another, creating, along with the howls and wails of the air itself, plenty of noise to mask even Cyborg's footprints, with a little help from his auditory dampeners. It blew the smell of the stankball in Cyborg's hand back into his face, which wasn't exactly ideal, but then the alternative was to alert his intended target ahead of time, and he couldn't permit that.

The target in question was about a dozen paces ahead, seated near the edge of the tower, leaning against a vent and staring off at the city, apparently oblivious to the world around him. Cyborg smirked as he carefully made his approach like a hunter stalking a deer, relying on his dampeners, on the wind, on David's distraction, all to get him within range. The flight characteristics of a Stankball were bad even in calm air, let alone in high wind, and so he had to get close enough to make sure that -

"Did Raven throw you out too?"

Cyborg froze in mid-step as David, suddenly much less oblivious than he had thought, addressed him without turning his head. He considered for a second if he should go ahead with the shot anyway, but without the element of surprise, and thus the hilarity of ambushing him out of nowhere with the dreaded stankball, it no longer seemed as good an idea...

... plus he knew Robin and David had been working on mid-air interceptions for a while, and he did _not_ need the stankball splattered all over himself by an impromptu blast.

"You hear me comin'?" he asked. Even if he couldn't score a point today, he might as well learn what he'd done wrong.

David shook his head slowly. "Sensed you," he said, "or whatever you call it. I was just watching the air."

"Watching the air?" asked Cyborg, lowering the stankball and walking over to the edge of the rooftop as David stood back up, still leaning against the vent.

"Watching the air currents move. The molecules. I noticed a bunch of titanium alloy coming up the stairs inside the tower and..." David trailed off, then looked furtively up at Cyborg with that horrified and startled look that he got whenever he realized he had said something he maybe shouldn't have. "Sorry..."

Cyborg just laughed. "Man, it's not like you're the first one to notice I'm half-metal. You don't gotta keep pretending like I ain't."

David let out a nervous laugh of his own. "Yeah..." he said with a smile and a sigh. "Anyway we've been working with titanium a lot, so it sorta stood out."

"Well that's good, isn't it?" said Cyborg, "Means you're gettin' this stuff down, right?"

"I guess..." said David, who sounded rather unsure, but then when didn't he? He shook his head slowly and chuckled. "I'm starting to see this stuff in my _sleep _at any rate. Lead, uranium, granite - "

Cyborg raised his sole remaining eyebrow. "Since when does Robin let you sleep?"

David looked back up at Cyborg in confusion for a second, and only then seemed to perceive that the question had been a joke. He laughed, but only halfheartedly, his mind plainly elsewhere. It wasn't hard to figure out where.

"So... did she?" David asked, as Cyborg sat down on the edge of the roof.

"Yep," said Cyborg, "said she couldn't concentrate with me running the power tools, and that BB needed to sleep some more. Figured I'd see if you were up for a round or two. What 'bout you?"

David smiled sheepishly. "She caught me sneaking him his pocket gamestation."

Cyborg winced. "What'd she do?"

"Nothing," insisted David. "She just asked if my arm was feeling better, and when I said it was, she said that if I wanted to keep it that way, I should probably let him rest." He smiled and seemed to shudder a bit. "It didn't sound like a suggestion," he said.

"Don't take it personal," said Cyborg. "She's been really going all out with her powers to help fix up BB."

"How is he?"

Cyborg took a deep breath and let it out very slowly. "He looks like he's gonna be all right," he said finally, but he was unable to keep the doubt out of his voice, and he saw that David could tell. He tried to explain further, provide some re-assurance for his own sake as much as David's. "I mean, last time I was down there he was drivin' Raven crazy with those jokes of his, and trying to make sure I remembered to tape his shows. Kid's been out of it for a week, and I've already got like four and a half solid days of cartoons on the DVR. I dunno where he gets the time to watch that stuff..."

David was watching Cyborg as though looking for some kind of sign, and Cyborg noticed that his hands were held tensely behind him, tightly enough to leech the color from his fingers. "So he's... gonna be all right then?"

The question had been on everyone's mind all week. Cyborg, Starfire, and Robin had been asking it of Raven so much that she threatened to send the next person to do so on a one-way trip to another dimension. David had, to Cyborg's knowledge, been avoiding doing the same, if only because he was clearly still more than a bit scared of Raven.

'Gonna have to teach him the difference between bark and bite', he thought as he did his best to answer the question. "Raven's not saying just yet, but I think so. He's doin' a lot better than he was at least, don't you think? I mean you'd know better'n I would probably. Raven won't let me talk to him for more than half an hour or so. Least you get to watch him while we're out doin' our thing."

David nodded in agreement. Since the events of last Saturday, the Titans had been called upon three times to deal with fresh 'incidents' in the city, and all three times, David had stayed behind (as he would have anyway) to make sure Beast Boy was all right in their absence, enabling Robin to field all four remaining Titans against whatever the threat was, and thus take it down quickly so that they could return to the Tower.

"Yeah," he said, "but I don't know what's normal for him. Star said she'd never seen him that bad off before."

"BB's tougher'n he looks, man," said Cyborg, doing his best imitation of Robin at his most unwavering. "He'll be all right. Might take him another week or two, but he'll be all right. Try not to worry about him too much." The brave front was mostly for David's benefit. Mostly. "'Sides," he said, cracking a grin and lightly (very lightly) punching David on the arm, "way I hear it, you got enough to worry about today, least that's what Robin says. Did I hear right?"

Despite Cyborg's best efforts at being gentle, David still was shoved half a pace or so back by the mock punch, and rubbed his arm a bit as he blushed lightly and nodded. Cyborg laughed aloud and clapped him on the back. "Don't worry, we'll go easy on you for your first run through. It prob'lly won't be too much different from what you've been doing with bird-boy." This much might have been a lie for all Cyborg knew, but he thought it might help to try and calm David down before his first session with the full team (well almost full). "Group training's all finesse. No sweat."

"... yeah," said David uneasily, sounding exceedingly unconvinced, and he rubbed the back of his head absent-mindedly with one hand as he returned his gaze to the bay and the city beyond, not volunteering anything else for the time being. Cyborg let it go. Something else was bothering the kineticist, but it could have been any one of a hundred things. Starfire or Beast Boy might have tried to pry it out of him, but Cyborg was more of a fan of letting people work out their own issues when they seemed disinclined to talk about them.

"Nice spot up here," said Cyborg after a minute or so had passed. All of the Titans had their own little personal 'spots', from the garage to the evidence room to the rocks on the shore of the island. The roof was Starfire's, typically, but David borrowed it on the occasions when she wasn't using it. "I thought you weren't big on heights."

"I'm not," responded David, not changing his gaze. "I don't know why I come up here really, I just like the view I guess."

Cyborg nodded. "Well," he said, standing back up slowly. "I guess I'll see you this afternoon, man. Lemme know if you wanna try a round of Gamestation or somethin' before we get started." He turned to leave, but hadn't gotten more than half a dozen paces before David stopped him.

"Hey, Cyborg?"

Cyborg stopped and half-turned back. "Yeah?"

David looked like he wanted to say something, but the words were apparently not forthcoming. He stammered the beginnings to a sentence for a second or so, then finally shook his head. "Nevermind," he said, and he turned back to the cityscape with a soft sigh. Cyborg paused for a beat or two, then fully turned around.

"Hey, David, you all right?"

"Yeah," said David, turning his head back, "why?"

"Because you don't look it," he said, "something botherin' you?"

"It's nothing, really," insisted David, which of course gave Cyborg the exact opposite impression. "Just some... stupid stuff."

"Hey, man, after what happened on Saturday, I think anybody'd be a little wierded out." He almost left it at that, but David's entire stance was tense, and he looked paler than usual. Something was wrong, and he thought he had an idea as to what. "If you're still upset about what happened with Blockhead..."

"It's not Cinderblock," said David, and he leaned back against the vent as he rubbed his eyes and shook his head. "It's not _anything _really... I'm just..."

Despite everything, Cyborg couldn't help but smile as what David was talking about clicked in his mind. "You're scared."

David glanced up at Cyborg at the word 'scared', but did not deny it, not that it would have helped to.

"You're scared half to death and you don't even know what you're scared of, but it's got you wound up like a clockwork toy. And it ain't about Cinderblock or BB or what happened on Saturday, because it's really about all of them mashed up together, plus all the stuff you don't even know yet, but you know enough to be scared of." Cyborg smirked at David's stare. "What? You think I don't know how it is? I wasn't born with circuits and armor. We all went through this, one way or another."

David made several attempts at replying, and then finally had to settle for a nervous laugh as he slid his back down the vent until he was sitting on the gravel-covered roof again. "I must sound pretty pathetic..." he said with a chuckle.

"Nah, like I said, I know how it is. After that thing on Saturday, I figured you'd need a while."

"You guys had it even worse though..."

"That don't make what you had to do a walk in the park. Besides, you've seen how everyone's been this week. Don't worry about it."

David didn't respond for a few moments, and Cyborg decided to press him.

"So if it wasn't Blockhead, then what was it?"

"Everything," responded David with an exasperated sigh. He let it stand for a little bit, then continued. "It was that bus driver that got killed, and Beast Boy, and Cinderblock, and me being dumb enough to go out there in the first - "

"Hey, I saw the recording," interrupted Cyborg. "That wasn't your fault and you know it. Don't tell me Robin's been giving you a hard time about that."

"No," said David. "And yeah, I know it wasn't, but it's all of those things... and on top of it, back there when it was just me and Cinderblock I had this moment where... it just sorta hit me that I was it. I was the only one who could stop Cinderblock from killing all those people. The SWAT team wasn't coming, and I didn't know where you guys were, and... I know that this is the sort of thing Robin and the rest of you all are trying to get me ready to do, but it... it just sorta..."

"It just _hits_ you all of a sudden that you're it. You're the backup. You're the guy who's supposed to know what to do, and you don't have a damn clue in the world what the hell to do. Am I close?"

David nodded, still looking at Cyborg. "And I still kept... I never really thought about it that way. I mean I _did_, but not _really_, you know? I sort of expected that by the time I got to the point where I was trying to do what you guys do, I'd be... different or something. I dunno what. But I wasn't."

"So you just gotta react, and the whole time you're thinkin' 'holy shit, I _can't_ be the one to do this. There's gotta be somebody else.'"

"But there wasn't, and I _knew _that really, but all the same, it was just total chaos, and I mean I got through it, I guess. Nobody else died besides the bus driver, just a bunch of property damage, but ever since then..."

"You've been thinking about how close it was?"

David sighed. "Yeah."

"Well what do you think all of us have been thinking about all week? You think it never crossed my mind that if whoever sold those shells hadn't decided to cheat, Star and I'd both be toast? Or if Raven hadn't done... whatever she did, those things would have torn BB apart?" David gave a visible shudder as he pulled his knees up against his chest, and Cyborg stepped over to him. "Look, I'm not trying to freak you out even more, but sometimes that's how it _is_, man. We're the last line, and there ain't one of us, superheros I mean, who don't sometimes stand there thinking 'Damn, how the hell did _I_ wind up being the guy on the spot? Someone call the army, I can't do it!' I guarantee you even the Justice League gets that sometimes. It's totally normal."

"So what do you do about it?" asked David sincerely.

Cyborg shrugged. "Everybody deals with it differently. Some people just shrug it off. Some people totally go nuts and burn themselves out trying to be the best they can because they're so scared of being the one responsible. Robin still does that a little bit. I think most of us just deal with it. Me, whenever I get to thinkin' that way, I have to start _doin_ things. Work on the T-car, upgrade my systems, build something new, go to the training room and smash some drones, whoop Beast Boy at Ninja Racer. Helps me get my mind off of it, and helps me remember the most important thing."

"And what's that?"

Cyborg grinned. "That I'm _damn_ good at what I do, and so far, nobody's been able to beat us. Brother Blood, Slade, Ternion... if those guys couldn't kill us, then there ain't no way I'm gonna let some punk with a pipe bomb or a turbocharger do it. And if I can't handle it for some reason, then the others have got my back. Period."

David watched the display with a begrudged smile, and finally Cyborg extended a hand to help him to his feet.

"Besides, man," said Cyborg, "you did pretty good yourself out there. I had to take Cinderblock down once by myself, and it wasn't easy. And other than the one civilian he killed before you could stop him, you did it without anybody else getting hurt, and by yourself. I'd call that a big win. Hell, you should see what the TV's been sayin' about you."

"I caught some of it," said David. "Half of them want to lock me up, and the other half think I'm in hiding to avoid you guys."

Cyborg elected to say nothing on that score. The joys of dealing with the media were something better saved for another time. Accordingly, he changed the subject. "Hey, what happened to that girl you told us all about? The one you were hanging with when Blockhead decided to crash the party?"

"Carrie?" asked David. "I... I dunno what happened to her. She was there after the fight ended, but... I lost track of her afterwards and I don't know how to check up on her."

"She didn't give you her number?" asked Cyborg, and he smiled as David completely missed his implication.

"I don't even know her last name. To be honest, I've been pretty worried."

"Well if she was bad off, missing persons or the hospitals woulda reported it, so don't worry so much. Jump ain't _that_ big, and you're gonna be pretty high profile before too long. You'll run into her again. And we'll all have to go meet her. She your first girlfriend?"

"Yeah, that'd be... wait, what? Cyborg, she is _not_ my..."

"Suuuure she ain't," said Cyborg in a mock-understanding tone. "Just like you're not a superhero?" David took this indignantly, which of course was the whole point, and Cyborg laughed at his discomfort.

"She is not... Cyborg, I've only _met_ her twice! I don't even know which school she goes to!"

"You saved her both times, right? Adonis and Cinderblock and some drunk? That stuff works _wonders_. Take it from me, what you wanna do now is..."

Cyborg unfortunately was not given the chance to impart his wisdom onto David, as his communicator chose that moment to go off. Ignoring David's look of relief, Cyborg picked it up. Robin was on the screen.

"Yo, Rob, what's up?"

"Have you seen David," asked Robin.

"He's right here with me."

"We're thinking of starting the session early. Can you two come down to the training room and we'll get it going?"

Instantly, David became very still, but he said nothing and Cyborg watched him for a second before speaking back into the communicator.

"Sure thing, Robin, we'll be down in a minute." He closed the communicator, turning back to David. "You ready?"

David shrugged uneasily. "I'm not sure."

"You'll do fine," said Cyborg, as they both walked towards the stairs. "Besides. It's just practice, and there'll be three of us there. What's the worst that could happen?"

**O-O-O**

"Course commencing in three. Two. One. Go."

The lights came up flashing black and white strobe, a dazzling sight that made it very hard to figure out what was going on, or so David thought, not that it seemed to phase the other three Titans, who immediately dashed off towards their targets like bullets from a gun. Squinting his eyes and forcing his perception to shift from light to matter, David tried to emulate them. A trio of pop-up drones loomed before him, and he paused momentarily to identify their makeup. It was obvious enough at first glance, an iron-carbon-chromium alloy... stainless steel. He tried to remember the hundreds and thousands of repetitions he had done on stainless steel, tried to let himself fall into the muscle memory and mental habit that Robin kept insisting he build up. He saw the external molecules dim as the internal ones brightened, and shoved the energy inwards to the tipping point. The first drone exploded. He repeated the process as quickly as he could, causing the second one to burst into fragments that rained down onto the ground. His hand shifted to point to the third as he pressed the energy...

A loud buzzer sounded and the room flashed red again, followed by solid bright white light. "Time expired," said the computer in a maddeningly clinical voice, and David angrily kicked a piece of one of the destroyed drones, sending it bouncing across the room, before clenching his fists tightly and turning back to Robin, Raven, and Cyborg, all of whom were standing amongst the smashed remains of their three drones. Just like the last five times. By now he couldn't bear to look any of them in the eye, so he fixed his gaze on a piece of debris near his foot as he shook his head and heard Robin pronounce, once again, the obvious verdict.

"You're still not getting them fast enough," said Robin, as though David were somehow unaware of this... as though any of them were. David lifted his eyes furtively. Cyborg and Raven were politely trying not to stare at him... okay Cyborg was... but it wasn't like he needed their stares to tell him that he wasn't getting the job done. He was only glad that Starfire and Beast Boy weren't here, the latter because of his injuries, the former because it was her turn to look after him during practice.

"I'll reset em," said Cyborg with the hints of a sigh behind his voice, but Robin stopped him before he could do so

"No, Cy. Hold on," said Robin as he walked over to David. David didn't look up until Robin was right on top of him practically, his head beginning to throb again, his face flushed red, and not simply with the exertion of blowing things up.

Robin got straight to the point. "You keep hesitating," he said. "You're taking too long to focus. What's the matter?"

"I can't..." stammered David between breaths, painfully conscious of Raven and Cyborg watching him. "I can't... do it any faster..."

"You _have_ to do it faster than that," responded Robin. "You managed it in solo practice. What's different?"

'What isn't?' thought David, but he knew better than to say that. Instead he tried to explain. "I go into... I try to ID the target, like you said, but... with the shooting and everyone else moving, it takes longer to focus on it. I can't concentrate fast enough. It's like I'm trying to push through everything else before I can get at the targets, and by then..."

Robin narrowed his mask-covered eyes. "This is the slowest setting we have for our trial runs," he said. "If you can't do it in this amount of time, you won't be able to do it at all. If we're out there and someone pulls a gun on you, you have to be able to blow it out of their hands, or blow the street out from under them, before they get a chance to fire it. Do you understand me?"

David nodded furtively. "I'm trying," was all he could come up with, a lame excuse even to his ears.

"All right," said Robin, stepping back. "We'll try some freeform co-op for a while. Cyborg, we need to talk about this. Raven, take David through some tandem exercises."

Robin and Cyborg stepped to the side of the room, as Raven moved over to where David was. She said nothing regarding his inability to complete his assigned task in the allotted time, but merely explained what they were going to do. 'Freeform co-op' was essentially unstructured training, where the object was to figure out new ways for the Titans' powers and abilities to synergize, and apparently Raven had an idea or two for that.

"I'm going to levitate these girders," she said, pointing to a large stack of steel railroad-gauge I-beams sitting on one side of the room, "and throw them at the targets on the other end. Your job is to make them explode when they're near the targets. Can you do that?"

Even-toned as ever, Raven still never failed to give David the creeps, but he swallowed them and nodded. "I'll try," he said, trying desperately to block out the sounds of Cyborg and Robin whispering in the corner, evidently having some kind of disagreement about something. He could guess what.

Raven evidently noticed his preoccupation, and she reached over and smacked him lightly on the back of the head with her open palm. It did the trick. "Pay attention," she said. "You're getting way too distracted by everything around you. A real battle is going to be even worse. Now let's try it."

David nodded, and Raven waved one hand towards the girders. Both her hand and the closest girder were instantly swathed in black energy, and she lifted the multi-ton piece of steel into the air with no more effort than if she had been lifting a sheet of paper.

"Your powers are based on concentration," she said. "So are mine. You need to learn how to concentrate even while other things are happening, like I do. Now get ready."

Raven waited another second or so, and then tossed the girder across the room with a flick of her wrist. David followed it with his hand outstretched, fingers tightly clenched in a fist, before releasing them along with the pent up energy just as the girder was approaching the targets. Instantly the girder snapped in half like a twig, scattering a half dozen of the targets as first one piece, then the other, exploded into shrapnel and fragments. The echoing boom briefly drowned out Robin and Cyborg's conversation, and helped to steady his nerves a bit. He could at least do that much. Raven looked unimpressed of course, but that was nothing new. Still, she did not offer criticism, but a question.

"How come you point at it?"

David opened his mouth to answer, and then realized he had no idea at all. "I... dunno... he said with confusion as he scratched the back of his head where Raven had hit him. "It... makes it easier to push the energy in. I'm not sure why."

Raven considered this a moment. "Try it again," she said, lifting another girder, "and this time, don't move at all."

The girder was tossed as before, and David, with his hands stuck firmly in his pockets, wrinkled his brow and narrowed his eyes and clenched his teeth and forced the energy in, but this time, the energy refused to go without a fight. The girder sailed well over the heads of the pop-up targets, before colliding with the back wall and falling down it onto the ground. Only then did David finally manage to compress the energy to the tipping point, and the girder exploded, causing no damage whatsoever to the intended targets. David sheepishly turned back to Raven to apologize, but Raven wasn't looking at him, but instead at the remains of the girder, and, for once, did not seem disappointed.

"All right," she said, not giving a hint of what she was thinking, "you can use your hands again. Let's keep going."

Repetition after repetition they went through, blasting construction material to scraps of steel and bits of flying shrapnel as the pop-up targets recycled themselves, to the point where David had to wonder just how this place got cleaned up after a given "session"? The whole time, Robin and Cyborg watched, occasionally making comments to one another. David tried, he actively tried not to overhear what they were saying, but inevitably a few stilted soundbites would filter through.

"... holding back."

"... reconsider..."

"... no idea how they work..."

It didn't take much imagination to envision what they were actually saying, but try as he might, he could not cause the detonations fast enough to apparently satisfy them. Raven talked him through clearing his mind through brief mental exercises, adjusting his stance and the way he pointed at the targets (he had no idea how that had anything to do with it, but did as she said). Nothing helped. They even switched back to a few more time trials, but the result was the same as it had been before, and the more adjustments he made, the worse his headache got, to the point where the explosions themselves were thundering inside his skull like a rubber ball being bounced around inside.

"All right, that's enough for now," said Robin finally, and Raven put down the latest girder and turned towards Robin. "We're gonna try one more routine, and then we'll call it for today. He turned to Cyborg and nodded, and Cyborg walked over to the stack of girders, and began to effortlessly (or so it appeared) gather them up in his arms. Robin meanwhile explained the exercise to David.

"We're gonna try a different sort of timing," he said. "I want you to get all of those girders ready to explode, push the energy to just below the tipping point, or however you call it. Once they're ready, I want you to hold them there. Then Cyborg and Raven are going to throw them at individual targets. Your job is to push each one over the edge and blow it up just as it hits the target. Can you do that?"

There was no answer to give but yes.

David took a deep breath and tried to clear his mind as Raven had indicated he should. He extended first one hand, then the other, closing his eyes and relying on his power to show him what was going on. The mass of steel molecules awaited him, and one by one he began to corral them, forcing the energy inwards towards the center, as always. Frost formed out of frozen condensation on the surface of each girder as he prepared it, chilling its exterior down towards the freezing point and beyond. Gritting his teeth, he pressed and pressed, and juggled his attention, until all of the girders were frozen, all awaiting his command. Barely able to squeak now for fear of setting them off prematurely, he gave the slightest nod towards the mass of carbon and organic molecules that represented Robin, and Cyborg and Raven began to open fire. One after another, the girders flew like gigantic javelins at targets that appeared on the other side of the room, and one after another, David blasted them to bits with a final tap of his mind. Sweat beaded on his brow, his arms felt like lead, his teeth were clenched tightly enough to hurt, but slowly he was getting the upper hand. Each girder that exploded was one less that needed to be maintained, and with the girders pre-prepared for detonation, he was able to time the explosions far more accurately. Several targets were atomized by direct air-bursts as David set the explosions off while the missiles were mere centimeters from their intended receptacles, and most of the others were mangled by blast waves and shrapnel. David even managed to glimpse a small smirk of satisfaction on Robin's face out of the corner of his eye. At last, he was finally getting it done right. At last he was -

... and then his world exploded.

A spike of pain more intense than anything he had ever experienced in his life suddenly drove into his brain like an icepick, choking off his breath, shattering his concentration, and blinding his vision over in red. He gave an aborted, amorphous cry of pain and pitched forward as though he had been shot, turning as he did so and seeing Cyborg let out an alarmed yelp as the remaining girders in his arms began to explode, seemingly on their own accord. The blasts knocked Cyborg back, and the last thing David saw before he hit the ground was the girders spinning and twisting as they floated gently through the air towards him, flying to pieces and exploding as they flew. And as a familiar black shield materialized around him, his eyes rolled back into his head and he slammed down limply onto the floor of the training room, and heard and saw no more.

**O-O-O**

"What could possibly have triggered such a thing?"

Cyborg shook his head, and as he did he saw Raven and Robin do the same thing. "You got me, Star. I've never seen anything like it. I thought he'd had a damn stroke or somethin'."

"So you're saying he didn't have a stroke?" asked Raven with admirable calm, as ever. Beast Boy sat up a bit straighter in his bed as Cyborg shook his head, glancing over at the other bed, upon which David was laying still, electrodes and other monitors hooked up to him.

"I don't know what happened, but it doesn't look like anything _that _bad. I gave him a sedative. He should be out of it in a half hour or so. I can't tell without a lot more tests, or Raven doin' her thing, but I think he'll be all right."

"Um... dudes, what about this...?" asked Beast Boy in a raspy voice, gesturing at David. David's eyes were shut now, but Beast Boy leaned over and gently opened one with one hand. Normally light brown, similar in color to his hair, David's eye was now a sickening bloodshot red, the whites of his eyes tinged purple and crimson, as though someone had injected them with food coloring.

"He popped a blood vessel in his eye," said Cyborg. "Don't ask me how. When we picked him up off the floor he had a nosebleed and his eyes were turning that color. It looks like something blew out part of his circulatory system. Some kind of massive blood pressure spike. If I'm right, he'll have bruises all over by the time he wakes up."

"But what _caused_ it?" asked Robin, getting back to the matter at hand, as usual. "Did he overtax himself? Tense up too much?"

"You_can't_ tense up enough to blow blood vessels in your eyes," said Raven sharply. "It's not even possible. Not for a human. He didn't do this to himself, something _happened,_ and we all know what caused it."

Nobody else said a word until Starfire pitched in with a question. "Raven, I do not know why such a thing would have happened. Is there something I am missing?"

"His powers, Star," said Cyborg. "His powers did this."

"Wait a minute," said Robin. "We don't know that his powers did it.

"We don't know anything about his powers one way or the other," said Raven. "They don't work the way that other kinetic powers do. We don't even know if he _is_ kinetic, or if he's something else. But he was using his powers when he collapsed, so I'm betting they had something to do with it."

"But he used 'em pretty hard against Cinderblock, didn't he?" asked Beast Boy. "How come it didn't happen then?"

Nobody had an answer.

"But even if this was due to his abilities, if we do not understand them, how are we to prevent it from occurring again? It would be most... unfortunate for it to happen in the midst of a confrontation with a villain, no?"

"Unless he manages to improve his reaction times, there's no way we can let him at a supervillain anyway," said Robin, frustration beginning to ooze from his voice. "And if we don't know what happened, then we can't risk putting him back into intensive training."

"So... what do we do?" asked Beast Boy. Starfire, Robin, and Cyborg all looked at one another and slowly, one by one, shook their heads. Raven remained unmoving, not looking at anyone, but instead looking down at the young kineticist, or what they were all assuming was a kineticist, as though trying to make her mind up about something.

"Well, I'll take the watch down here I guess," said Cyborg. "The rest of y'all can go back up and - "

"Wait,"

Everyone slowly turned to Raven, who was slowly drawing the hood of her cloak back, and tightening the obsidian guards around her wrists.

"There's something I can try."

Starfire and Beast Boy looked at one another in puzzlement, and Cyborg fell silent, but Robin apparently deduced what Raven was talking about, and his eyes widened. "Wait a minute Raven... you said that was dangerous."

"It's dangerous doing it to an unwilling subject. All I'd be doing is looking for the source of his powers, and trying to find out more about them. As long as he doesn't resist me, I shouldn't have any trouble."

"But you don't know if he's going to resist you or not," said Robin. "What happens if he does?"

"Robin, you know I'm don't read people's minds without permission. I'm going to wait until he wakes up, and then I'm going to ask him, If he says yes, then I'll do it."

"Hang on," said Cyborg. "Are you talkin' about what I think you're talkin' about? You're gonna go into his _head_?"

"Like I said, just to find his power source. Nothing more. I won't be trying to find out who he's working for if that's what you're worried about. This isn't an interrogation."

"It's too risky," said Robin, crossing his arms, "even if he does agree. You don't know what you're going to find in there. I can't allow - "

"It's not your decision," said Raven. "It's his decision and mine. Besides, you're the one who's been so insistent that we get him ready. If we don't do this, then we'll never know how to help him."

Beast Boy remained silent, as did Starfire, but both turned to Robin to see what he would say. Cyborg folded his arms in mirror of Robin, and waited for the Boy Wonder's verdict. It was not long in coming. After a few more moments of thought, Robin gave an exasperated sigh.

"All right," he said, "if he agrees, go for it. But I want to be here when - "

"No," said Raven emphatically. "I need it to be just him and me. Anyone else's thoughts might get in the way and interfere."

Robin looked unhappy, but didn't say anything, leaving Cyborg a moment to ask. "So where are you gonna do it then?"

"We'll do it in his room."

**O-O-O**

"You want to do _what_?"

Raven tried to force herself to be patient. She was asking quite a lot, she knew, but still a large part of her just wanted to get this over and done with and not have to explain everything to someone who had no experience with psychic links. Accordingly she counted backwards from ten once again in Azarathian in her head, and then explained as carefully as she could.

"I wouldn't be actually entering your head. I'd be projecting myself into your mind with my powers. Once I was in there, I could look around and try to locate the source of your abilities. If I could find them, then I might be able to figure out what happened to you this afternoon, and also figure out why you can't seem to react as fast as most kinetics are able to react with them. There's still a lot we don't know about your powers, and this would clear a lot of that up."

"I... get that," said David, shifting uncomfortably in his seat. Cyborg had been right after all. David looked like he was the victim of some kind of hemorrhagic fever, his face and hands and presumably the rest of him covered with red and blue splotches, both eyes blackened as though he had been hit with baseballs in the face. The redness in his eyes was still terribly pronounced, and Cyborg had said that he'd likely be unable to see very well for a day or so at least. "But… I mean… no offence but what _else_ would you be looking for if you went in there?"

"Nothing else," said Raven. "Not without your permission. You could resist me if I tried, and that would be very dangerous for both of us. That's why I wouldn't read your mind before."

"But you will now?"

"What I'd be doing isn't mind-reading, it's more like looking for anything in you that isn't… normal. Powers stand out when you're inside someone's head, like a skyscraper in the middle of a forest. I should be able to find them pretty easily."

"And…" David leaned forward and shifted his weight again. "and you're… you're really not gonna try to read my mind?"

"No," she said. "You'd know if I did, anyhow."

"Oh," said David, considering the matter for a moment. Raven waited while he squirmed and thought, all the time wishing he would hurry up and say yes or no so that she could –

"What about my memory?"

That was not the question she expected. "What about it?"

"Could you read that while you were in there?"

Puzzled, Raven raised an eyebrow. "Not without your permission, like I said, or else things could go very bad. Don't worry about it."

"What if I gave you permission?"

This one stopped Raven in her tracks. "What?"

"To… look into my memories. If I gave you permission to do that, could you?"

"In… theory…" she said guardedly. "But… why would you give me permission to go into your memories? Aren't you worried that I might see something you don't want me to?"

David didn't answer immediately, taking a long slow breath and wincing as it made his bruises ache. "I don't… remember my real name, or who my parents were, or even how old I am. I was… I was thinking maybe… if you can go inside my memory, maybe you could find something out?"

Now it was Raven's turn to not answer immediately. She had assumed that David would react with great skepticism to her offer to enter his mind. Indeed she had not expected him to grant her permission. That he might see this as an opportunity was not a thought that had crossed her mind at all.

"I'm… really not sure," she said. This much at least was true. "I've never tried to do that before. I wouldn't… feel right about it." A cop-out perhaps, but in a split second on that night when Robin believed he was fighting the re-incarnation of Slade, Raven had learned more than she found she had ever wanted to know about Robin's past and memories. It hadn't been… terrible certainly, embarrassing though it was to know more about Robin than the others, but it was not something she was eager to repeat without proper preparation.

David seemed to shrink a bit as Raven said no. "Oh," he said, "okay then."

Raven's eyebrow raised a little higher. "Okay?"

"Go ahead," said David. "If you think it'll work… I wanna know what these powers are too. What do I have to do?"

Raven felt like laughing. After all this setup, he had agreed to it without a second thought. She was reminded of the tracer bug that Robin had given David at the very beginning of his stay at the tower, the one he still carried on him, and had accepted without complaint, unlike what pretty much every other teenager in the universe would have done.

"Just lay down and try to relax," said Raven, sliding her chair over towards David's bed. David obediently laid down on his back, hissing as his bruises protested, before leaning his head back and closing his eyes. An instant later he cracked one of them open again.

"This… it doesn't like… hurt does it? This mind-entering thing?"

"You shouldn't even notice anything happening," said Raven. "Now breathe slowly, try to concentrate on your breathing, and just… relax…"

Slowly, David's breathing became more regular and he closed his eyes once again, folding his hands on top of his chest. Raven took a deep breath and composed herself, crossing her legs into a lotus position, draping her cloak over herself, and repeating her mantra slowly.

"Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos…"

"Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos…"

"Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos…"

**O-O-O**

Raven opened her eyes, and found herself in a forest.

Warm air floated about her, the sun beamed down upon her face, and the fleeting sounds of birds and insects flickered about from every direction. The ground was covered with a thick, soft loam of grass, and all around her stood trees. Raven was no expert, she could not tell an oak from an ash, but the forest was plainly comprised of all manner of trees, including ones that had no relation geographically to one another, tropical ironwoods and Californian redwoods next to arctic evergreens and giant bonsais. Glancing around, Raven looked for any obvious signs of direction, but there were none. The sun was directly overhead, the trees seemed to stretch off on all sides, and while she could plainly hear birds, bugs, and other animals, she could not actually see any, which would have been strange for a normal forest, but in this place, was far from the strangest thing she expected to see.

Unable to see above the forest canopy, Raven levitated up into the air to get a better look around. Once above the canopy, she could see that the forest stretched on and on and on in every direction, apparently to infinity. No feature or mountain disturbed the flat and endless woodland, or rather none, save for the most glaringly obvious one.

Less than a mile away from Raven , towering over the forest below, sat a massive hemispherical dome. The dome was colored like bronze, and looked almost liquid, its surface rippling and shimmering in the everlasting sunlight. Trees were sticking half-through the dome, as if it had materialized around them, but it stretched taller than the tallest of the trees, the sole landmark in this featureless scene. Raven was frankly surprised by how jarring it was. Most of the time a meta-human's powers stood out by themselves but… not like this…

Still there was nothing for it. She turned towards the dome and flew at it, full speed, hoping to find a way inside when she got closer. No sooner had she arrived next to it though, than she realized she was to be disappointed in this hope. No door or window appeared within the dome, nor any other blemish to indicate a portal. A quick tour of the entire periphery revealed only the same, glistening surface. After several minutes, Raven simply landed next to the dome, and gently but firmly pushed on it with her hand. With only the barest pressure, she felt her hand pass right through the dome's surface. Quickly she withdrew her hand, and the liquid released her arm cleanly.

"Well, why not," she muttered to herself, and then she closed her eyes and stepped into and through the side of the dome."

She emerged inside a wasteland.

No sooner had Raven opened her eyes than she caught the smell of cordite and brimstone, rich and thick, a smell to assault the nose and bring stinging tears to the eyes. Her boots stood upon sand, or what looked like sand, but it was blasted, rocky, ash-mixed sand, like the fallout from some terrible nuclear war. Though only a moment ago she had passed through a glistening bronze barrier, she now found herself on a moonscape plain, with no barriers around her whatsoever, and no end to the moonscape that lay before her. Moonscape it reminded her of because the sky was pitch dark, yet the ground was somehow illuminated. Craters and jagged rocks lay scattered about in every direction, as well as small bits of objects that looked very vaguely artificial, but worn as if blasted by blowing sand for a hundred years, the bare skeletons of what might once have been buildings or vehicles or Azar-knew what else. The entire area looked like the deserted aftermath of a planetary catastrophe, a ruined, and terrible place, that caused a knot to form in her stomach, built of unease and deja-vu.

There, ahead of her, the sole object of note in this battered ruin of a place, sat a large red satin plush armchair, facing her. And in the chair sat a figure dressed in clothing that looked like it had once been rich and expensive, but was now completely washed out by the ash and dust, such that not even the color could be determined with any accuracy. The figure's face was invisible, a swirling mass of dusty-grey features that seemed to change faster than the eye could follow, and it sat in its chair and surveyed the dead landscape around it, and did not stir or react to Raven in any way.

This, to be frank, was not what Raven had expected to encounter.

She walked slowly towards the figure in the armchair, largely without any idea of what else she might do. She had expected to find some evidence that would point her towards the nature of the powers she was looking for, but this… this was something else altogether. The forest from before had felt 100 different from this wrecked landscape. For a moment she wondered if David might be schizophrenic or something. It took one to know one. Most mindscapes were not fragmented like this, not to such a violent extent, not even her own, strange as Nevermore was. This place felt like a whole different mind than the place she had first entered.

And who the hell was the person in the chair?

As Raven got within a dozen paces of the chair, the figure raised its head slowly. Its face was still inscrutable, a swirling combination of a thousand faces, human and otherwise, but as Raven watched, the swirling, changing features began to settle, and the figure seemed to shrink a bit. When at last the features arranged themselves into a coherent face, Raven found herself staring at who else but David.

Sort of.

The figure was the right size and age for David, had the right features, the right appearance, but even accounting for the heavy dusting of volcanic ash it had taken on, its gaze was far too direct, far too unflinching for it to have been David, who usually looked at Raven for exactly the amount of time necessary to determine that they were not about to collide, and otherwise averted his eyes as though trying not to draw down the wrath of a dangerous predator. This David's gaze was focused, calm, revealing nothing, as cool a poker face as anything Robin had ever deployed. The gaze was not particularly malevolent, nor anything else for that matter, but something about this figure made Raven extremely uneasy, moreso than she should have been given the circumstances. None of this was real after all. This was just visions conjured up by her and David's minds. Nothing to be afraid of.

"I'd wondered if his new friends would come."

Raven almost (but not quite) gave a start at that, so still had been the figure before it spoke. The voice was not David's, not even close. This was a much richer, deeper voice, seeded with various quasi-detectable sounds that gave it resonance and power, and Raven couldn't help but wonder if this was one of the facets of David's personality, like her emotions were inside her mind… and if so which one?

"Are you his power?" she asked, directly. For whatever the movies would have one believe, direct speech often worked well in these sorts of places.

"I am the source for his power," said the figure, and it stood up and slowly walked towards Raven. It, like David, was considerably smaller than she was. She stood her ground as it approached. "And you must be Raven."

Raven had expected it to know her name. It was a part of David's mind after all, albeit an exceedingly weird part, so logically it knew everything David knew. But still something was off here. She had never heard of someone's kinetic powers manifesting themselves as a personality side. Then again, it wasn't like she'd been inside too many other kinetics' minds. Perhaps there was nothing odd about this at all, other than the obvious.

"I expected you to come earlier," it said to her, and smiled a vaguely predatory smile. "You are suspicious of his motives."

"I was," she said. "I'm not anymore."

"Liar," chided the figure with a smile. "You're suspicious of everyone's motives, if perhaps not David's any more than others now. But I thank you nonetheless."

"Why?" asked Raven, willing to play along if it meant getting some answers.

"He's never been a very social boy," said the figure with a slightly warmer smile. "You five will do him a great deal of good, not just as teammates. I hope he can return the favor of course, but I don't know you all. This is a rather new thing for me as well."

"And who are you?" It seemed the obvious question.

The figure was now standing before Raven. "I'm the reason you came," it said. "You wished to know how he might wield me more effectively and safely?"

"I wanted to know how they worked."

"I'm afraid that's a bit complicated," said the figure. "But… for the trouble he had today, I think you suspect already what the issue is…"

Raven lifted an eyebrow. "Somatics?"

The figure nodded. "Exactly," it said, as it extended its hand to Raven. Not usually given to such gestures, Raven thought in this case, it might be best to try and be polite, and shook the figure's hand.

And that's when everything went straight to hell.

With a loud gasping cry, the figure recoiled from Raven as though repelled by some kind of aura about her, its eyes flying open and dust cascading off of its clothes like a petrified waterfall. It staggered backwards in obvious horror, mouth agape, features twisted, breath coming in ragged gasps. Raven had no idea what had just happened, but the figure stumbled backwards towards its chair.

"No…" it said, a hollow whisper of a voice that knew itself to be lying. "No, it can't be, it _can't be_!"

"What can't be?" asked Raven, now beginning to become truly worried. "What are you talking about?"

The figure took no notice of her words, but threw its hands out as if defending itself. "Stay away!" it shouted. "I won't permit it!"

Things were making less sense by the minute. "What won't you permit?" Raven asked, already preparing her defenses in case the figure attacked – "

"_Demonspawn_!" screamed the figure, "_Begone_ from this place!"

Raven froze.

"… What?" She had heard him perfectly well, but… he couldn't possibly know that! David couldn't possibly know that! _Nobody_ knew that! How in the world could -

"Gem of Trigon!" shouted the David-like figure. "Portal of darkness, I will _not_ permit it! Go tell your master to _leave this one alone_! He is _not _for your filth! _Begone_!"

Raven staggered backwards as if she had been punched in the chest. Her head swam, her blood chilled to ice water, as the words poured forth unbidden from the figure before her. An urge to run, to flee as fast as she could came over her, but before she could make good on the urge or decide if it was worth obeying, the figure raised its hands, and the entire mindscape blew up.

Raven's shield erupted into being around her, strong, inflexible, powered by every ounce of will and energy that she had to draw upon. Nothing, not even her own limitless rage, had been able to tear through such a shield, not in mental combat, not here. And yet the figure that was David and at the same time was not him conjured forth a power that Raven had never in her life even imagined before. The equivalent force of a thousand burning suns consumed the entire scene in fire. There was no more ground, no more air, merely fire, and a bubble of black energy protecting her from it. The threat galvanized her attention, and she fought back with everything she had, for nothing else would suffice, and yet the shield began to warp and crack and through the roar of the firestorm around her, she could hear the words of the figure who had done this, screaming like a damned soul, words packed with fear and rage.

"_SPAWN OF TRIGON, YOU WILL LEAVE THIS ONE ALONE_!"

With a thunderous crash, the shield gave way, and Raven felt the flames boring into her and felt herself screaming even as she released her concentration all at once.

**O-O-O**

"Raven? Raven? Raven can you hear me? _Raven_?"

"Dude, what_happened_?" yelled Beast Boy, crouching over Raven's fallen form, holding her head gently in his lap, even as David sat on the floor opposite her,

"I don't _know_ what happened. I was just lying there and all of a sudden she screams and falls out of the air."

Beast Boy grabbed the communicator off his belt. "Beast Boy calling Robin, Starfire, Cyborg. It's an emergency! Raven's – "

Raven suddenly gave a loud gasp and sat bolt upright, nearly knocking Beast Boy over in the process, and causing David to jump back in surprise nearly half a foot. Beast Boy stopped in mid-sentence as the faces of all three of the other Titans stared back at him from the communicator screen. "Um… hold on," he said, and he closed the screen again. "Raven? Are you okay? What happened?"

Raven for her part looked almost unsure of where she was for a moment. She looked around for a second or two, before focusing on Beast Boy and David, and only then did the understanding return to her gaze. "Beast Boy?" she asked, the meaning of the question being left sufficiently ambiguous.

"Dude, Raven, are you all right? You look like someone just stuffed a rhinoceros beetle up your nose." Such was the situation that neither David nor Raven commented on Beast Boy's choice of imagery.

"I'm… I'm okay…" said Raven, still sounding confused.

"What happened in there?" asked David. "You just started screaming all of a sudden."

"You didn't… you didn't see what happened?"

"No," insisted David, "it was like you said. I never even felt anything. Did you go inside my mind?"

Raven nodded slowly, as both boys stared at her as though half expecting her to grow wings. "It was…" she started, then stopped and started over. "It was just some mental feedback. I'm all right, I think."

Beast Boy looked considerably relieved, David a bit less so, but still somewhat better. "Well, did you go into his head?" asked Beast Boy. "Did you find anything there?"

Raven had by now recovered to ask an obvious question of her own. "Beast Boy, what are you doing here? You're supposed to be down in the infirmary, asleep."

"Oh," said Beast Boy. He rubbed the back of his head and grinned. "I um… just thought I'd come up and make sure everything was going okay."

"Even though you heard me say that I didn't want anyone else here because their emotions might interfere with the procedure?" said Raven, her angry tone beginning to re-assert itself. "Get back down to the infirmary right now, or I'll make sure whoever attacks us next doesn't _have_ to kill you."

"Right!" said Beast Boy in an overly cheery fashion as he got up and slowly backed towards the door. "So… um… glad… everything went… okay!" he said, and with that, he bolted out the door as fast as he could, and could be heard scampering down the hallway in some quadruped form or another.

Raven slowly stood up, and David did the same. "So… did you find anything?" he asked hesitantly.

Raven looked back at David with a look that was almost frightened herself, but it lasted only an instant before her professional gaze took back over. "I… need to think about what I saw for a while. I need to… interpret it right…"

"Oh," said David, obviously expecting a bit more. "All right then... I guess… just let me know if you come up with anything, okay?"

"I'll be sure to do that," said Raven as she slipped out the door. David couldn't tell, but t took every ounce of self-control she had not to run down the hallway. She needed to get back to her room. She needed to meditate. She needed to look at her books, but most of all, she needed to figure out what she was going to tell everyone else.

But that much she already had an idea on…

**O-O-O**

"So after all that," said Cyborg, leaning against the doorframe, "he's just a normal kinetic after all?"

"Looks that way to me," said Raven, as she watched Robin shuffle through a sheaf of papers in the evidence room filing cabinet. "A somatic-based kineticist. I should have thought of it before."

"But you don't know why he had that attack this afternoon? Or how to improve his speed?"

"I don't know… exactly yet," said Raven, "but I think I can make sure it doesn't happen again."

"How?" asked Robin. Raven was prepared for such a question.

"Somatic-based kinetics have what's called a psychosomatic trigger. Certain gestures, certain objects, are what let them unleash their powers. That's why he keeps pointing at whatever he's blowing up. His powers are mental, but he has an easier time with them if he's got some kind of focus."

Robin and Cyborg both nodded, either understanding, or pretending to. "So you're willing to work with him on this?" asked Robin. "That's… pretty generous of you."

Raven shrugged. "Like you said, we might need him to be ready soon, and I'm the only one who knows what I saw inside his mind."

"Yeah, BB said something about you screamin'?" asked Cyborg. "What _did_ you find in there?"

"Just a standard mindspace. His was a giant forest with a big golden dome in the middle of it. Nothing too interesting for a mindspace, but I was able to figure out that the somatics should help him a lot."

"So you gonna go back in? If he lets you that is?"

Raven shook her head. "No. No need to. I don't have anything more to find out there." Her face remained her usual emotionless mask, and neither Cyborg nor Robin noticed her bunching a handful of her cape up in one of her fists as she said it.

Robin finally found what he was looking for, and stood up from the cabinet, walking over to Raven and handing it over.

"This is just one of my old batons," said Robin, "you sure it's gonna work?"

"What's it made of?" asked Raven.

"Just stainless steel," said Robin, and Raven nodded.

"It's just temporary," she said, "but I think it'll do…"

**O-O-O**

"David? You up here?"

There was a soft cough followed by the sound of footsteps in the gravel, and slowly, David appeared out of the darkness of the Tower's roof. His gate and posture were even more subdued than usual, his hands stuffed in his pockets and white condensation coming off his breath as he walked over. The tracer logs showed that he'd been up here for at least an hour or more, and he looked frankly, half-frozen. Jump got pretty cold at night.

"It's like five degrees up here man, what're you doin'?"

David shrugged. "Nothing," he said. "Just… trying to stay out of the way."

"Yeah, well, c'mere. We got somethin' for you."

Cyborg stepped aside and allowed Raven to climb up the steps behind him and onto the roof. Reaching into her cloak, she drew out a small metal stick about eighteen inches long, and handed it to David, who gently took it, turning it over in his hands, clearly unsure as to what it was or what it's purpose was.

"What's… this?" he asked.

"That's your magic wand," said Raven deadpan. From anyone else, it would have sounded like a joke, but not from Raven.

"What do you mean my magic wand?" he asked. "I don't do magic."

"It's a figure of speech," said Raven. "Your powers are tied to somatics. You want to blow something up, you point at it. Pointing at it doesn't really do anything, but it makes it easier for you to focus on it." She gestured at the small metal bar. "That's your new focus. It's something for you to concentrate on, and get your powers into the right mindset. I think it'll help."

"How… how do I use it?" asked David, who seemed to be unsure of how even to hold the thing.

"You start by concentrating on it. It's made of steel, so that shouldn't be too hard. Don't try to blow it up though, just focus on the molecules, and then when the target shows up, point the bar at it, and let your mind slide from one object right into the other."

David looked rather suspicious of all this, but did not attempt to argue. Cyborg lifted the small bag of horseshoes he had brought up to the roof with him. "What do you say man, you wanna give it a shot?"

Nervously, David nodded, and Cyborg took one of the horseshoes out of the bag. Not sure of what else to do, David held the bar like the aforementioned magic wand, and nodded to Cyborg, who threw the horseshoe into the air. David, looking more self-conscious than he normally did, and obviously trying desperately to look like something other than a ripoff from a renaissance fair or a Harry Potter convention, pointed the metal bar at the horseshoe, and opened his mind.

"BAM!"

The horseshoe blew up as if blasted out of the air with a shotgun. Bits and fragments pinged back to earth like rain, as Cyborg smiled and Raven smirked and David stared, thunderstruck, at the puff of smoke drifting off into the inky night that the explosion had left behind. What was amazing was not the explosion itself, for he had done that before a thousand times. What was amazing was that for the first time, the blast had occurred while the Horseshoe was still rising.

"I think he likes it," said Cyborg to Raven, who did not respond. "Wanna give it another go, man?"

David seemed almost past the point of words, but he simply nodded, and Cyborg tossed another horseshoe into the air. If anything, this one exploded even faster than the first had, not _quite_ fast enough to qualify as a snapshot perhaps, but close, damned close, closer by far than anything David had done before. What's more, Cyborg could see (for Raven had mentioned he should look) that David didn't flinch at all when he blew up either horseshoe. It meant nothing official of course, but it indicated at least that the process was both much faster, and much less painful.

"Raven, I think we're gonna go through this bag," said Cyborg, judging from David's look, which was passing from astonishment into wonder and even joy. "You're welcome to stay up here and give us some tips…"

"That's okay…" she said. "I've got to go and watch Beast Boy again. Let me know if anything goes wrong. I'll let Robin know it seems to be working."

"Way I heard it," commented Cyborg. "Beast Boy thought you needed some watching instead."

"Which is why I'm going to duct tape him to the bed," said Raven, leaving it an open question of whether or not she was joking.

Raven vanished down the stairs, and Cyborg turned back to David and began tossing more horseshoes into the air. Already Cyborg could see a sea-change in David's demeanor. Perhaps it was relief at (apparently) having found the breakthrough they needed, or perhaps, for once, he could let himself get caught up in the sheer wonder of what he was able to do (something he tended to lack), but David was smiling, laughing even as he shot horseshoe after iron horseshoe out of the sky, sometimes taking two at once, like a skeet shooter who had finally learned how to aim. At this rate, David would be ready for the final tests soon. This was a welcome change, certainly, but coming on top of everything that had happened last week, it was, at least to Cyborg, a symbol that _some_ things were finally going their way.

'And the best part was', he thought to himself, 'that for once, we figured something out with no extra mysteries popping up. For once we can just sit back, enjoy this one, and not have to worry.'

And fifteen stories below him, in the elevator on its way back down to the basement, Raven was doing the closest thing she knew how to do to praying, whispering her mantra to herself as she sought inner wisdom from within her own soul.

And words came back, dredged up from her memory like spirits of the restless dead.

"Demonspawn begone," came the words, "you will leave this one alone."

"Great Azar," she whispered to herself, "_now_ what?"

But for this question she could find no answer, save for the silence that wrapped around her as the elevator plunged down into the depths of Titans Tower.

* * *

**Author's Note:** I once more hope you enjoyed this chapter, but if you did not, please send me a review anyway so that I can hopefully ensure you will enjoy the next one. Thank you for reading!


	18. Tools of the Trade

**Disclaimer:** I barely own anything at present, let alone the Teen Titans.**  
**

**Author's Note:** Greetings everyone. It is good to see you all again. I know it has been quite some time since last we spoke, much longer than I would have liked. This is not because I was overly busy, nor because I was unwilling to continue with the story, far from it. My prolonged absence has been due to two factors alone:

Firstly, almost as soon as I finished posting Chapter 17, I became ill. Very, very ill. I was out of commission for three weeks with all manner of unpleasant symptoms I shall not bore you with clinical descriptions of, hallucinating at times, and utterly unable to do anything. I picked at the next chapter as I could, but unfortunately, was unable to really start work until I recovered...

... whereupon I ran into a second issue: This chapter itself. I am going to be the first to admit that this one may not thrill or amaze you guys. Partly I had difficulty doing all of the things I wished to do in this chapter within the framework of a coherent narrative. Partly, I simply had an absolute hell of a time writing it. It was one of those chapters where everything you write seems pedestrian, boring, and terrible. I should have posted it last week, I _really_ should have, but I wasn't pleased with it at all, and decided that with one extra week I could resolve everything. Well an extra week later, I'm still not pleased with this chapter, but I cannot improve it any further to my understanding. It represents vital plot elements, and it is as good as I am able to make it, and so I beg your indulgences with me as I try to push past it into Chapter 19. I know I am asking a lot of you guys, given the lateness of the chapter to begin with, and I am deeply sorry if any of you feel this chapter is not acceptable. All I ask is that if so, please just let me know what you thought, be it ne'er so terrible. I cannot figure out where this one ran off the rails, and I would appreciate every aid you can tender me in solving the mystery.

Anyhow, I'll let you all get to it, and I hope that you find some redeeming material in here, though I myself can barely bear to look at this chapter any longer. Baring further illness, come hell or high water, I have resolved as part of my New Year's resolutions, to post up one chapter every two weeks from here on out in this story, so there should be no further unreasonable delays for you, my faithful readers.

Thank you all once again, and I hope you like something of what you see below.

* * *

**Chapter 18: The Tools of the Trade**

_"Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, rather we have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit."_

** - **Aristotle

**O-O-O**

**Day 1**

"I think he likes it..."

Robin said nothing, as usual, simply crossing his arms and watching Raven and Cyborg run David through another round of blowing things to pieces, giving no sign of whether or not he was pleased, or displeased, or if he even thought anything of the proceedings. Beast Boy imagined, not for the first time, that Robin had missed his calling in life, and should have become one of those guards in front of the Queen's house in England that wasn't allowed to move. He certainly had the fixed stare down.

"Indeed, he does appear to be enjoying himself much more than the last time," said Starfire.

"Star, last time he had a stroke and collapsed on the floor," said Beast Boy.

"And this time, he has not done so," replied the Tamaranean with a smile. "Is that not a good thing?"

"It's a very good thing," said Robin, who as always could be counted on to break his strong-and-silent routine for a question from Starfire. "I just want to make sure that Raven knows what she's doing."

"Dude, it's_Raven_," said Beast Boy, "she always knows what she's doing. 'Sides, without her, we wouldn't even know what had happened, or about the whole somawhatsit thing." Robin and Starfire both cast confused glances over at Beast Boy, who blinked for a second before explaining. "The 'wand'?"

All three turned back to the training room below, where David was presently pointing the metal pipe in his hand at a stack of bricks. One by one, the bricks began to explode, fragments of them hopping up into the air like popcorn.

"I do not understand," confessed Starfire after a moment or two. "That is not a... 'wand', not such as the one Mumbo uses whenever he is committing crimes. Has Raven trained David in the use of magic?"

"It's not a real wand," said Robin. "It's just one of my old training batons. Raven said that what he needed was an external focus to trigger his powers more rapidly. She's offered to work with him in figuring out how to use it with his powers."

"So," said Beast Boy, "he's just gonna use it like... wait, she did _what_?"

"I know," said Robin. "I was surprised too, but she's the one who went into his head, and of all of us, her powers are the most like his. It makes sense to let her try."

"It is very kind of Raven to offer to assist him in such a way, do you not think?" said Starfire, but her voice revealed that even she thought this was strange. Raven didn't exactly 'bond' with people easily, and while she had willingly done everything Robin asked her to do concerning David, she had not volunteered any further assistance. It just didn't seem her sort of 'thing'.

Apparently looks were deceiving.

"It makes sense for her to do it," said Robin, his voice as impassive as ever. "In fact, I'd like to have all of us take a turn in the next couple of weeks. We all have things to show him, things he's gonna need when the time comes. And we should think about getting everything else ready for when it does."

Starfire raised one of the small spots that served as eyebrows for her. "Is... there some need for haste?" she asked. "Cinderblock has been destroyed, as has the army of robots we were assailed by, and there has been no further sign of danger to him or us, has there?"

"With Cinderblock dead, we have no idea who was behind all this, or why. Each attempt they've made has been stronger and more destructive than the last. Since we can't find them, we need to be prepared for when they make their next move. That means he has to be ready as soon as he can."

"Relax, dude," said Beast Boy, "Cinderblock's dead because David trashed him, and Raven smashed all the robots that they sent. If they know what's good for them, they'll be hiding where nobody - "

"Cinderblock's dead, Beast Boy," said Robin, cutting Beast Boy off, "because 'they' infiltrated a maximum security meta-prison and killed him without leaving a trace. If they can do that, then there's no telling what else they can do."

"Robin, if they could just warp into the tower and kill anybody they wanted, why would they even bother with Cinderblock? Wouldn't we all be dead or captured or whatever already?"

"I don't know," said Robin, still refusing to turn his head away from the scene below, "but the longer he's not ready to face whatever's coming, the bigger the chance that it'll arrive before he's prepared for it. He can't take that risk, and neither can we."

As though to signal that the discussion was closed, Robin turned away from the window. "We need to finish showing him the ropes," he said as he walked towards the door, "and we need to do it fast. I don't think we have any more time to lose."

"How much longer do you believe we should spend preparing him?" asked Starfire. "He is... improving, but he still requires much work. Perhaps we should - "

"Two weeks," said Robin, pausing before the door. "I think if he works hard at it, and we all do our part... he should be ready for a real test in about two weeks. That'll make it almost exactly three months since he started training."

"But... dude, is that gonna be enough time?" asked Beast Boy.

"It was for me," said Robin as he opened the door with the push of a button, "and I think it will be for him too. Either way, we're going to find out."

**O-O-O**

**Day 3**

"Let's just try it again,"

Raven sounded annoyed, but then Raven always sounded more or less annoyed, and David simply tried to ignore it and focus on the matter at hand. Slowly, he picked the metal baton up from off the ground, and held it in one hand again, breathing carefully as he cleared his mind in the manner Raven had explained to him. The sorceress was standing opposite him, arms crossed like a disappointed schoolteacher, with her cloak wrapped around her like a winter coat.

"Ready? Now do it slowly. I'll talk you through it, and try not to drop it this time unless you have to."

David nodded, and slowly closed his eyes, focusing on Raven's words as they filtered in through the back of his mind.

"Clear your mind of all distractions," she said. Much easier said than done, but he did his best. "Concentrate on the air around you. What do you see?"

David ignored the urge to complain that this was the twentieth time he had done this today, and slowly opened his eyes, the lights around him dimming into nothingness, replaced by a swirling mass of glowing dots, infinitely small, yet each distinguishable as they lazily moved about.

"Nitrogen and Oxygen," he said, identifying the two most common types of dots. The others existed only as occasional glimpses within the sea of blue and red gas (why those elements appeared blue and red was a question he could not answer).

"Good," said Raven. "Now, concentrate on the baton itself."

David looked down at the metal stick in his hand, now an indistinct hazy mass of iron, carbon, and chromium molecules. Though the metal rod wasn't moving, the molecules comprising it were, vibrating in place like little engines, so small as to be invisible to anything save for an electron microscope, yet somehow visible to him here and now.

"You're seeing it?"

David nodded slowly, took a deep breath and held it, knowing what was going to come next.

"All right, now I want you to use your mind to take control of the baton like you normally do. Don't try to blow it up, just keep it as it is right now.

This was the hard part.

He focused on the baton, extending his mental control over it bit by bit. It was partly like trying to hold one's hand perfectly still in mid-air, and partly like a juggling act, constantly having to release some parts of the baton, and compress some others. Bit by bit, he took control over more and more of the molecules, and soon he began to feel the baton start to shiver in his hands, as bits of it would warm up suddenly, then chill down far below room temperature, only to warm up again.

"Raven..."

"I know, just keep going."

Very very carefully he walked the mental tightrope, trying to ignore the wild shifts in the temperature of the baton, which seemed to be trying periodically to scald or freeze his fingers off. He clutched it tightly, trying to force the baton to return to equilibrium, having little success.

"You're choking up on it too much. Relax and it will stop trying to burn you. Take it easily and you'll get it to calm down."

David might have commented that this was a lot easier to say when you weren't the one holding onto the alternately burning/freezing baton, but he had too much to do already. He physically forced his fingers to relax their grip somewhat on the shaking, fluctuating baton, and tried to do the same with the grip his mind had on the baton. It took some effort, but as it turned out, Raven was right, and no sooner had he done so than the fluctuations began to taper off. The temperature still shifted, but the shifts came slower, more regularly, a rhythmic pulse not unlike a heartbeat...

In fact...

"There," said Raven, and David let his breath out slowly, still staring at the mass of metallic molecules that comprised the baton, rather than the baton itself. Raven let him catch his breath for a second, before giving him his next instruction.

"Now, I want you to adjust your vision back to normal, without letting go of the baton in any way, and see what you've done."

David hesitated. "You want... what?"

"You _can _keep hold of the baton with your mind while looking at it normally, can't you?"

"I... yeah... I think so..."

"So then do it, and don't let go of it this time. It's going to look a little weird, but don't worry."

David instantly began to worry, if only at the thought of what grotesque mockeries of nature Raven would call weird. Still he took and released another deep breath, and then closed his eyes, paused, and opened them again, looking down at the stick in his hand, and no sooner had he done this than he gasped and choked up on the baton with both mind and fingers, for the metal stick was on fire.

"Easy! Easy!" insisted Raven, and it was that sharp command that made him hesitate long enough for his nerves to realize that the baton wasn't burning his hand, and that what he had taken for flames was actually...

... well... what _was_ it?

The baton was apparently _not_ on fire after all, as it was still pulsating from warm to cool in tune with the beating of an invisible heart (his own?). However a reddish-orange aura was spilling off of it in waves, like the flames of a soft candle, licking into the air before fading out, bright enough to cast a soft light around the baton even though the room itself was well-lit. Gently, he raised the baton up, staring at it closely, expecting at any moment to feel the heat of the 'flames' licking his face and searing his hand, but they never did, though the pulsing temperature shifts became a bit more pronounced as his heart rate increased, and he forced himself to take a few deep breaths to still it. The aura ringed the entire baton, making it look as though it were merrily burning, the aura filtering through between his fingers and licking at the air around it, leaving a trail of orange-red energy as he gently moved it through the air. By now he was no longer afraid, merely confused, and he looked up at Raven for a moment.

"What the...?"

Raven shrugged. "It's your power," she said, "how should I know?"

"Raven," said David, beginning to feel the fear building in his chest "seriously, what is this?"

"Probably just a side-effect," said Raven. "Most kinetic powers have them. T... a kinetic I used to know would encase everything she affected in a yellow aura. I wrap everything in dark energy. It happens."

"But then why haven't I seen it before?"

"Probably because you've never tried to use a somatic focus before," said Raven, with a note in her voice that indicated a rapidly draining reserve of patience. "Now pay attention. Point the baton at your target and get to work."

David extended his hand with the still-glowing baton held tightly, towards a series of bricks lined up in a row like dominoes.

"Ready?" said Raven, "all right, slide your focus from the baton to the target... and... now."

David flicked his wrist, gesturing with the baton as though it were a magic wand, and the first brick detonated an instant after the word 'now'. The aura around the baton flickered for a moment, but came back to full strength after a fluctuation or two between hot and cold and back again.

"Good," said Raven, "but remember to make a loop. Push with your mind out of the baton, through the target, and back into the baton."

David nodded, and gestured with his baton at the second brick, which exploded with just as much vivacity as the first. The baton quivered once more as he returned his full attention to it, but not as violently, and the reddish aura barely flickered. He continued to move down the line of bricks, one after the next, and with each explosion, both he and the baton recovered more quickly. Raven said nothing as he obliterated the line of targets brick by brick, breaking in only at the end to check that everything was still in order.

"No headache?" she asked.

David blasted the last target to pieces before responding, turning the still glowing baton over in his hand. "No," he said with a nervous smile, as though to say this was to tempt fate. "No, I feel... I feel fine... I think."

"Good," said Raven, crossing her arms. "You can let go of the baton now. We'll take a break, then try some directional explosions."

David nodded, and slowly released the baton with his mind. The red aura extinguished itself like a campfire quenched by a sudden downpour, and the alternately hot and cold metal returned to room temperature without so much as another twinge of motion.

"Hey um... Raven?"

"Yes?"

"Thanks for... for helping me figure this stuff out."

Raven turned away, walking towards the side of the training room, where she had left a thermos filled with the herbal tea that she drank practically to the exclusion of all else (or so at least it seemed). "Don't mention it," she said without turning around.

David normally would not have mentioned it, but... perhaps because they were finally making some progress, perhaps because of what had happened last week, perhaps simply because Raven had offered to give him a hand, and David knew how little she was wont to do that, he felt like making such an explanation as he could.

"Look," he said, "I'm... I'm just... I just wanted to say that..." why did these conversations always wind up with him sounding like an idiot? He took a breath and restarted. "I know this... this whole thing's been kinda weird for you guys too, and... I wanted to say, thanks. Thanks for... for helping me anyway."

"Whoever's after you tried to kill us as well," said Raven. "We tend to take that sort of thing personally."

"They only tried to kill you guys because you were helping me," replied David. "You didn't have to - "

"You don't know that," said Raven, and even so, whatever they want with you isn't likely to be good news for us or for the city, even if we hadn't gotten involved. That makes it our business."

David had heard this before, and so he simply nodded. "Even so," he said, "thanks."

"What part of 'don't mention it' didn't you get?" she asked, and unlike most people who used those words, Raven actually seemed quite willing to let the matter drop. "Let's try directional explosions," she said, walking over to the control panel and summoning another three dozen bricks for target practice. "I'll levitate some targets, and you fire the bricks into them. And try to pay closer attention to where you're aiming this time. Hit me by accident, and you'll wish Robin had broken your neck last combat training session."

David couldn't resist. "And what happens if I hit you on purpose?"

Raven smirked. "You'd have a better chance of beating Robin in a stick fight."

**O-O-O**

**Day 6**

As he contemplated the training mat from his present position laying face-down atop it, David decided then and there that if he lived to be a thousand years old, he would never ever _ever_ actually attempt to fight Robin for real. In fact, he wasn't so certain that this wasn't the point of the present lesson.

"How did I do that?" asked Robin rhetorically.

"You hit me in the head with a stick," replied David after a moment's thought. It seemed obvious enough to him.

Robin did not seem to appreciate the wry remark. "That's right," he said, "and how did I manage to do _that_?"

David tried to think of something reasonably competent, witty, or even coherent to say, but finally had to give up the effort in exhaustion. "You swung it at me?"

"So when someone swings a baton at your head, do you usually just stand there and get hit with it?"

"I don't usually _have_people swinging batons at my head," said David with just a touch more frustration than he intended. Robin however refused to be baited.

"No," said the Boy Wonder. "I think your specialty is telephone poles, isn't it? I can have Cyborg go get a couple and we can try it with those instead if you want."

David groaned as he slowly peeled himself up off the mat, his head pounding like a snare drum, and for once from the perfectly natural causes of having been hit with a stick repeatedly over the course of the last hour. His head was not the only thing aching for that reason. Worse, in some ways, than the physical beating he had taken (which was at least mitigated somewhat in that Robin was not actually _trying_ to cripple him) was the fact that so far he had not managed once to score a single hit, to evade a single strike, or to otherwise in any way prevent Robin from doing exactly and precisely whatever he wanted in their little sparring match.

And on top of that, he knew Robin was going easy on him.

Robin watched as David got up, his eyes hidden as ever behind the latex mask he wore at all times (or at least at all times David recalled seeing him). Mask or no however, David had no trouble reading Robin's gaze this time. It was a look he disliked more every time he saw it, the look of Robin trying to figure out why it was that, despite his best efforts, David still wasn't getting it right. Nevermind that Bruce Lee would have been hard pressed to go toe to toe with Robin for any length of time.

David stood there silently for a few moments, regaining his breath, expecting Robin to tell him to try it once more. His right arm felt like a dead weight from swinging the baton around in every direction except (obviously) the correct one, and his balance was off after having been thrown to the mat at least fifty times in the last hour. Still, there was no way around it, so he simply waited for Robin to tell him to attack, or to prepare to receive an attack, so that he could miss, or fail to block, and wind up on the mat for the fifty-first time.

But instead of attacking or ordering David to attack, Robin took a step back, lowering his baton to his side and rubbing his chin thoughtfully. "You're not trying to hit me," he said finally.

David blinked. "... what?" he asked, semi-incredulously. Trying to hit Robin was literally all he had been doing for the last hour, not that there had been much to show for it.

"You're not trying to hit me," repeated Robin, "you're trying to attack so that when I hit you, you don't get hurt."

This was a bit too fine a point for David to grasp, given his present circumstance. "It hasn't been working," he commented.

"Pain in training saves it in the field," said Robin, another one of the catchphrases that David assumed he was getting out of a booklet somewhere. Robin however had already moved on. "Why do you think we're doing this?"

"What... training?" asked David. He could think of several reasons that were unlikely to win him any points with Robin, but opted for the safe route. "So that I'll be ready for whatever happens." He'd said and heard it so many times by now that came out automatically.

"No, not training in general, melee training. Why do you think we're working on this?"

'Because you like to show off how you can beat the stuffing out of me,' thought David, though he opted instead to go with a reply that was slightly less inflammatory. "I have no idea,"

He expected to receive a lecture about the importance of hand-to-hand combat training for a superhero. It would not have been the first time Robin had given it to him, nor the fifth, but that was not what Robin said. Instead Robin made a fairly unexpected remark.

"You're terrible at this," he said. "The melee fighting. I know it, you know it, so you've got to be wondering why I keep insisting on it. It's not just about learning how to defend yourself at this range, though you will need that. So do you know what it's really about?" David shook his head, and Robin folded his arms in front of his chest. "It's about learning how to hurt people."

David felt like he had missed a punch line somewhere. "What?"

"Hurting people. That's what a fight is. Two people trying to hurt one another bad enough that one of them stops fighting and gives up. You need to learn how to do that."

"I _know _how to do that," insisted David.

"No," said Robin, "you don't. You've been holding back with that baton all day. I was hoping I could make you angry enough to really start swinging at me by tapping you a few times, but it didn't work. You're not a natural fighter, and you're going to need to learn how to become one."

"What are you talking about?" asked David, who was getting sick of having to repeat that question. "You just said I was terrible at this stuff."

"When you meet an enemy, everything you can do, talk, hit them, shoot them, call for help, hide, everything boils down to two options. You can try to fight, or you can try to run. Most people try to run, unless they don't have any other choice. We're heroes, we don't run. We fight. Sometimes we fight with our weapons and our powers, and sometimes with our words, and sometimes just by being an example to everyone else, but that's what we do."

Robin retracted his baton and clipped it back onto his back. "You're not a natural fighter, David. Someone comes after you, you run away. And normally that's fine. Not a lot of people like you get into this sort of thing, but sometimes it happens. What I'm worried about is if you come up against someone who's trying to kill you, that you're going to hold back and give them a chance."

David shook his head, as though trying to ward something off. "This is crazy," he said, "I wasn't holding back against Cinderblock, was I?"

"Cinderblock was a walking monster made of solid rock the size of a house. It's easy to go all out against something inhuman and giant and scary. But most of the people we fight are just that, people. Bank robbers, terrorists, other meta-humans. Are you gonna be able to go all out against people like that, or are you gonna hesitate, and let them get a shot off on you?"

David opened his mouth to answer 'no', but stopped before he did so, for Robin's gaze was unwavering, and as always, he knew that Robin already knew the answer.

"I'm not trying to say you're a coward," said Robin, "But the first time we talked about doing this, you told me you didn't want to get killed, and you didn't want to kill anyone."

"I thought Titans didn't kill?" asked David, his hands slowly falling back to his side. His eyes darted down to the floor, suddenly unwilling to meet Robin's gaze.

"We don't," said Robin as he approached, "but that's not the point. You were afraid of even showing us your powers the first time you got here. You never used them much at all before coming here, at least that's what you claimed, and I believe it."

Robin walked up to David and re-extended his baton, holding it up in front of David's face. "You need to be able to face someone _this _close, where you can look them straight in the eye, and hit them with everything you've got. Your baton, your fist, your powers, everything. You need to be able to hurt a psycho or a supervillain bad enough to make them want to stop fighting you and give up. You've got the weapons to do that, even if you're bad at hand-to-hand fighting, but you need to be_ willing_ to hurt them."

All thoughts of sarcasm and wit had long since fled, and David's shoulders drooped as he shook his head. "How?" he asked without looking up. "How can... How do you learn how to do that?"

"I don't know," said Robin. "I didn't need to, and neither did any of the others. We're not crazy, we don't _like_ hurting people, but none of us ever had to learn how to not hold back when the time came. Some of us needed to learn how to restrain ourselves, we're just like that. You're not. It's not about being afraid or a coward or not understanding the stakes. You were right before, you didn't hold back against Cinderblock, but you only turned on him after he chased you all the way to Battery Street. Why was that?"

"I was... I was scared, all right?" said David defensively. "He was gonna kill me!"

"And what?" asked Robin, "you weren't scared after he _did_ corner you? Of course you were scared, but that's not why you ran away from him. If it was, you wouldn't have stopped running when you saw all those people."

David rubbed his eyes with his free hand, lowering his head back down to face the floor. "You think I didn't want to hurt Cinderblock, even after everything he did?"

"I think you didn't want to get into a fight," said Robin, "with him or anyone else, and so you only fought because you absolutely _had_ to." He reached over with the baton and laid the tip of it on David's shoulder, like a knight dubbing a squire with a sword. "And there's nothing wrong with that for a civilian, but you're not a civilian anymore. I'm not saying you should ever enjoy it, or that you can't ever try to get around it, but you're going to have to hurt people in this line of work, and you need to learn how. Because we almost never _have_ to fight. We choose to fight because if we don't, then innocent people get hurt. You've got the tools to do that, but you need the will."

David raised his eyes again. "So how do I learn that?"

Robin smirked as he backed away to engagement range once again. "You can start with actually trying to hit me with the baton," he said, "but we'll do that next time."

David shook his head, chuckling at the absurdity of it all as Robin turned away and walked towards the door. "You know that I'm never gonna be able to actually hit you, right?"

"Of course not," said Robin without breaking stride, "I was an acrobat when I was three. I had to start military-grade combat training when I turned eight. You don't need to be good enough to hit me. You just need to be good enough to hit everyone else."

The baton fell out of David's hand as a horrified look crossed his face. "You did... what?" he asked, "Good God, why? What psycho made you do _that_?"

Robin paused at the exit to the room as the door slid open to let him leave. He did not turn back as he replied, his voice in a flat tone that was far too even for it to be anything but strictly controlled.

"My father," said Robin, and with that, he walked out of the door, letting it slide shut behind him, leaving David to curse himself for a fool...

... again.

**O-O-O**

**Day 7**

Cyborg whistled approvingly. "Nice, man... real nice..."

"Yeah, I know" said David with a groan, "just pull a couple, eh?" Cyborg chuckled and pulled three baseball-sized metal spheres from out of the barrel next to him. David stared at them intently for a few seconds before taking his guess.

"Bauxite, cadmium, and... is that tungsten?"

Cyborg grinned and shook his head no, making a buzzer sound as he did so. "Close. Molybdenum."

"Mo... mowhat?"

"Molybdenum. It's a metal used in high-temperature alloys. Car engines, machine tools, that kinda thing. Same properties as Tungsten though, so don't worry about it." David shrugged, and Cyborg put the spheres back into the barrel and rummaged around for three more random substances. "Anyway, I'm sure he won't take it personal,"

"Right," said David, "because nobody takes it personal when you call their parents psychos."

"Way I hear it, you weren't all that far off," said Cyborg, pulling three more spheres out. "Easy ones this time."

"Malachite, bronze, and kerosene," said David with barely a glance. "What do you mean I wasn't far off?"

"I mean, I've heard him call his dad a lot worse than that," said Cyborg offhandedly as he began to pick out three more.

"I didn't even know he _had_ any parents," said David. "So who is this military psycho?"

Cyborg raised an eyebrow at David. "Batman," he said, as though stating the obvious.

David's eyes widened in shock. "Wait a minute," he said, "Batman's his _father_?"

Cyborg laughed loudly, dropping one of the spheres which went up in a roar and a flash of flame, leaving a burn mark on the floor. "How do you _not_ know that Robin was with Batman before he came here?"

"I knew _that,_" protested David, "but... I thought they just worked together! I didn't know they were _related_!"

"He's Robin's adopted father," said Cyborg. "Rob lost his real parents before he started training with the Bat. I don't know what happened exactly, but Batman's the one that taught him all that kung-fu stuff, how to solve crimes, pretty much everything."

David collapsed into the folding chair that had been set up in the middle of the training room. "I didn't know any of that."

"He doesn't talk about it a whole lot. 'Fact, he doesn't talk about it ever really. Raven and Starfire prob'ly know more'n I do, but I think something happened between him and Batman 'fore he came out here to Jump. Don't bother asking though. He won't tell you."

David sighed slowly. "I get the feeling he doesn't tell anybody much of anything about himself."

"Yeah," said Cyborg, "him and Raven are both pretty private 'bout everything. Like I said, Star might know more, but I doubt it. All I know's he left Gotham to come here and try to work it out on his own." The half-metal Titan laughed as he rummaged around for more spheres. "First time I met him, he was all 'I work alone'. You can guess how long that lasted. Anyhow, try these."

David took only a couple of seconds. "Ammonia, Pyrite, and..." he blinked and squinted at the last sphere, solid metal on the outside, just like the others, but containing something he did not recognize. "What is _that_?"

Cyborg smirked. "Bacon grease."

"... bacon grease?"

"Hey man, Robin said to make sure you could ID anything that came your way."

"... _bacon_ grease?"

"You never know what you might run into doin' this!" protested Cyborg. "We fought a tofu monster once! 'Sides, bacon grease is good stuff. You can use it in everything. I even use it sometimes to lubricate the..."

"Okay... that's... I... really don't want to know... thanks," said David, which elicited a victorious laugh from Cyborg, who set the bacon grease container down on the table next to him, and hunted for some more spheres to test David on. As he searched through the container, David suddenly decided to ask a more direct question.

"So how'd... _you_ get into this?"

"Hrm?" asked Cyborg, his head still shoved inside the barrel next to the table.

"The Titans, the superhero business. If Robin moved here after he stopped working with Batman, how'd you get into it?"

"Oh, I grew up here," said Cyborg. "Jump's my city. All the others just sorta showed up here one day, and Star was bein' chased by this huge spaceship full'a aliens. We all happened to be in the same place, so when they showed up to tear the city apart and take her back to their planet, we all got together and gave 'em a whoopin'. We built the tower on the framework of the landing ship they put down. That's why it's shaped so weird."

David didn't say anything for a second, until Cyborg pulled his head back up to look at him. "You all right?"

"Um... yeah," said David, "I just... I meant... how did you get... you know..." he gestured a bit incoherently at Cyborg, "... your metal?"

Cyborg's smile faded quickly. "Oh, that..." he said in a hollow voice, prompting David to worry that he had just said something he shouldn't have.

"I'm... sorry, I... I didn't mean..."

"No man, it's... it's all right. I had an accident."

"An accident?"

"Yeah," said Cyborg. "My... dad worked at this big science lab downtown. It's closed down now. There was a... an experiment they were runnin' one day. It didn't work. Some big teleporter thing. The whole lab got blown apart. A lot of people got killed..." Cyborg closed his remaining human eye, pausing just for a fraction of a second. "I got messed up real bad, shoulda died even, but... my dad decided to fix me up with a bunch of experimental technology. He was big into robotics and biomechanics..."

David didn't say anything, and Cyborg shook his head finally and stuck his arm back in the barrel of spheres. "Anyway, that's how I got turned into a cyborg. I was about your age."

David decided to go out a bit on a limb. "So then... why'd you become a superhero?"

Cyborg shrugged. "Because I could. Wasn't like I could do that much else. 'Sides, it beats sittin' around feeling sorry for yourself. Mostly though..." he stopped rummaging for a second, looking almost wistful, "people like us, people who do this, we don't have anything else. Not just us five, I mean all of us superheroes, and probably most of the bad guys too. We don't got families, jobs, even our own homes, so we make our own. I really don't know what I'd do without the others, man, and I don't think any of them would know what to do without the rest of us either. I mean... it's different for me or BB, we couldn't pass for normal even if we tried."

Shaking his head and chuckling, Cyborg resumed searching for more spheres to test David on. "Anyway man, the short answer is that I don't rightly know _how_ I got into this business. I had the skills, and the rest just sorta fell into place. I don't know why I became a hero, but I sure as hell know why I still am one. Try not to worry too much about the 'whys' of everything. You just do what you gotta do, and see where it takes you." He held up a trio of new spheres. "What do you got?"

"Let's see," said David, focusing on the spheres. "Granite... cement... and..."

Cyborg suddenly tossed the third sphere towards David, who gave a shout of alarm and fell backwards, overturning his chair. The sphere landed harmlessly next to him, and Cyborg burst out laughing.

"Man... you are _too_easy to spook," said Cyborg as he walked over to help David up. "You just wait 'till BB really gives you the works. He'll have you up half the night looking for the cherry bombs he hid in..."

As Cyborg bent down to offer David a hand, the sphere he had tossed suddenly exploded into his face. Cyborg had enough time to shout as a white cloud enveloped him, dusting him, the floor, the chair, and everything else within ten feet in a snowy white - everything, that is, except David, who had scrambled back out of range as the cloud blew up into the air.

"... powdered sugar," said David, trying and failing to contain his laughter as he climbed back to his feet. Cyborg looked rather like the Pillsbury Dough Boy's older cousin.

"Oh, that's it," said Cyborg climbing to his feet with a fiendish grin on his face. "You are _so_ dead."

**O-O-O**

"What did you guys _do_ in there?" asked Robin, pacing back and forth in front of them, while he waited for the automated cleaning system to finish with the practice room. It estimated that it would require most of the night.

"Uh, nothing," said Cyborg, casually brushing the tar, powdered sulfur, and charcoal mixture off of his shoulders as he did so, letting it drip to the floor to join the cocktail of some eighty other substances that were pooled there. "Just um... a little ID practice, right?"

David blinked the apple juice out of his eyes and brushed the iron filings off his shirt even as the gobs of asphalt stuck to his shoes no matter how much he shook them. "Er... yeah," he said. "That's about it. Just... practice."

Getting the glue out of his hair that evening in the shower was a bit of a pain, but the look on Robin's face nearly made it worth it.

**O-O-O**

**Day 10**

"There's no way."

"It's not that bad."

"It _is_ that bad, just look at it."

Beast Boy stood back and considered the radioactive green-and-orange uniform on the computer screen with a connoisseur's eye. "Seriously, I think it's fine."

"This coming from a guy who wears purple."

"What's wrong with purple?"

David hesitated. "Um... nothing... except..."

"Dude, you know how hard it was to find something that actually goes well with green?" asked the changeling. "Besides, this is the uniform of the Doom Patrol. Only the best of the best get to wear this."

"As punishment for what?"

"As... dude! This like the most awesome uniform in the world." The green titan jumped up to his feet and began showing off the 'features' of his uniform. "It's got a kevlar-teflon polymer weave, steel-threaded semi-pressurized battle gloves, re-enforced titanium-plated combat boots - "

"... with velcro straps?"

Beast Boy halted in mid-sentence. "What? It's easier to get them on is all."

"Sure..." said David, going back to the screen. He blinked at the computer a few times, tilting his head, trying to imagine himself actually wearing something that... ridiculous. "I dunno about this, Beast Boy..."

"Dude, you've _gotta_ have a uniform. It's like a law or something. Everyone does it. Trust me, you'd look even more crazy without one. Imagine the five of us going out to thrash some bad guy, and you coming along looking like that."

"... what's wrong with how I look?"

"Nothing, but you look like a civilian, and bad guys aren't scared of civilians, or else they wouldn't be bad guys."

"Come on, nobody's scared of Robin because of his uniform."

"Are you kidding? He's totally intimidating!"

David blinked incredulously, glancing around to ensure that Robin wasn't standing behind him. "Beast Boy, he looks like a hot dog stand _threw up_ on him."

"Yeah, so? How do you think people recognize him? They take one look at him, and they know who it is, and then they know that they're in for a world of butt-kicking if they don't back down right now. It's the same with all the rest of us... well except Cyborg, but he kinda stands out by himself."

"... says the guy with green skin and pointed ears."

"Dude," said Beast Boy, crossing his arms and leaning back in his chair with a knowing smile, "chicks dig the ears."

"I'll take your word for it."

The computer flipped through a few more color combinations and styles, none of which seemed to offer anything but public humiliation. David shook his head as he stood up and walked back and forth for a few moments, trying to force the image of being laughed at by everyone within eye-shot out of his head.

"Come on," said Beast Boy, "we'll figure something out, you won't look that bad. We'll find something that goes with the rest of us... maybe red?"

"Maybe," said David with a shrug. "I dunno," he sat down again, hesitating before turning back to Beast Boy. "I mean... I know you've been doing this forever and all but... doesn't that getup ever make you feel kinda..."

"Kinda what?"

David thought better of the word he was going to use, but a replacement did not immediately appear. "Never mind," he said, but Beast Boy apparently had divined what he had meant, and, to his surprise, started to laugh.

"What?" asked David.

"Dude, you don't know this yet, but... once we find you a uniform, and you actually go out and use it, you're never gonna want to take it off again."

Several seconds of silence followed this remark, as David slowly turned his head to look quizzically at Beast Boy, who had a grin on his face that betrayed total confidence in what he had just said.

"I... sort of doubt that."

"That's only because you've never worn one. Trust me, you will."

"I wore a couple of different ones for Halloween once or twice. I never had any trouble getting rid of them afterwards."

"Yeah, because they weren't _yours_. Your own costume... it's totally different than anything else you've ever worn."

David watched Beast Boy in silence as the Changeling's voice took on an almost venerating tone. "You put it on, and you actually_feel_ different. You feel better, stronger, like you're ready to take on the universe, because you're a superhero, and this is your costume. Everyone knows who you are, what you are. Not just bad guys, everybody. Without my costume, I'd just be some green kid with fangs walking down the street, but with it, I'm Beast Boy, and everybody in the whole city knows who I am. Just putting it on is like some announcer saying 'Bad guys, beware. There's a hero in town.'" Beast Boy's gestures became more and more animated, and the glow in his eyes increased to an almost fever pitch as he tried to explain the feeling he was talking about. "I... I totally can't even describe it, but you get a uniform of your own, and put it on, even for the first time, and I guarantee you dude, you'll get such a rush that you'll wanna start kicking bad guy butt right then and there. I know it looks stupid when you sit back and think about it, but when you put it on, and you get ready to roll, looking bad will be the last thing on your mind."

The cynic in David wanted to respond with the comment that it would indeed be the last thing on his mind, due to the fact that he would be more worried about getting pounded into red jelly, but despite the changeling's less than oratorical words, David felt for a second like he could see what Beast Boy was talking about. Always he had sought to go un-noticed, of course, and the idea that he had to transition into a role where he was expected to be a public spectacle was one that worried him as well as made him feel inadequate and self-conscious. None of this was anything new.

The idea that this might prove a way around that feeling... well...

Beast Boy had by now noticed David's silence, and turned back to him. "So what do you think?"

David waited a moment or two before replying. "Can... you go back to that red one again?"

A broad grin crossed Beast Boy's face as he punched a command into the computer. "Robin's got a red tunic, but none of us really go all out with red," he said. The red uniform template appeared on the computer, and Beast Boy handed David the keyboard to control it. "I figured since you blow stuff up, it might be a good match. Look kinda like an explosion, you know? See what you can do."

David slowly began to make the computer lighten or darken the various parts of the uniform, adding and removing various accessories to it. Even simply staring at an image on a screen, it was barely twenty seconds before he was no longer thinking about how foolish he would look wearing the uniform, and instead imagining what it would be like to run, move, and fight with it on. He barely noticed Beast Boy sitting back in the chair next to him and setting his feet up on the desk. Beast Boy didn't say 'told you so.' He didn't need to.

Ten minutes and more passed as David continued to fiddle with the computer's controls, occasionally asking Beast Boy a question or two about the finer points. Beast Boy never hesitated to give his opinion on everything from what material to use ("Mylar itches really bad. Go with Nomex."), to what sorts of additions to make ("Trust me, dude, pockets don't cut it. You're gonna _want_ a belt."). With Beast Boy treating this so matter-of-factly, as though it were the most normal thing in the world to be doing, David didn't need too long before he was totally immersed in trying to find a proper setup. They went on this way for at least another half-hour, before Beast Boy finally changed the subject.

"So, you thought of a name yet?"

David hesitated at this unexpected comment. "What... what do you mean?" he asked.

"A superhero name?"

David let out a small groan. "Oh," he said, "that..."

"I know it's a big deal," said Beast Boy with a laugh, setting his feet up on the desk and putting his hands behind his head as he leaned back in his chair, " but it's not that hard to come up with, just think about whatever you think fits the best. 'Sides, you get to change it if you want. So, any ideas?"

David shook his head, staring down at the keyboard. "Not really," he said, leaving it at that.

"Well..." said Beast Boy in a tone David had by now learned to watch out for. "I mean, if you want, I could think up some. Maybe... 'Bombardier'?"

David shook his head, "Really, you don't have to..."

"How about, 'Dynamite'?"

This one generated a wince. "I mean it... I... thanks but..."

"No! No, wait! I know! You can be 'Master Blaster'!"

David had no reply to that suggestion save for a blank stare. "What?" asked Beast Boy, sitting up again, "those are good ones!"

"... yeah," said David, and he turned back to the computer slowly, trying not to roll his eyes. "Anyway, I don't have one yet. I'm not even sure why I need one..."

"It's so you can have a secret identity!"

"A what?"

"You know, a secret identity! Like how nobody knows who Superman or Batman is when they're not being Superman or Batman? That sort of thing!"

"But... why do I... why do _any_ of us need that?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well it's not like you're ever 'not' Beast Boy, right? I mean you guys are always in your uniforms, you only ever call each other 'Cyborg' or 'Raven' or whatever, and except for Robin, none of you have masks or disguises or anything."

For a moment, David worried that he had said something he shouldn't have, as Beast Boy suddenly became far more quiet than he was normally wont to, and instead of answering back, lowered his eyes a bit as he took his feet down from the desk and put them on the edge of the chair, tucking his knees in under his chin.

"I'm... I'm sorry," said David, certain he had done something he shouldn't have. "Did I... say something I shouldn't - "

"No, dude, don't worry," said Beast Boy, "it's just... it's like you said. I'm green, so I'd stand out whatever I called myself, so I guess_really _there's no reason not to use my real name..." he turned to David and flashed another grin, "you know, except that 'Beast Boy' is really cool."

David breathed a silent sigh of relief and smiled, and Beast Boy continued. "But, I mean, you could pass for normal if you wanted to, you know? Prob'ly better'n any of us could, cause you've been doing it for so long. You're not green or a space alien, or made of metal or whatever. So for you, if you use a superhero name, it means that if... something goes wrong, or if you wanna make a fresh start as another hero, or if you decide one day that you don't wanna do this anymore, you can just... stop. And if you do, then you'll still have your real name to use if you want."

David sat there for a moment or two, considering what Beast Boy had said. "Stop?"

"Well, you know, not _stop_ stop, because being a superhero is the coolest thing ever and all, but like, it's just sort of so that if you ever need to for some reason, you can go back and be David again, instead of being 'Bomb Squad', _which_, incidentally, is a totally cool name that you oughta use." Beast Boy crossed his arms and nodded professorially.

"There's no way I'm using 'Bomb Squad', said David. "But hang on a second,"

"Yeah?"

"So... you guys all _have_ real names then?"

"Of course, dude! What, did you think my _parents_ called me 'Beast Boy'? I mean, it's an awesome name, but that'd be really weird."

"No," said David, "no... I just... never really thought about it. I mean, you guys go by 'Cyborg' or whatever even with each other... so..." He let his sentence peter out as he considered what Beast Boy had been saying. He still had no idea what he was going to take as a name of course, but... even so... it was nice to think that whatever or whoever he would become in a few weeks or days or whatever, he wouldn't totally be leaving David Foster behind.

Made-up name or not, it was still one he didn't relish losing.

"So what is it?" he asked after another few moments.

"What's what?"

"Your real name," asked David, and to his surprise, Beast Boy's eyes widened and he sat up quickly.

"No way," he said, "no way I'm telling anyone that."

"What? Why not?"

"My name's _Beast Boy_," said the changeling with emphasis. "That's my real name now."

"But you just said that..."

"Dude, if I tell you, then you're gonna tell Cyborg, and then he's gonna make fun of me for it for like six weeks. There's no way I'm letting that happen."

"Wait, you mean Cyborg doesn't know your real name?"

Beast Boy shook his head and smiled. "We don't know each other's real names," he said, shrugging "except yours I guess. It's just... we just don't. Our superhero names are way cooler anyhow, so why not just use those. Oh... by the way, when you _do_ pick a name, do you want us to keep calling you David or calling you the new name?"

"I er..." said David, not sure at all of what to answer with, "I'll... have to let you guys know, I guess."

"It's up to you dude, but as for the rest of us, we never tell anyone any names except the ones we go by outside. Trust me, you'll never get any of the others to tell you their real names either."

**O-O-O**

**Day 12**

"Koriand'r",

David blinked. "Seriously?"

Starfire returned the puzzled blink. "Of... course," she said, "why would I speak of such a thing in jest?"

"No!" stumbled David quickly, "no, I just was surprised sort of... I didn't think you'd tell me."

Starfire laughed. "Why would I refrain from answering such a question?"

"Beast Boy said you guys never told each other your real names,"

"I do not believe Beast Boy has ever asked it of me," said Starfire, looking a bit bemused, "but surely there is no secret as to my proper mode of address, for you see, 'Starfire' is simply the translation of 'Koriand'r' in your language."

"Isn't that... isn't there a spice or something called 'Coriander'?"

"Oh yes," said Starfire with another grin, "it is most delicious when added to mustard pudding. Robin claims that it was not named for me, but I find it difficult to imagine otherwise, given the co-incidence, do you not agree?"

David decided it was best to simply smile and nod. He often found himself deciding this when talking to Starfire.

"Please, friend," asked Starfire in her own inimitable way, "what is the reason for your query? Have you succeeded in selecting a name for yourself for when you aid us in defeating the doers of evil?"

"Not... so much," admitted David, worried that Starfire was going to take this as permission to give him another host of suggestions. Fortunately, she did not.

"I understand that selecting such a thing can be most difficult. None of the others were made to do so themselves. Do you wish for aid in choosing the title you shall carry?"

David shrugged. "Thanks," he said, "but... wait... none of the others had to pick one?"

"To my knowledge, no," said Starfire, "Beast Boy and Robin both had their titles selected by those that trained them for battle. Cyborg took his when we all first met, at Beast Boy's true suggestion that there was no shame in being comprised partially of metal. And Raven..." Starfire trailed off for a second, and her expression turned to a puzzled frown. "... I do not know_ where_ Raven acquired her name, but she had it before we met. I believe the monks of her home world may have given it to her."

David didn't know what to say to that, and Starfire simply proceeded. "Regardless," she said, "I would be most honored to assist you in choosing an appellation that will strike fear into the doers of evil everywhere..." she smiled and actually blushed a bit, "... but I confess... I do not know what sorts of names would be... appropriate for such a thing on your planet."

Every once in a while, David had to admit, it was refreshing to speak with someone who _also_ didn't quite understand everything that was going on around here. "Thanks," he said, "but I'll think of something."

Now if only he could be sure that were so.

"Well, shall we resume the activities of the day then, friend David?" she asked with a sweet smile that almost distracted one from the fact that as she was saying it, she was casually lifting a half ton piece of equipment up and depositing it on the ground next to her. "The launcher of discusses is in place and ready."

"Erm... sure..." said David, reaching down to his side and unclipping the metal stick that Raven had been training him with. As he lifted it, it began to emit a red aura like the flickering flames of a candle. Neither he nor Starfire paid it any mind.

"Then let us commence..."

Slowly at first, then more and more rapidly, the discuss launcher began to fling small plastic disks at David, who dug his feet in, crouched into a ready stance, and prepared to deflect them. As they approached, he lifted the baton carefully, and then swung it violently down, as though clubbing something or someone directly in front of him. The baton bit into nothing but the air, but the nearest discus disintegrated and crashed to the ground with a puff of smoke. Quickly he brought the baton back up again and swung once more, this time to his right and left, and as though in mimicry of his motions, two more discuses exploded. Again and again he swung, and again and again the discusses flew off course, broke into pieces, or simply exploded and vanished into nothingness. After a few more seconds, the pace increased, and David turned to one side, crouching even lower to present a smaller target, letting several of the discusses fly past as he concentrated on the ones that -

The buzzer sounded as one of the discusses that had missed him by more than a foot slammed into the wall behind him. David was instantly knocked out of his concentration with a gasp of surprise, for he had yet to be hit by one of the flying targets, and in fact had been doing just as Robin had trained him to do, or so he thought.

"What... what'd I do?" he asked Starfire, who was watching him carefully.

"Forgive me," she said, a preface that accompanied a good half of everything Starfire ever said, "you have been performing admirably, but... perhaps you have not understood the purpose of this exercise?"

David hesitated. "I... thought I was supposed to blow the targets out of the air?"

"You were," said Starfire, "but... perhaps I should demonstrate..."

As quickly as she could, Starfire suddenly snatched one of the discuses up from the launcher next to her and hurled it at David. Thin and fragile plastic though it was, David had no time to react with anything but instinct, and he dove to the ground as it passed overhead and shattered on the wall behind him. Only after the discus had already shattered did David slowly recover his wits and start to get back up, only to find Starfire already standing over him with a smile on her face, extending a hand to help. He accepted it, and after she helped him to his feet, she asked him an odd question, the applicability of which he could not discern.

"Do you possess faith in your own abilities?"

David blinked. "Excuse me?"

"Your... powers," asked Starfire. "Have you ever felt that there has been a time where they did not behave as you desired them to? Do they not always function in the same manner?"

"Um... no..." said David, now completely lost. "I don't think so... I mean... I have to concentrate and maybe use these psychosomatic aids to get them to - "

"Splendid!" exclaimed Starfire, "Then we may commence the teaching of having faith within them."

"I don't understand," said David. "Faith?"

"Allow me to attempt to explain," said Starfire. "In order to fly, or to utilize the starbolts, I must feel certain emotions. For flight, I must experience the joy that is flying within my head. For a starbolt, I must invoke a righteous fury at the doings and actions of my enemies. This is how Tamaraneans control their powers. However, when I am fighting with an enemy, I may at times be feeling other things, such as fear, or concern, or pain, or simply anything else. And so, even though I do not at that moment feel the boundless joy or the unquenched fury that is necessary to utilize my powers, I will sometimes leap from a tall building, or step out in front of a monstrous creature anyway."

David nodded slowly, only half-understanding what Starfire was saying, as she continued. "I am able to do this," she said, "because I trust that before I fall to the ground, or before the monster is able to crush me, I will be able to marshal the appropriate feeling and begin either to fly or to fire the starbolts. I have faith that my powers, which have never failed me before, will manifest themselves in time to prevent an... unfortunate occurrence. All of us do this to some extent. For example, Beast Boy will allow Raven to push him off of buildings because he has faith that he will be able, as he always is, to transform into a creature of flight, and avoid impacting with the rocks below."

And often, this alone is what permits all of us to defeat whatever foes we are summoned to combat, for if we did not have faith in our powers, we would hesitate whenever we were called to make use of them, and instead attempt to rely on more... normal... actions. When I flung the plastic discuss at you, you evaded it through diving to the ground. What you must learn to do instead, is to evade it not by doing as you would if you had no powers, but by trusting that your powers will protect you as they have always done."

As though to punctuate her last statement, the discus launcher suddenly fired a trio of discuses at both David and Starfire. With one graceful action, Starfire spun around and launched three starbolts that intercepted the discuses in mid-air, reducing all three to heaps of smoldering ash. She allowed her momentum to complete her spin, rotating back around to face David, who had barely had a chance to blink.

"Had I not reacted in such a fashion," said Starfire, "they would likely have struck you, would they not?"

David was forced to concede that they would, for he could not possibly have reacted in time.

"It is for this reason that you must learn to trust in your powers, for they provide the best means for you to defeat an enemy before they can harm innocent citizens of Jump City."

"How... how do I do that?" asked David. "I... I didn't think when I duck, I just... did it..."

"Of course," said Starfire, "but with practice, you may learn to do otherwise, even without thinking. It is not at all difficult to learn."

"It's... it's not?"

Starfire giggled and flew up into the air. "Certainly not," she said, "once you begin to trust your powers a small amount, you will automatically begin to do so more and more. They are your powers, and you know that you may always rely on them, as you may always rely on your friends, though that may take some time longer to learn."

The last statement caused David to hesitate. "What do you mean?"

Starfire landed once more and smiled. "Sometimes it is not simply I who must jump from the tall building," she said. "Sometimes Robin must also do so, and he must trust that I shall use my powers to catch him before he strikes the ground. He must trust that I trust my powers enough to save him, and he must do so without thinking twice."

David had seen them do this exact thing before of course, in person as well as on the television, but he had never thought about it in terms of the trust that was required for such a thing. "Wow..." was all he could say.

"It is perhaps the greatest thing in the universe, such trust," said Starfire. "You will see,"

"Even so," said David, "I... I don't know if I could really jump off a building and expect someone else to catch me, you know?"

"It is not an easy thing to do," said Starfire, "but that was not what I meant."

"What... what did you mean?"

"Incredible though it is," said Starfire, as she walked over to David, "the greatest thing in the world is not jumping off a building and knowing that your friends will catch you. The greatest thing is to have friends who will jump off a building without hesitation, because they trust that you will catch them."

David's eyes widened and he had difficulty for a moment forming a coherent sentence. "Star... that... that sounds terrifying, not great," he finally said, not sure why he had said it, but very sure that he meant every word. Starfire however merely smiled, as she extended one hand and placed it gently on David's shoulder, a gesture of re-assurance and understanding.

"You will find, Friend David," she said, "that it is both."

**O-O-O**

**Day 14**

"Come on man, we're waitin'. Let's see it."

David's voice filtered out through the bathroom door. "Almost done," he said, "just one second,"

"Did I get the sizes right? Nomex shrinks when you dry it, so I had to compensate by eye."

"I think it's fine," called David from within, "I just... give me one minute."

"Hurry up, dude," yelled Beast Boy, "Cyborg wants to see how good a seamstress he is!"

"I told you already, grass stain," yelled Cyborg back angrily, "nobody sewed anything! This stuff's polymerized and pieced together with a nano-lathe. Don't be tryin' to call me a - "

Beast Boy cut him off. "Hey, Cy, when we're done here, I think Starfire could use a new dress, maybe you could make her something with ruffles? Since you're so good with a needle and thread..."

"Oh, would you be willing to provide me with such a thing, Cyborg? I do not know what the 'ruffles' are which Beast Boy speaks of, but if you are willing, there was a lovely picture I saw in a magazine of... is something the matter with Beast Boy's neck? Is it necessary that you squeeze it in such a manner?"

"Both of you, knock it off," said Robin, with no apparent effect, as Beast Boy became a hummingbird, and flew around teasing Cyborg and deftly evading the metallic teen's swipes. Raven looked like she was rapidly approaching the point of flinging both Cyborg and Beast Boy out the nearest window, but fortunately for all concerned, a moment later, David's voice filtered back through the door.

"Okay... I... I think I've got it all set."

"Well then let's see it, dude, come on out," came Beast Boy's reply as he resumed normal form. There was a moment's shuffling from behind the door, the soft sound of a deep breath being taken, and then suddenly it slid aside, and David gingerly stepped out into the hallway, where the overhead light revealed the uniform he was wearing.

The two-piece uniform was red, red like a fire engine, similar to Robin's tunic's color, but several shades lighter, and unlike Robin, David's uniform was predominantly-so. Only on the sleeves and the pant legs did the color change, tapering slowly from a still solid red at the knees and elbows to a yellowish orange at the wrists and ankles. The pant legs were bloused over the tops of David's orange boots, like those of a paratrooper, and the soft 'clink' as David stepped into the hallway revealed the ferro-ceramic shock absorbers built into the soles. Coupled with a pair of fiery-orange fingerless gloves made of polymerized titanium, the suit had the appearance of... of all things... a freeze-framed explosion, with a dark core and a brighter periphery. The suit moved and looked like normal cloth, but looks were deceiving. Partly nomex, partly kevlar, partly other polymers woven together like threads and attached via a process few people could pronounce much less understand, the suit was connected at the waist by a small locking belt of a brass-colored metal, with several clips on it, all presently empty. Neither hat, nor mask, nor other head covering did David wear, but standing there in the hallway in front of everyone in his brand new uniform, his face was rapidly turning the color of the rest of his suit, and his eyes were fixed on the ground, darting back and forth as he awaited judgment, as self-conscious at present as if afflicted with stage fright.

For a few moments, nobody said anything, long enough for curiosity to overcome embarrassment, and slowly David lifted his head, hesitantly at first, then finally fully, to try and gauge the reaction he was about to get. It took him several times cycling through looking from Titan to Titan to realize that nobody was laughing.

It took him several more to realize that everyone was smiling.

Cyborg was the first to break the silence. "Damn, man," he said, "I didn't know any better, I'd think you were ready to go kick some bad guy butt!"

"You... really?" A lame reply, but the best David could conjure given everything. He was still half-convinced that he looked absolutely ridiculous.

"A most excellent costume with which to kick the butt!" agreed Starfire. "It reminds me of the royal guard of the court of the emperor at Yereslass III." David resolved to simply take her word for it.

"Not bad," admitted Raven, which was among the more expressive forms of approval David had ever recalled hearing Raven use. "But is it gonna hold up?"

"A polymer weave like that is solid as a rock," said Cyborg. "I based it on Robin's cloak, actually. It's completely fireproof, five times tougher than steel wool, and it'll hold up against anything short of a high powered rifle."

"It'll protect him if he gets knocked around then," asked Robin, and David guessed it was more for his benefit than Robin's edification.

"I figured he's gonna be dealin' with plenty of shrapnel once he starts mixing it up," said Cyborg confidently, "so I double-plaited the weave. You could take a belt sander to that thing and not tear it. It'll hold up against a spill or two."

"And you're not having any trouble moving?"

David rotated his arms a few times and moved his shoulders and legs. "No..." he said, "it feels... it feels pretty good." To be frank, his relief at not looking like a complete idiot was such that he almost felt like he could do cartwheels in this suit... not that he could do cartwheels generally...

Robin stepped back and nodded. "Then I'd say," said Robin, "you're ready for your big test."

David took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "I guess we'll find out," he said, and he turned to walk off towards the training room. He had not made more than half a pace, when Robin unexpectedly turned to all the others, and said something David did not expect to hear.

"All right," said Robin, "let's all go get lunch."

David paused in mid-stride. "Lunch?" he asked, puzzled, "I thought I was supposed to do this... test?"

"Well we just go and do it right now," said Beast Boy with a grin. "We've gotta wait for the next alert."

David felt a chill run down his spine, "... a... alert?"

There were several glances back and forth between several of the Titans, coupled with grins David might have called mischievous had he not suddenly lost the capacity to think straight. Robin turned back to him to explain.

"Of course," said Robin with a soft smirk that was his trademark, or one of them. "It's a_field_ test, David, not a training exercise. It's time to use you've learned in the real world."

The temperature in the hallway seemed to lower as Robin said that, and David felt his hands starting to shake, but he somehow managed to find the courage (and Lord-knew-how) to give Robin a slight nod, as though he had somehow known this all along.

He fooled nobody.

"Come on," said Cyborg, putting a massive hand on David's shoulder, "you're gonna want to eat somethin' before we go out, and I wanna make sure that uniform of yours gives you totally free movement. Can't have it gettin' in your way when it's bad guy butt kicking time, can we?"

Eating was, perhaps, the last thing in the universe David wanted to do just now, but there was nothing for it, and slowly, he and the five Titans made their way towards the common room to get lunch, and to await for the alert that would no doubt arrive soon. Murphy's Law dictated that much. To David, it did not however feel like grabbing a bit of lunch before going out to save the universe. It felt far more like a last meal for a condemned prisoner. Such at least was what his emotions were telling him, while his intellect was trying to argue that with the five other Titans there, that everything would be fine, that he had handled Cinderblock alone, and that it would turn out to be easy, just like the others said it was.

He just hoped that part of him was the one that was right.

* * *

**Author's Note:** Please, whether you liked, hated, or were indifferent towards this chapter, please leave me a review, that I might benefit from your experience of having read it, and thus render to you a better chapter next time. Thank you so much for reading!


	19. To Protect and Serve

**Disclaimer: **After this much writing, you'd think I'd get to at least _rent_ the Teen Titans, no?_  
_

**Author's Note:** A reviewer once told me that I was no longer permitted to apologize to my readers for the length of my chapters. That admonishment was given to me for a thirteen thousand word chapter. The one below... is more than half again larger.

Once again, my desired timetable for updates has fallen by the wayside, but this time I have some excuse. My chapter simply was too long to write in the allotted time, and rather than breaking it up again, I have decided this time to keep it intact. Given that, I beg you all to forgive me my trespasses in this installment, for no doubt most of you will find it too long. It was a long, bloody, agonizing time in the making, but now it is finished, and I present it to you all in the sublime hopes that within its pages, you will find something to enjoy. Please, as always, whether you hated the chapter or not, leave me a review so that I might know what you thought, for your thoughts, opinions, criticisms, and suggestions are all priceless jewels to me. Thank you all once more, and I hope to see you for Chapter 20.

* * *

**Chapter 19: To Protect and Serve**

_"In times of trouble, adversity, and pain, you may well find to your amazement that you are braver than you know, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think."_

- A. A. Milne

**O-O-O**

Lunch was a quiet affair, relatively speaking.

Granted, 'quiet' was not the word one normally associated with Titans' Tower even at its most serene, and mealtimes were usually anything but. Cyborg and Beast Boy could always be counted upon to engage in an epic battle over what sort of food should be served (Cyborg's idea of 'lunch' being six pounds of beef per person, and Beast Boy's being about the same amount of tofu and soybean), and on the off-chance that they were both satisfied with what was being served, there was always the games of who got to be the first one to try Starfire's latest concoction (David _swore_ that the others were cheating but couldn't prove it), Robin's futile attempts to use lunch as an opportunity to comment on the last training session, or Raven's occasional pyrotechnic outbursts whenever Beast Boy or someone else managed to get on her nerves (which was how Beast Boy had come to be cleaning maple syrup off the ceiling the day before). Even if none of the above was happening however, it was usually a matter of everyone talking, arguing, joking, laughing, and otherwise making plenty of noise.

And so it was today, except that David couldn't keep his mind on any of it.

He'd never been that talkative at lunch (or any other time), but over the last few weeks (and months), he'd been slowly coming out of his shell in that regard, at least enough to participate in the conversation, whatever it was. Today though, he was as nervous as he ever remembered being in his life, and could barely manage to stop from glancing back every ten seconds at the large red alarm that was mounted above the main viewing screen in the lounge section of the Common Room. Indeed, several times he did so, but so far it had remained dark, quiet, waiting. It might not have been so bad if it had been a simple matter of a countdown, or some other scheduled thing, he had been preparing to take this 'final test' after all for over two weeks, but the most unsettling thing about it was not knowing when the hammer was going to fall, not knowing when the alarm would sound and he, along with everyone else, would have to drop everything and race off to engage in a battle that could well be even greater than the ones he had fought against Cinderblock.

It could happen in five seconds. It could happen in five days. There was no telling when.

"You gotta eat somethin', man," said Cyborg, snapping David back into the moment once again. "Trust me, you don't wanna go out there on an empty stomach. 'Sides, how can you resist Cy's famous Five Alarm Chili?"

"Yeah," said Beast Boy with a snicker, "five alarms to poison control maybe." He extended a plate of his own food towards David. "Try some of my veggie chili, dude," he said. "One bite and you'll never want to eat anything else."

"Man, I told you already, it ain't chili without beef! All you got there is bean soup!" Cyborg picked up the pot of his chili and held it up, sniffing the aroma that came off it. "Now_this_, this is _chili_. Just what you want when it's time to kick butt."

Beast Boy sat back and made a face. "Pft! Whatever, dude. This is the best stuff on the_planet_. All your meat paste is good for is patching tires."

David temporized by accepting half a bowl of each, but the argument simmered on for several more minutes until Raven (who as usual seemed to subsist on herbal tea and meditation alone) threatened to force feed each of them the other's chili, which was a credible enough threat to change the subject. Starfire then proceeded to describe in some detail her experience in what appeared to be a hair salon (she called it an "advanced braiding maneuver institution"), and explained how pleasantly surprised she had been to find a passable imitation of the Tamaranean delicacy "Zazgarl". Nobody had the heart (or the stomach) to ask what kind of a "delicacy" she had found in a hair salon.

All of this was as it always was, and yet it didn't serve to loosen the knot that was settled inside David's stomach. Every so often, Robin would glance over at him, and he would mechanically force himself to take a few bites (in this state, he frankly couldn't tell the difference between the two chilis), but it was the best he could do, and other than the odd topics of conversation, all of which had long since faded into the nebulous realm of "normal", there was plenty to remind him that what he was about to do was anything but. Cyborg had insisted he make sure the uniform wasn't constricting his movement in any way, and it wasn't, but even if not uncomfortable it was certainly unfamiliar. Nomex and Kevlar simply didn't _feel_ anything like cotton or denim, nor did his shock-absorbing, traction-enhanced boots feel anything like the sneakers he was accustomed to. The fingerless gloves, also made of polymer, didn't quite get in his way, but having lived his entire life in California, he'd never worn gloves before for any length of time, and they _were_ a bit distracting. True, they didn't seem to slow him down any, and they certainly made it easier to get a (physical) grip on things, but it was one more reminder that he was walking into uncharted territory.

The stainless steel baton sitting in his lap was another.

He wished he could relax. He knew he should be relaxing. He knew that what was about to happen, however bad it was, was something he had trained for, and that there were all of the other Titans with him if anything went wrong. He knew that this was the sort of thing that the five of them usually handled by themselves, and that therefore they would never _really_ let anything happen to him. But every time he shut his eyes or zoned out of the conversation, all he could see was the black dragon on the roof, about to incinerate him, or the ravening beast in the sewers, slashing to tear his guts out and lay him out on the concrete...

... or Cinderblock.

Sharp laughs snapped him back into reality once more, as everyone (save Raven) was laughing at a joke Beast Boy had told a moment ago that he had completely missed. He smiled anyway, just to give the impression he had been paying attention. Most everyone had finished, and David had eaten just about everything he felt that he was going to be able to eat today. Still, nobody left the table just yet, unwilling to start doing the dishes perhaps, or just sensing that David was not exactly attentive. He did notice that while the Titans were as relaxed as they always were with the prospect of an alert staring them in the face (they were always on call after all), none of them mentioned anything about what was to come. They were trying to put him at ease.

Had anything worked, it might well have been that, but nothing much did.

Eventually, there was no putting it off further, and Beast Boy wearily rose to do the dishes (it was his turn), while the others slowly filed out to whatever else they were doing. Starfire remained behind in the common room to watch one of her favorite television shows ("World of Fungus"), and Raven settled in on the other couch to continue reading whatever book she was presently going through (all David knew was that it was hardbound in leather, and would probably try to eat him if he ever touched it). The other two chose to make an exit at this stage, Cyborg to his garage, Robin to his evidence room, and David decided to follow their example by going back to his own room for a little while.

He didn't get there.

He no longer got lost in the tower, at least not on the top couple of levels. The hallways twisted and turned in permutations that seemed to defy physics, but enough repetition could stamp the layout of even a labyrinth such as this into his head. His trouble was not finding his room, his trouble was making it that far. A wave of nausea hit him like a baseball bat to the stomach in the middle of the hallway, and stopped him cold, doubling him over and nearly knocking him to the floor save that he managed to catch the wall with his hand, the baton falling out of his grip and clattering to the ground. He shut his eyes tightly and dug his fingers into the wallpaper, trying not to be sick, and ultimately managing to hold down the contents of his stomach, if only barely. After a minute or two, he slowly lowered himself down to the floor, and simply sat there, sweat standing out on his forehead, his hands trembling slightly as he slowly picked up the baton he'd dropped and fiddled with it like a priest fiddling with prayer beads. His heart was thundering in his ears, his breath coming in ragged hisses, and it took effort, real effort, to shift his vision into the netherworld of dancing particles that he often took refuge in when he needed to steady himself.

... and all this before he had even left the Tower.

He was about to embark on the usual round of self-recriminations for his worn and taut nerves, when he heard footsteps approaching, and lifted his head as his eyes took in light once again rather than whatever they were perceiving when it came time to destroy things. This shift too took effort, a testament to how tense he really was, and by the time it was done, Robin was standing in front of him with his arms crossed, looking as implacable as he ever did, with a vaguely smug look on his face that the mask did nothing to dispel. David, still trying to slow his racing heart rate, did no more than glance up at him furtively, half-worried for a moment that he was about to get some kind of lecture on never showing fear or something similar.

"Nervous?"

Robin's casual tone put him off his guard, and he looked up for a second. For the past weeks, Robin had been his training instructor, and had been telling him what to do and how to do it, but that was not who was standing before him now. Robin seemed... relaxed perhaps was an exaggeration, but at least _more_ relaxed than normal, somewhat ironically given that he had caught David in the exact opposite state. David did not doubt for one instant that the answer to Robin's question was written all over him, but he replied honestly nonetheless. It helped a bit.

"Yeah."

Robin did not lecture or recite a catchphrase, but simply nodded, keeping his thoughts to himself, as ever. Instead of the lecture, he leaned back against the wall, his arms still crossed, regarding the psychokinetic as if watching a documentary of some sort on television.

"You mind if I ask you a question?"

David almost forgot his own nerves for a second, so unexpected was this from Robin, who was usually as direct as a punch to the face, a trait he shared with Raven. There could only of course be one answer.

"Um... sure."

"Why are you doing this?"

David blinked. "What?"

"You remember when we started training, I asked you if you were willing to try to become a hero?" explained Robin, "You said you were, and I believed you, and I still do. You were willing to try. You did try. And you're ready now, except that I still can't figure out why you're acting like this."

The tone might not have been accusatory, but the words assuredly were. "What are you talking about?" asked David. Was it to be a lecture against showing fear after all?

It was not. "I don't mean why you act scared. I mean why you keep acting like a civilian."

David wasn't sure if he was more puzzled at the question or at the fact that it had been asked. "I _am_ a civilian," he said by way of answer, knowing it wasn't what Robin wanted to hear, but not caring.

"No," said Robin, shaking his head slightly, "you're not."

David managed a smirk of his own. "I thought I was supposed to have this 'test' before we decided that."

"The test is to see if you can become a superhero and a Titan," said Robin with perfect equanimity. "That's not what I'm talking about. I don't mean you're not a civilian _now_. I mean you never _were_ one, but you act like one anyway, and you've been doing it for so long that you think that's what you are."

By now, David was having trouble determining if Robin was trying to lecture him, insult him, or simply asking harmless questions. "Look," he said, "I'm..._really_ not sure what you're talking about, so..."

Robin slowly crouched down, still facing David with his masked gaze, and spoke in a tone that was oddly unhurried, as though they were discussing subjects of no concern to anyone at all.

"David," said Robin, "I'm just trying to be honest here, all right?" David nodded, but said nothing, bracing for impact. Nobody ever prefaced their words with such a thing unless they had something particularly difficult to impart. Robin continued.

"Do you actually _know_ how powerful you are?" asked Robin, "because I don't think you do."

"What do you mean?" replied David unevenly.

"I mean," said Robin with perfect confidence, "that you have no idea of just how dangerous you really are." He shrugged. "I guess there's no way you _could_ have an idea, not from just training, but if you're scared of what's about to happen, why aren't you thinking about what happened with Cinderblock?"

David failed to suppress a shudder at the suggestion. "I'd really rather not."

"That's a mistake," said Robin, but there was no sternness to his tone. "You took Cinderblock out. By yourself. No backup, no support, no help from anybody. I've seen Cinderblock destroy buildings, flatten entire city blocks, and so have you. You know how powerful he was, because he spent most of the last five months trying to kill you. You remember what happened at the center, on the waterfront, and last month on Battery Street, right? You were scared of him then?"

"Of... of course I was..."

"So if he was so powerful, and I'm not trying to say he wasn't, then what does it say that you hurt him worse than _anyone_ had ever hurt him before, and stopped him cold in his tracks, by yourself."

David didn't answer directly. "Any one of you guys could have handled Cinderblock by yourselves," he said. "Cyborg told me that he _did_ once, and Cinderblock barely touched him. I nearly got killed."

"But you _didn't_ get killed," said Robin. "He did."

"I didn't kill Cinderblock," insisted David, his throat tightening as he said it. Robin's reply was immediate.

"No, you didn't. But you knocked him out harder than anyone ever has, even Cyborg."

"Yeah, because I got lucky and blew a gas main."

"And you think luck doesn't have anything to do with what we do?" replied Robin without skipping a beat. "All of us would be dead long ago if it wasn't for luck."

David didn't know weather to shiver or laugh, and wound up doing both. "Is that supposed to make me feel better?"

"Honestly?" said Robin, "it really should."

"I'm supposed to feel good about the fact that I'd be dead if it wasn't for where the city planners laid their gas pipeline?"

"No," said Robin, "you're supposed to realize that even if the rest of us could have done the same thing to Cinderblock, and yeah, any of us probably could have, we're _not_ civilians, and neither are you."

If only it were so simple. David however did not have the stomach to argue this any further. "I guess we'll find out," he said lamely, lowering his head again. He half-expected Robin to leave, or change the subject, or at least do something, but Robin didn't move, didn't speak, and didn't give any reply. A few moments of awkward silence were enough to draw another comment out of David.

"Look," he said, "you were the one who kept saying not to get overconfident, right? Don't assume you have what it takes, don't assume you know how to beat the other guy, always assume the worst? So why do you care how I feel about all this? Civilian, hero, I go out, I do what I'm supposed to do, isn't that all that's important?"

Robin's vague smile vanished as if dispelled by magic, replaced with a disappointed frown. David nearly winced, and was working up the courage to ask what was the matter when Robin answered.

"That isn't what I said," said Robin with a dead serious tone that indicated he was no longer simply having a friendly conversation. "You're not supposed to think that it's going to be easy, or get complacent about fighting a criminal or a supervillain, but you _have_ to believe you have what it takes, and that you _can_ and _will_beat the other guy. I can't teach you how to do that. Nobody can. But you _have_ to."

David sighed and shook his head. "Robin, I..." he wasn't sure how to put this, but decided for the direct method. It seemed to pay the best dividends insofar as Robin was concerned.

"I... never thought for a second that I could actually beat Cinderblock," he said. "Not while I was fighting him, not ever. I thought... I thought maybe I could... I dunno, put off him crushing me to a pulp or something, but not beat him. It just happened... so _fast_, and then all of a sudden there was the gas main and I set off a spark and then when I woke up he was.., down. So I mean..." he rubbed his scalp with the palm of his hand nervously. "... why does it matter what I believe, as long as I do my best at it?"

"Well for one thing," replied Robin, "it matters if you get so worried and worked up about going out on an alert that you make yourself too sick to take the test. It matters if you're thinking about this like you're a civilian, because no civilian in the world can do this sort of thing, and you know it, so you start assuming you're going to get beaten, or worse yet, killed, and those kinds of assumptions become self-fulfilling after a while. I'm not trying to say you're wrong to be nervous or scared, everybody gets that, especially their first time, but you get so focused on the idea that you're not good enough to do this that you're going to wind up finding a way to prove it to yourself." Robin folded his arms again and concluded with a smirk. "Or if not that, then you're at least going to give yourself an ulcer, and trust me, those aren't fun. Take it from someone who knows a thing or two about stress."

"Somehow I'm not surprised," said David, but his heart wasn't in the sarcasm.

Robin stood back up. "My point is," he said, "yes, you should always be a little worried about what's going to happen, but not like this, and not for these reasons. D'you think I'd actually let you take a field test if you weren't ready for one?"

David had to admit he hadn't thought of it that way. "What if you're wrong?"

"I'm not," said Robin, with a tone that brooked absolutely no contradictions, a hair removed, if that, from the tone he used to give orders in. "There's a whole lot you don't know, so you're going to have to trust me. You know that fighting Cinderblock was the hardest thing you've ever done in your life, but you don't know or don't realize just how big of a thing that was. And part of that's because we got mixed up with the attack at the same time and there wasn't a chance to debrief, but the trap they sprung _worked_. They figured as long as they got you alone away from the rest of us, they'd kill you, but they didn't because you stopped Cinderblock by yourself, which I didn't think you could do, and neither did they. And if you can stop Cinderblock by yourself, then you can handle pretty much anything we're likely to meet on a normal alert with all five of us there. But even so, you still act like a civilian, which I don't get, because you're not one and you never were."

"What do you mean I never was?" asked David.

"You've had these powers since forever, or so you say, right? I'm not gonna lie, I don't know what that's like. I don't have powers, but I know way too many people who do, and none of them are as shy about throwing them around as you, not even Raven. You had them for six years? Eight years? And you used them once before the first attack?"

"Pretty much."

"Denying that they exist doesn't make them go away. Why didn't you ever use them? Most people with powers can't _stop_ using them, just look at Beast Boy."

"Beast Boy doesn't cause a pyroclastic molecular explosion when he sneezes."

"That's just it, neither do _you_. All the fights, all the training, all the _time_ you've been here, you've never once had them go off without wanting them to. No matter how scared you get, how angry you get, they've always done exactly what you want, right? People who _can't_ control their powers sometimes try to hide them, and lots of metahumans try not to let anyone know that they are, but you don't look abnormal and except for those focuses you don't do anything obviously paranormal when you cause an explosion. Raven swears that there's something fishy about you and that you can't be telling us everything, but I think you _are_ telling us the truth. I think you didn't use your powers, never tried to be anything except another kid in an orphanage, because that's what you wanted to be."

David didn't say anything, and didn't look up. Robin didn't sound like he was angry or upset or even disappointed, but he did sound worried, and that was almost worse.

And then he asked a pointed question. "You never wanted to be a hero, did you?"

David lifted his eyes.

"Growing up. Did you ever want to be one? Most kids do at some point, especially the ones in orphanages and foster homes... but I don't think you did."

David took a large breath and let it out slowly. "No," he said, "I didn't."

"Why not?"

Beast Boy had asked him this a long time ago, up on the roof the day he had agreed to train with Robin. He had had no good answer then. He had no better one now.

"I don't know."

Robin said nothing, just waited for David to take a guess, and a long pause later, he did.

"I didn't... I didn't think I could be one. Not... not that I couldn't blow things up, and all, but... I didn't think I could handle being a hero. Not a superhero, a hero. With responsibilities, and people looking up to me, and all the rest of it. I mean... I didn't know about you guys, so for the kids at the centers it was usually Superman." He looked up at Robin, shaking his head. "Who seriously looks at _Superman_ and says 'I could do that'?" He shrugged and shook his head, and took a few more deep breaths. "The other kids dreamed about being a superhero because they knew it wasn't ever going to happen, because they weren't special and didn't have powers or military combat training. I _had_ powers... so it wasn't the same thing. I thought that if I ever used them... or if people found out that I had them, then I'd have to go and try to be like Superman. I'd have to go and try to be heroic or powerful and if I didn't get killed, which I probably would, then I'd kill someone else, or let someone else get killed because they were relying on me. So... I never used them. I was... always too afraid that I'd like using them so much I couldn't stop."

"You didn't think you had it in you to be a hero?"

David shook his head. "No."

"There's about four hundred people who might say different after what happened on Battery Street," said Robin

David chuckled a bit. "Yeah," he said with a sigh, "well... this was before."

"So what about now?" asked Robin.

"Now?"

"Have you changed your mind? You saved hundreds of people out there a couple weeks ago. You saved that girl you met up with when you went after Beast Boy and Raven. You stopped Cinderblock, fought Adonis to a standstill, and now you're one test run away from being offered a position on the team." Robin smiled a bit. "Most people would be a little excited."

"Well, like you said," said David, his face taking on a wry smirk of its own, "I'm not like most people. You see an chance to go out and 'prove myself' or something? I don't. I see a chance to go out and get killed. Or maybe get other people killed."

"But you're still here," said Robin. "If that's all there was to it, you could have just quit, and stayed here in the Tower. You still can. So why didn't you stop? If you actually think you're going to wind up dead, or killing someone, or failing somebody somehow, then why did you agree to do this in the first place?"

David searched for an answer for a moment or two, before finally looking back up at Robin, and answering with the only reason he had to give.

"I..." he stammered softly, "I wanted to be wrong."

And at that moment, the lights flashed red, and the alarm sounded, deep, unmistakable, a call to battle. Robin merely glanced up at the flashing red light in the middle of the hallway for a moment, then slowly returned his gaze to the psychokinetic, still sitting against the opposite wall, whose expression had frozen on his face like an oil painting. Slowly, as if to indicate that it was all right to breathe, the leader of the Titans extended a hand to David.

"Then let's find out how wrong you are."

With a last deep and fitful breath to steady himself, David took Robin's offered hand to help himself up, and then with one last nod to Robin, both teens turned and ran down the hallway towards the elevator.

It was gametime...

**O-O-O**

And what a game it was that was set before them...

The T-car's engine snarled and roared as it hurtled down the streets like a cannonball, the stoplights shifting to green as it passed while traffic parted for it as though it were an ambulance or a fire truck. Cyborg, at the wheel as always, swerved it left and right around cars, trucks, and other obstacles like a skier in a slalom course, not even bothering to consult the overhead map that the T-car's computer was displaying for him. The pillar of smoke looming over the rooftops was enough of a guide point.

Over the radio, tuned into the police band, came ever more frantic calls for aid. Shouts and static and the muffled sounds of what might have been gunfire or explosions or who knew what else competed with the frantic voice that came over the radio, speaking in a tone of barely-controlled panic that David recognized as easily as he would a familiar face.

"Ten thirty-five!" came the voice, "Code ten thirty-five! Emergency! We're under attack, I repeat, under attack! Shots fired! Officers in danger! Code ten thirty-five! We need backup down here!"

"To hell with backup!" shouted someone else into the radio. "We need the Titans, ASAP! We're under atta- "

There was a sharp crack and muffled blast, followed by static, and Cyborg leaned forward to switch the radio off. Nobody in the car needed to hear any more to determine what they were driving into, certainly not David, whose worst nightmares were parading loose in his head at each snatch of sound. He was wedged in the backseat of the T-car, on the passenger side behind Beast Boy and next to Starfire. Work of art though the T-car was, its present incarnation sat only five, and so Robin had opted to make the trip on the R-cycle, which was presently pacing the car just outside David's window. David however wasn't watching Robin. Indeed he wasn't watching anyone, his eyes shut and his breath coming in slow, even intakes and exhales, as he tried to dispel the queasy feeling in his stomach. Despite how much it felt like carsickness, he knew it wasn't that.

After all, it had started before he got in the car.

"What is the location of this disturbance, Cyborg?" asked Starfire, who sounded totally unperturbed at the thought of entering an urban warzone, to the point where David was envious.

"The cops said it was at 14th Street and Kearney," said Cyborg. "That's the federal bank."

"Dude, _another_ bank?" groaned Beast Boy. "We _just_ finished with a bunch of bank robbers last week. What gives?"

"That's where the money is, man," said Cyborg with a shrug. "'Sides, this sounds a little heavier than just a bunch of bank robbers."

Robin's voice piped in over the speakers from his motorcycle helmet as though he were sitting inside the car himself. "I told the police to back off, and let us handle it. They say it looks like an organized robbery team. Well armed. They're shooting at the police."

Cyborg smiled greedily in anticipation of the fight to come. "They shoulda picked another city," he said, swerving around a delivery truck hard enough to knock David against the door. He glanced at the other Titans, trying to discern if any of them were in the least worried about what they were proposing to do. Starfire was staring ahead with her hand clenching the armrest of her seat, as if eager to burst out of the car like a phoenix and thrash whoever had violated the sanctity of their city. Raven was looking away, her reflection in the window revealing that she looked as bored as she ever did, as if this was nothing more than a giant imposition on their time. Beast Boy's smirk in the rear view mirror was blossoming into a feral grin, anticipating no doubt the spectacular fight he was about to engage in, and in his mind, inevitably win. Cyborg's tone of voice and his driving made his own feelings clear. And while he couldn't see Robin's expression from where he was sitting, he had no doubt that Robin was already entering that professional zone he entered when it was time to go to work.

None of _them_ were afraid.

Which of course didn't help at all, but... there was nothing for that. All he could do was to clench his fingers tighter around the handle of the riot baton held against his chest, and close his eyes, and breathe deeply, letting his mind focus on the baton, following the thought pathways that led to where he needed to be. Gradually he felt the baton begin to throb in his hand like a living thing, warm and cool, warm and cool, in tune with the beating of his own heart.

It was throbbing rapidly.

"Are... you well, David?"

David opened his eyes to see Starfire looking over to him with a concerned expression on her face. Only then did he remember that in focusing his mind, he had cloaked the baton in its red sheath, as though he was about to start blasting things to bits. That and he probably looked fairly pale.

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah... I'm... I'm all right."

Starfire might not have been the greatest expert on Earth or on Humans, but she could tell exactly what was the matter. She placed a hand on David's shoulder and looked him squarely in the eye.

"You shall _not_ come to harm," she said, with absolute conviction, as if reciting a known fact that was beyond all doubt. "You shall instead join us in gloriously defeating whoever is responsible for this latest disturbance. We shall all make certain of it."

Starfire was wholly certain of what she was saying, and her certainty could not help but rub off. The knot in David's stomach loosened a bit, and he took another deep breath and smiled awkwardly. "Thanks," he said. "I'm... I'm sure it'll be fine."

"Hang on y'all," called Cyborg from the driver's seat as the car swerved around the last corner. "Here it comes!"

**O-O-O**

A war zone.

David wished that he could say he had never seen the likes of this before, but the truth was that this very image haunted his dreams like a spectre. Burning cars, overturned fire hydrants, uprooted street lights cast about like some kind of mad abstract piece. A scene of destruction and chaos replete with the pall of gasoline fumes and cordite smoke hovering over everything like a flock of gaseous carrion birds. The six of them were standing next to the T-car, which had been hastily parked where Cyborg had come to a screeching halt in the plaza in front of the Jump City Federal Bank, an art-deco skyscraper of masonry and steel, looming ahead though barely visible through the haze. The others surveyed the scene with what passed for professional detachment, and David tried to mimic them, but he could not fully suppress a small gasp when he realized that one of the vans in the plaza was that of the JCPD tactical squad, an armored command vehicle that the SWAT team used when they were deploying against serious threats. The van was laying on its roof, and there was a jagged hole two feet in diameter drilled into its side, from whence the vehicle was billowing smoke.

Nothing to be worried about... really... nothing at all...

"Looks like they got heavy weapons," said Cyborg. "Any idea who these guys are?"

"No idea yet," said Robin. "We'll have to ask while we're dragging them to jail."

Raven's eyes were closed and she had a hand to her forehead, her chakra gem glowing bright red as she made use of her powers. "There's... maybe four dozen of them. And another ten or eleven hostages." She clenched her eyes a little tighter closed. "Eleven."

"Hostages?" exclaimed Starfire, her eyes opening wide. "They have stooped to the seizing of hostages like lowly Drevnorgs! We must quickly liberate them before these cruel men are permitted to harm any of them!"

"I'm downloading the plans to the place now," said Cyborg, whose mannerisms gave no indication that he was engaged in a remote uplink with the Tower's computer on the other side of the city. "The police band says that they snatched a bunch of civilians right off the street to use as human shields, and came right in the front door. They started shooting at the cops when they showed up until they pulled back to let us deal with it."

"Then let's get to it," said Robin. "Raven, I want you to take - "

Events overtook them.

The front doors to the facility burst open all of a sudden, and a flood of men came pouring out of it. Dressed in solid black, like mercenaries or paramilitary forces found the world over on the news, all of them were armed to the teeth with rifles of some sort, while a few sported larger weapons that David could only guess at the nature of. Sixty at least there seemed to be to David, though a more rational count would have shown more like twenty-five. Either way, it was clear that the soldiers had not expected to encounter anyone in the plaza, for no sooner had they burst out the door at a dead run for the few undamaged cars still remaining in the plaza, then they all ground to a halt, hesitating as they found waiting for them, not police, but superheroes.

Robin didn't even hesitate.

"Titans! _Go!_"

And then everything happened at once.

Starfire and Raven burst into the air like birds of prey, followed an instant later by Beast Boy in a far more literal fashion. As they did so, Cyborg dropped to one knee, his forearm opening up to reveal his infamous sonic cannon. With a shout, he unleashed a stabbing beam of blue energy that struck the nearest soldier square in the chest, blasting him off his feet and back into the open doors of the bank. Robin, as he always did in these circumstances, leaped into the air like a bullfrog, turned a flip, and released a handful of marble-sized objects that fell to the ground and exploded into light, smoke, and thunder, disorienting the entire first rank of soldiers whose rifles jerked upwards and discharged harmlessly into the air. Starfire's starbolts slammed into the ground an instant later, catching two more soldiers in their helmets and dropping them to the ground like marionettes with their strings cut, even as Raven uprooted a no parking sign with a wave of her hand and clobbered another soldier in the face with it, lifting him off the ground with the upward strike and tossing him back into the wall.

The remaining soldiers opened fire.

David, who had not yet had time to blink, let out an involuntary cry as a green laser shot over his shoulder close enough to feel the heat of the beam on his ear, and he dove to the side as several more beams nearly took his head off. An thunderous crash drowned out his shocked yelp as Beast Boy morphed from bird into Tyrannosaur, landing amidst the soldiers and scattering them in every direction, spinning his tail around and sending three of them flying like toys. One of the braver soldiers turned his rifle on Beast Boy, but the laser did no more than scorch his thick dinosaur's hide, and with an ear-splitting roar, Beast boy turned and shifted into an elephant, snatching the soldier up with his trunk and slamming him against the overturned police van hard enough to dent it. Cyborg gave a loud war cry and charged forward into the dust and smoke, even as David saw Robin coming down next to another soldier, grabbing the larger man's rifle, and using it as a pivot, spinning around to fling him headfirst into a rack of newspapers, which collapsed around the unfortunate soldier before Raven's dark energy tied the rack in knots around the struggling form.

An all out melee broke out, and for a second, David had no idea what to do. All the training he had been doing for five months had been aimed towards something like this, but the spectacle and the confusion dragged at his mind and he hesitated aimlessly, crouched behind a parked car, unsure of what to do, how to engage, how to help out. Inside he was screaming at himself to get moving and act, but despite the baton in his hand, the uniform on his back, he felt exactly like he had back on the rooftop so many months ago, with the Titans waging a tooth and nail battle against a monstrous dragon, and him unable to do more than hide behind something and watch helplessly.

But then suddenly... as it had before... something caught his eye.

One of the soldiers had taken cover from Beast Boy and Cyborg's rampages behind a stone fountain, and was hefting a massive shoulder-mounted weapon into place, leaning forward into it and squinting into the optical sight. David had no idea what that thing was, an energy cannon, a rocket launcher, or something else altogether, but it was unquestionably hostile, and it was aimed square at either Beast Boy or Cyborg, neither of whom had spotted it yet.

Time slowed down as he perceived the soldier steadying the heavy weapon, taking careful aim to be sure of a kill. David's hand started to move automatically, without even needing his brain to tell it to. Five months ago he would no doubt have been so paralyzed with fear as to be unable to act. Two months ago he might have tried to shout a warning to Beast Boy and Cyborg, in the hopes that they could turn about and deal with it. Today however, the endless repetitions in the training room suddenly came back to him a flood, and everything else faded to irrelevance as he lifted the baton in his hand which flared into full red flaming aura, as though coated in gasoline and set to spark. And with one fluid motion, he stood up from behind the car, and as his vision shifted to perceive, instead of a man, a mass of carbon, synthetic materials, and his block of steel, he swung the baton across and in front of him as though it was a tennis racket.

And the steel reacted precisely as he commanded it to.

The rocket launcher detonated like a bomb, several millionths of a second before the rockets within it went off as well, a cascading series of explosions channeled directly into the the unfortunate soldier's chest. The blast unhesitatingly lifted him off his feet and threw him backwards before slamming him headfirst into the metal-shuttered door of a nearby flower shop. And as the soldier crumpled unconscious to the ground, David felt a sudden rush of adrenaline burning through him, so strong, so unexpected that he stood stock still for a second, more than a little astonished that it had actually worked.

He realized just in the nick of time that he wasn't the only one who had noticed the blast.

Four or five nearby soldiers turned their guns on him, and loosed a barrage of lasers that forced him to dive to the ground or be perforated, scrambling behind the car he had been crouched behind a moment before. The lasers burned into the opposite side of the car, sending cascades of sparks spilling from the aluminum frame. Laying on the ground, David raised his head and peered over the hood of the car long enough to see one of the soldiers changing out the energy clip in his laser rifle, and semi-automatically, he shoved the baton through the open window like a billiards cue, willing the rifle to disintegrate and release its explosive energy backwards. It did so, catching the soldier in the solar plexus with the blast and upending him as the battery spilled white chemicals all over the ground. Another laser shot barely missed his hand, and he ducked back down, trying to think of what to do next, when all of a sudden the car exploded.

A rocket slammed into the car from the opposite side and blew it into scraps of metal, and the blast threw David back as he had done the two soldiers a moment ago. So quick was the blast that the next thing David knew, he was sliding on his back over the asphalt of the street before coming to an abrupt stop against the curb. White lights were blinking in his eyes, and he couldn't hear anything but a high pitched whine. For a moment or two he lay stunned on the ground, helpless and oblivious to the world around him, but fortunately for him, the soldier that had fired the rocket was not carrying a rifle, and had opted to drop the launcher and draw an extendable bayonet, which he was presently holding above his head as he ran full speed towards David, intending to spear the psychokinetic with it like a beached fish.

In retrospect, it was amazing how well screaming madmen brandishing inordinately large knives tended to galvanize one's attention.

David managed to roll over and scramble back up onto one knee, not yet possessing the wherewithal to realize that he had just slid fifty feet over asphalt on his back, and likely had torn the skin right off of his backbone. Glancing around for his baton, and finding it providently laying next to his knee, he grabbed it and brought it up in an automatic paltry defense, the sort he had attempted a hundred times against Robin in hand-to-hand practice, and which had never once worked, for Robin was always quick enough to simply evade the baton and strike him in the head.

But he wasn't fighting Robin.

The baton caught the soldier square in the wrist as he was bringing the knife down at David's head, and though not swung with the utmost force, it had enough strength behind it to knock the knife out of the soldier's hand. David flinched as the knife flew past his neck by centimeters before landing on the ground, but fortunately, his next move was quasi-automatic, drilled into his muscle memory by a thousand repetitions, and he swung the baton up and back, slamming cracking the soldier in the jaw with it and spinning him a full 360 degrees around. David distinctly saw a tooth come flying loose as the soldier staggered back, bleeding from the mouth where he'd been backhanded by the stainless steel riot baton. As the soldier spat blood out onto the street and turned back to face his diminutive opponent, it was hard to tell whether he or David looked the most surprised, the soldier at having been hurt, or David at having actually hurt him. The bad news was that the soldier, older, and less of a stranger to such things, recovered first, and reaching behind him, drew out another knife and lunged forward.

The good news was that David wasn't alone.

There was a bright green blur, and something _smashed_ into the soldier like a meteor, casting up a cloud of dust and debris that nearly staggered David, who threw up one hand to shield his eyes, coughing as the dust cloud enveloped him. When it cleared a few moments later, David saw Starfire standing next to the foot-deep crater she had knocked the soldier into, staring down at his motionless form as if worried that she might have hit him too hard. Fortunately, the soldier was still breathing, though very much unconscious.

David stared in wordless astonishment as Starfire turned back to him. "Are you yet unharmed?" she asked with the utmost concern, her fists still glowing green from where she had been flinging starbolts and hammering soldiers into the dirt a moment ago. The question dragged him back into reality, and he reached back with his free hand to feel his back, expecting to find himself spilling blood like a faucet from where he had been scraped over the asphalt, but to his surprise, the nomex-kevlar weave had held, and other than some small pebbles ground into the back of his uniform, he seemed, and felt, perfectly fine.

Which in and of itself was weird, but he had no time to dwell on that.

"I'm - " he started, but a shout interrupted him, and both he and Starfire turned to see a half dozen more soldiers sprinting towards them with rifles raised, firing energy bolts from their rifles left and right. A blast of Cyborg's sonic cannon lanced out of nowhere and struck one square in the back, toppling him over like a doll, but the others poured on their own fire, and the lead soldier's shots struck Starfire square in the throat, knocking her back onto the ground with a cry.

By now David knew, intellectually as well as from prior observation, that Starfire was as sturdy as an armored vehicle, and that it would take _far_ more than a mere laser shot to meaningfully injure her. However, as had happened before in the heat of combat, what David knew to be true instinctively, and what thoughts crossed his mind were not entirely the same thing. His eyes widened as Starfire fell, his jaw dropped, and without a moment's thought to whether or not this was a good or a bad idea, he turned to follow her fall with his head. "Starfire!" he shouted, as though his words somehow were the arbiter of whether she was hurt or not. Green flashes of energy flew past his head as he stood motionless in the center of the street, practically_begging_ to be shot, but he took no notice of them, his brain having short circuited. Another few seconds and he would certainly have been blasted into ash, but Starfire was _not_ seriously hurt, and moreover had not been speaking idly in the car before they arrived. Even as she fell, she reached out with one hand and turned her fall into a roll, coming back up in a crouch with her fists glowing neon green with furious starbolts. Two of these she loosed with expert throws, scoring with one, a direct hit on the soldier that had been about to blow David's head off with his rifle that reduced his weapon to slag and sent him to the ground like a house of cards in a windstorm.

"_David! Take care!_"

It was not exactly the most normal of warnings, but it had the desired effect of waking David up to the terribly exposed position he was still standing in. He quickly looked for something to take cover behind, but nothing was within range, and so for lack of a better option he did the only thing he could think of. He turned back to the advancing soldiers, pointed his baton at the one that had shot Starfire, and blew the asphalt up underneath his foot.

The explosion was fierce and immediate, catapulting the soldier into the air and sending him pinwheeling through it as though he had stepped on a landmine. Impressive as this display was however, it was the wrong thing to do, a fact David realized when the remaining soldiers quite predictably turned their weapons on the one target that insisted on standing bolt upright, brandishing a flaming red baton that cast enough light to draw the eye of everyone within thirty yards. A fusillade erupted into him, one shot hitting him in the shoulder, spinning him around as though hit with a riot slug, and sending him crashing to the ground on his side, a fact which was the only thing that prevented him from being torn to shreds. Even this wouldn't have saved him for more than a few more seconds, for the shot sent a withering jolt of pain shooting down his left arm, and he landed on his back, clutching at his shoulder which felt like it was on fire, momentarily unable to raise a hand in his own defense. It would have been comically simple to finish him off.

But... he _had_ managed to distract the enemy soldiers away from what Starfire and the others were doing for just a few seconds. And as was quickly demonstrated, removing one's eyes from the other Titans in the midst of battle was _singularly_ unwise.

The leading soldier took a step forward and lowered his rifle to shoot the helpless teen on the ground, and consequently received no warning whatsoever as something charged out of the smoke behind him. Hearing only footsteps, the soldier had enough time to half-turn around before Cyborg's fist met his face at what might be termed an 'elevated' rate of speed. Had Cyborg not moderated his strike, he would have certainly torn the soldier's head clean off. As it was, he flung the unfortunate man over David's fallen form like a tin soldier struck by a locomotive, and without hesitating in the slightest, turned his sonic cannon on a second one of the soldiers and casually blew him thirty feet back into an overturned dumpster. The last remaining soldier turned his gun on Cyborg , firing at a range where he could not miss, but Cyborg, like Starfire, could sustain such blows, and as he was doing so, black tendrils emerged from the ground, snatching the soldier up like the coils of some malevolent demon sea monster, before slamming him headfirst into the street like a spiked football, and then dissipating into nothingness.

David only caught snatches of the above, laying on the ground half-blinded by dirt and by the pain in his shoulder, and by the time he had recovered his senses sufficiently to determine what was going on, Cyborg was standing over him, offering him a hand, troubled not in the least it appeared by the blackened scorch marks that coated his cyan and silver-chrome frame. Behind him stood Starfire, who had a similar burn mark marring the metallic coif that she wore around her neck and collar over her uniform top, but appeared otherwise unhurt. One by one, the other Titans were emerging from the smoke, Raven materializing out of a dark portal, Robin flipping down from somewhere unknown like an acrobat, and Beast Boy appearing in the form of a rhinoceros, which seamlessly shrank and morphed back into his usual human form.

"Everyone all right?" asked Robin tersely as David accepted Cyborg's help in getting back up, and the question prompted him to take a second to consider his shoulder which was still throbbing mercilessly. Gingerly, he pried his fingers away from it, expecting to see blood come gushing from a gaping wound, but to his surprise, there was only a black scorch mark on the shoulder of his uniform shirt where the energy bolt had nicked him, with only a few of the kevlar-nomex threads broken and peeled back to reveal a glimpse of the skin underneath, red and swollen and painful, but not ruptured. Apparently the uniform was made of stronger stuff than he had anticipated. That and the fact that the shot had just grazed him.

"David?"

David snapped back to reality. "I'm... I'm okay..." he said hesitantly, glancing back up at the others, particularly at Cyborg, who's expression was as serious as he remembered ever seeing it. "Am I okay?" he asked, suddenly not so sure.

"You ain't gonna be okay for long if you keep standing out there to get shot, man," said Cyborg tersely. "This is the big leagues. These guys'll put you _down_ if you let 'em."

The reproach was not worded particularly harshly, but it was enough. David cringed involuntarily as he slowly picked up the baton laying next to his foot. "I... I know," he said lamely. "I'm... I'll try to..."

Robin, all business as always, didn't let him finish. "We drove them back into the bank, but they'll be back out soon. We need to get to the hostages before they start using them as human shields or worse. Raven, Beast Boy, take David, head up to the roof, and try to get into the building that way. We'll keep them occupied down here.

"Got it," said Beast Boy with a grin of anticipation. Clearly the skirmish so far had not been enough to satisfy his desire to mix it up with the soldiers engaged in this robbery. Raven said nothing, as was her way, but nodded curtly and floated back off the ground. David, the pain in his shoulder slowly subsiding, by now was flushed bright red, and not from exertion. After all the lessons and training, he had still stood out in the middle of the street like an idiot and nearly gotten killed for his trouble, still hesitated when he should have been acting, and indeed he probably _would_ have gotten killed had the others not been so quick to react.

These thoughts might well have led down their usual path, but he was afforded no time for self-recriminations. He stared up at the bank, whose roof loomed some twenty stories above the ground, and his brow furrowed in puzzlement. Beast Boy and Raven could fly of course, but how was he supposed to -

Something grabbed his shoulders and lifted him into the air.

The surprise was such that he didn't realize immediately what was happening, and he nearly dropped his baton, which would have been more embarrassing than he cared to imagine at this point, and it wasn't until he looked up that he realized that Beast Boy had wordlessly shifted into a pterodactyl, grabbed him with his talons, and taken off for the roof. David had seen him do this a hundred times with Cyborg of course, but it was one thing to watch the process with someone else, and another to experience it himself. He clenched his eyes shut and squeezed the baton's handle hard enough to compress the leather, and tried to suppress the queasy sensation that flooded his stomach as his feet dangled in mid-air with no ground to rest upon. Fortunately it was all over in a minute, and before he knew it, David was being set down remarkably gently on top of the roof of the bank. He managed not to fall over as he landed, wobbling only slightly as he stepped away from the 250 foot drop next to him, towards the center of the roof. Beast Boy set down next to him and returned to his normal form, a second before Raven joined them both.

"See, what'd I tell you?" said Beast Boy with a swagger as he clapped David on the back. "The only way to travel, right?" David managed, with great effort, a nervous smile by way of response as his head re-assured itself that it was once more standing on something solid, even as Raven pulled out her communicator.

"Try to get down into the offices behind the lobby," said Robin over the communicator. "It's the most secure place they could have put the hostages without getting into the vault." He probably would have given more detailed orders, but there was the sound of more laserfire from down below, and a flash of green light from the communicator in Raven's hand, and suddenly the connection was severed. The sound of the lasers mixed with Cyborg's sonic cannon, Starfire's starbolts, and Robin's flash bombs in the distance, and despite his unease with heights, David nearly scrambled over to the side of the roof to see what was going on down below. A single glance from Raven restrained him however, and he quietly followed her and Beast Boy over to the rooftop access door.

The access door was locked. Indeed it was actually _welded_ shut, a precaution that might have made sense against the police or SWAT, but against the Titans was a laughable obstacle. Raven could have ripped it off its hinges with a flick of her wrist. Beast Boy could have crushed it in the form of a dinosaur or elephant. David himself could have blown the entire door to fragments as a matter of a moment's thought, for it was made of solid steel, but as he turned to ask Raven which of these things they would do, Raven shook her head as if she had read his mind... which she very well might have, he supposed.

"They might hurt the hostages if they hear us coming in," she said. "We'll have to go around."

There was something in the word "around" that was not entirely comforting, especially given that Beast Boy turned a slightly paler shade of green as she said it. He glanced from her to Beast Boy and back, and asked the obvious question apprehensively.

"What do you mean 'around'?"

Raven merely smirked.

**O-O-O**

A black portal materialized in mid-air, absorbing all light projected at it like an area of null space, before suddenly vomiting out three figures into the middle of the securely locked office. Raven, controlling the portal, did not so much appear as coalesce from the black energy of her portal, materializing in mid-air in her lotus position, just as she had left. Beast Boy landed on his feet, with scarcely a tremor to indicate his own discomfort, though he did see fit to steady himself against the wall after the momentary disorientation. For David, the disorientation was anything but momentary. He landed on his knees, hard, eyes wide, muscles quivering and shivering as though afflicted by a nerve disorder. He did not feel cold, he felt _chilled_, chilled straight through to his bones with a flesh-crawling sensation that was not exactly cold, but was not exactly not, either. For at least the dozenth time today, he fought back the urge to lose his lunch.

It took several moments for him to calm himself down and lose the sensation of being frozen from the inside. When he did, he found Raven looking elsewhere, purposefully, as though unwilling to acknowledge for some reason what her teleportation did to those not used to it. Beast Boy, who had commented to David before on what it was like to be teleported like that (his description was on the mark, as it turned out, but in David's opinion, watered down), helped him back up. "You'll be fine in a sec," he whispered, hopefully out of Raven's hearing, though David wasn't ready to credit that, as Raven cleared her throat impatiently and walked over towards the single door in the wall.

"We're in the back office," she said, as evenly as ever. "I can feel a lot of people in the front one. It's probably the hostages."

David nodded, unclipping the baton from his belt, and subconsciously setting it alight again. "What should we do?"

"I'll go through and see what's there," said Beast Boy, and David caught himself before he asked how he intended to get through a solid steel door. Solid steel it might have been, but the keyhole was large enough for a gnat to get through, and Beast Boy became one before buzzing on through. Raven folded her arms and waited, and David, still holding the aura-sheathed baton in one hand, had no choice but to follow her lead. As Raven seemed (as ever) unwilling to engage in chit-chat, the two of them waited in silence for Beast Boy's return.

They could not have been waiting for more than thirty seconds, but to David, it felt more like ten minutes. He had to force himself not to tap the baton against his leg, or worse yet, the wall, a nervous tic that was most inappropriate given their intention to remain undetected. Eventually though, he could not stand the tense wait any longer. Let Raven get angry if she wished.

"What's... the plan?" he asked, not sure if there _was_ one, but as it turned out, there was.

"We wait for Beast Boy to stop messing around and get back here to tell us what's in the next room, and then we all go in at once," said Raven flatly, as though reciting the nutrition information on the side of a cereal box. "There's probably gonna be a couple of guards, so we'll have to take them down fast before they can hurt a hostage. Try not to blow up anything that you - "

A sudden crash jarred Raven out of her monologue, and they door they were standing next to gave a heave as something large and solid collided with it at high speed. David nearly jumped in surprise, but to his astonishment, so did Raven, her eyes wide all of a sudden with what looked like fear. Without another word about stealth she waved one hand and ripped the door from its hinges like a plastic toy, casting it aside and rushing into the room, David right behind her.

Beast Boy, once more in human form, was standing inside an office very similar to the one they had just left, surrounded by nearly a dozen people in assorted civilian clothing, all of whom were seated on the ground with their hands tied behind their backs and gags shoved in their mouths. One of the soldiers that they had been fighting outside was laying unconscious in the middle of the room, surrounded by the shattered remnants of the overhead fluorescent light he had apparently been tossed into. Another was laying at Raven and David's feet, his helmet cracked from where he had collided with the door. Beast Boy was kneeling down and untying the bonds of an elderly woman crouched near the side of the room.

Raven's eyes fixed on Beast Boy, and in the space of a few seconds, shifted from abject fear, to abject rage. "_Beast Boy_!" she practically shouted, snapping everyone's head around to face her and spoiling all possibility, David thought, of them remaining undetected (then again, the door thing had already done that).

Beast Boy caught the tone if not the reason for it, and he raised his head with a wan smile. "Um... hey Rae! I got em both!"

"You were supposed to come back and tell us what was in here!"

"Oh," said Beast Boy, and he turned and looked around for a second. "There's two soldier-dudes, and ten hostages." And with that, he resumed untying the elderly woman, apparently considering the matter closed.

The flippant reply made Raven, if anything, more angry. "You weren't supposed to attack them by _yourself_!" she insisted forcefully.

"Rae, I got them," said Beast Boy, looking back up at her. "What's the big deal? It was just two."

"Don't call me 'Rae'!" said Raven with enough force to cause the lights to flicker. "You could have gotten killed!"

David decided that discretion was definitely the better part of valor here, and did not feel particularly ashamed of the fact that he was glad it was Beast Boy and not himself that was on the receiving end of Raven's tongue lashing. Still, through the shouting and the quivering energy eruptions and the talk of getting killed that was really not what he needed to be focusing on, there was a voice in the back of his mind telling him that there was something wrong here... something Raven had said before...

"Rae, c'mon," said Beast Boy, ignoring Raven's demand as always. "I knew I could handle two of them. You're sounding like Robin."

"I am _not_!" snarled Raven (David begged to disagree with her, but kept his opinion to himself), "but you were supposed to come and get us!" She faltered, obviously scrambling for excuses to stay angry, and hit upon one that would have made Robin proud. "We're supposed to be showing David how to do this! That means following the plan!"

Amusing as this exchange was, David was not paying too close attention to it, his eyes darting around the room quickly. "Guys?"

"Hmph," said Beast Boy, "whatever you say, _Robin_,"

"Beast Boy," said Raven darkly, "I swear, if the soldiers don't kill you, I'm gonna - "

"_Guys_?"

Normally David would never think of cutting off Raven, but he had now realized what was bothering him, and so he broke custom. It was unexpected enough that both Raven and Beast Boy fell silent and turned to him. He looked up at Raven semi-apprehensively. "Didn't you say there were _eleven_ hostages?"

Both of the other Titans got the same look in their eyes.

Before anyone could do anything, the old woman Beast Boy had just finished untying and ungagging answered their unspoken question.

"There was a little girl," said the old woman. "The men tied her up like the rest of us, but they didn't tie her proper. When the guards left to go shoot at the police, she got loose and snuck out. We couldn't stop her! She said she was gonna go look for her parents."

"Which way did she go?" asked Raven, though realistically there was only one possible answer to that question, the only exit from the room other than the one they had just barged in from led out into the main lobby of the bank. It was in that direction that the old lady gestured, out into the lobby, which by now was almost assuredly crawling with soldiers.

"It was only just a minute ago," said the old woman.

Still, Raven didn't hesitate. "Stay here!" she called to David as she turned, raced over to the door that led into the lobby, and phased right through it.

Beast Boy also did not hesitate. "Come on!" he called to David as he turned, raced over to the door that led into the lobby, and shifted into a gnat again before sliding right through the keyhole. Left with a set of contradictory orders, David set his jaw and tightened his grip on the riot baton, and followed Beast Boy, though of the three of them, he was the only one who actually had to open the door.

He emerged onto a large marble balcony, which ran along the top of the back wall of the massive atrium which served the Jump City Federal Bank as a lobby. The balcony was long, running from wall to wall, with a staircase on either end running down to the floor of the lobby itself. From where David was standing, with Beast Boy and Raven standing next to him, David could see the lobby floor. As predicted, it was full of soldiers, all of them scurrying about like ants, some shooting out the front door at Cyborg, Starfire, and Raven, others building impromptu barricades or hauling around bits of equipment. Presumably some of them were trying to break into the vault, but the vault was directly below them, and out of sight. The fallen forms of Jump City police officers were there too, many of whom had been dragged to once side of the room and left there, unconscious or dead, it was impossible to tell. Bits of their dropped equipment, tasers and riot guns and fiberglass helmets were scattered all over the place. There was no sign of a little girl.

Standing openly on the balcony, searching frantically for any sign of the lost hostage, it was only a matter of time before they were spotted by one of the soldiers. Beast Boy could perhaps have taken on a small or invisible form, Raven might have cloaked herself in shadows and hidden along the dark recesses of the wall, but their hope was plainly not in stealth but in speed. They had to find her, fast, before the soldiers did, and if that meant drawing their attention away from finding her by attracting it themselves... well... that was what they were here for.

And as to David, unable to hide either through shadow or transformation, all he knew was that there was a hostage loose and lost somewhere in the labyrinth before them, and that they had to find her. Thoughts of stealth or speed never entered the calculation, nor indeed did he even realize that the soldiers could see them until one of them shouted the alarm.

"It's _them_!"

And then it all broke loose again.

The man who had shouted was standing several dozen yards further down the balcony from them, and took the time to alert his comrades before raising his rifle. He never got it into position. Raven raised her hand and her black energy threw him through the granite railing and off of the balcony, letting him drop several stories down, enough to badly injure, but not enough to kill. She turned back to David and Beast Boy long enough to shout a brief command: "Find the girl!" before conjuring up a shield of blackness around herself and flying up into the air to engage the soldiers, utterly unafraid, supremely poised, ready to deal out destruction on a scale that defied belief.

Most of the soldiers turned to engage Raven, and it was perhaps well that they did, but several were already firing at Beast Boy and David. Another office door opened close by, and two more soldiers sprinted out of it, rifles and bayonets in hand. One lunged at Beast Boy, who simply shifted into a rat, allowing the man's momentum to pitch him over the balcony's railing and down to the ground below. The other was moving towards David, but before he could do anything untoward, Beast Boy shifted again, this time into a python, and grabbed the man around the ankles tightly with a coil, tripping him up and knocking him onto his face, whereupon he lay still, out cold from hitting his head against the marble.

Lasers began to sail up from below, sizzling and popping as they blasted the granite banister that ran the length of the balcony. David ducked behind the railing, taking what cover he could, and spotting a soldier racing up the stairs towards them, shoving a clip into his rifle as he ran.

The stairs also were made of marble. That was all David had time to think as he brought his baton around.

One of the stairs exploded like a pressure plate trap, blowing a five foot hole in the staircase through which the soldier ingloriously fell. Another soldier, from below, reared back and threw a hand grenade up at them, but David saw it coming, and turned his baton around to point at the arcing projectile, which burst in mid-air like a firework, well beyond lethal range, an instant before Raven lifted a heavy oak desk with a wave of her hand and broke it in half over the grenadier's head. Ducking back behind the banister once more as bits of shrapnel pinged off the gravel, David permitted himself, just for a second, to think that they might be able to hold out up here.

But as before, the soldiers had their own means of dealing with enemies in cover.

A shoulder-mounted rocket struck the balcony from below, and blew the supports to pieces. Before David even knew what was happening, the floor gave way beneath his hands and feet and crumbled like stale bread. He found himself falling, and his eyes opened wide and he shouted out in fear. The soldiers who had fallen off the balcony had landed on carpet, and been hurt bad enough for their trouble, but directly below the balcony, the floor was bare marble, and at this height he would surely dash his brains out on it. Scrambling with his hands to grab at something solid, he desperately tried to save himself. For an instant, his fingers touched the broken edge of the balcony, then nothing, and he was free-falling towards the floor, some forty feet below.

And then he stopped.

Something looped around his wrist like a noose and tightened with a jerk strong enough to nearly pull his arm out of its socket, and suddenly he wasn't falling anymore. He looked up, and saw Beast Boy, now in the form of an octopus, clinging to the railing of the undamaged section of the balcony with seven limbs, with the eighth one wrapped around his wrist like a rope. In this form, Beast Boy could not speak, but his eyes indicated clearly what he would have said.

"I've got you!"

His baton still clutched in his other hand, David hung in mid-air for a second, before a searing pain shot through his leg, and he cried out and clenched his teeth and nearly dropped the baton. The soldiers below were blasting away at the both of them, and one of their shots had just struck him in the calf. Unlike before, this shot was no glancing blow, and it burned a cauterized, dime-sized hole right through his leg, sending tears rushing to his eyes and a stifled scream to his lips. Beast Boy tried to haul David back up onto the balcony, but before he could do so, another rocket struck further down, jolting the entire balcony enough to shake loose Beast Boy's grip.

Once more he fell, mercifully throwing off the aim of the soldiers shooting at him, and sending him plummeting to the ground. Fortunately, thanks to Beast Boy, he had less distance to fall this time, and instead of landing on hard marble, he landed on top of a large pile of debris and rubble that formed what was left of the chunk of balcony that had been blown out from under him. Though it was as hard as the marble would have been, its broken state permitted it to give a bit, and there was actually a functional difference between falling 25 feet and falling 40. He lay on the rubble pile, stunned, shaken, battered, but alive. Such was the dust and smoke kicked up by the repeated explosions, that he could not see any of the soldiers, nor Beast Boy, nor Raven, though he retained enough lucidity to realize that this meant nobody could see him either. Try as he might, laying half-conscious on the ground like a bird with a broken wing, he could not see anything wrong with that, and slowly he started trying to prepare himself to move, to sneak off under cover of smoke and debris into a corner to wait out the end of this insane fight. He no longer had ambitions of showing himself competent against a paramilitary army. He wished merely to survive.

And then he saw her.

She was barely ten feet away, crouched behind the same pile of rubble he was half-propped up against, a little girl of no more than six years, huddled up against the broken debris as though trying to phase through it, which she might well have been trying to do. Clearly, from where she was sitting, she had come within a hair's breadth of getting crushed by the falling granite, and with the shooting and sounds of chaos all around, she too was merely trying to lie low.

It wasn't going to work.

Looming up through the dust behind the little girl materialized a dark figure, a soldier, with his rifle slung onto his back, making his way ponderously over the rubble. So loud was the chaos in the bank lobby that his footsteps were drowned out, and the little girl had no idea he was coming, no idea that is, until he was suddenly there, standing over her, reaching down with something in his hand that might have been a stungun or a knife or perhaps something totally innocuous, though that was unlikely, reaching down to disable, kill, or at the very least grab her, and drag her off for use as a human shield.

That was the plan.

The reality was that as he was ducking, a rock hit him in the face and exploded.

A fist-sized chunk of granite, to be precise, thrown with all the velocity David could muster, and which, by some miracle, had flown true, smashed into the soldier's nose an instant before detonating. At that range, the blast might well have injured the little girl, but David focused the explosion forwards, with the direction of his throw, and the blast hit the soldier in the chest like a wrecking ball, flinging him through the air only to slam him against the wall. The soldier slid down onto the floor and did not rise.

The little girl turned her head back, and for the first time saw that David was laying there, half-propped up on one elbow, having used his right hand to throw the piece of debris. She said nothing, merely stared at him wide-eyed, while he desperately tried to think of what to do. He had no communicator, no way of signaling Beast Boy and Raven, who in any event were no doubt very busy at the moment, and the din was such that he could barely hear himself think, let alone shout above the noise. He rolled over onto his hands and knees, his leg sending jolts of searing pain up him with every movement, and slowly he tried to work his way over to the little girl, who was not moving, too shocked to react. He knew how she felt.

And then he saw something that made his heart freeze.

The dust was settling, and through it, he made out a figure standing back a dozen yards, holding a large device in both hands, which it was directing towards him and the girl. The shape... the shape was familiar somehow, and it took him a second to realize that he'd seen it before... in movies.

A grenade launcher.

There was no time to get out of the way, the man's finger was already tightening on the trigger, and in David's fall, he had somehow lost his baton. Without it, he could not possibly detonate anything fast enough. In desperation, he half-crawled, half-lunged forward, and his hand landed on something cool and hard and solid-feeling, and he glanced down at it. It was one of the bits of equipment left behind by the fallen riot police, a large, concave, fiberglass and plastic polymer board, wider and taller than he was, partly buried in the rubble.

And by the time he realized what it was, he was already acting.

The grenade left the launcher with a puff of compressed air, and arced up and over, aimed directly at the spot the little girl was occupying. Praying that it would not be stuck, David grabbed at the handle of the dusty object, and rolled over onto his back and then back onto his stomach, pulling as hard as he could. The polymer board caught just for a second, then broke free in his hand, and with a cascade of dust and debris, he rolled over to the little girl, who was still frozen in mute shock, and as the grenade descended towards them, he he grabbed her with one hand, forcing her to lay flat on the ground next to him, and held the board up with his other hand hand like a tent canopy, enclosing both him and the little girl beneath it, letting its stenciled white "JCPD" lettering face the incoming missile.

The grenade exploded a foot above them.

Fragments rained down like hailstones, embedding themselves in the front of the board, and staggering David as he struggled to hold it up, but the shock dissipated after only an instant. It took him a second to realize that while his leg was still throbbing like the devil itself, he was not dead, and only then did he look down at the little girl, and see that she was not dead either.

For the object he had held up was not simply a fiberglass board... it was a riot shield.

For a few seconds, David didn't dare move. Beneath the shield he could see nothing whatsoever, and hear nothing save for his own heartbeat thundering in his ears, and the scared breathing of the little girl. He was trying to decide if he should take a risk and look out from under the shield when, to his surprise, the little girl actually spoke first.

"M... Mister?" she said in a terribly scared voice, but nevertheless one that was clear and understandable. Better than he could have managed in the same circumstances.

"Are you okay?" he asked, not sure what he was going to do if the answer should be 'no'. The other soldiers were probably approaching already, and he was going to have to stop them... somehow.

"Is... this yours?" asked the little girl, and she lifted her hand. In it was David's baton, dusted and dented, but otherwise no worse for wear after having been dropped nearly three stories and half-buried under falling rock. How or why she had grabbed it was beyond him, but he was in no mood to question miracles right now, and so he nodded, and she slipped the baton into his free hand, and took a deep breath of what might have been awe when it began to glow red once more.

"What's your name?" asked David. He had no idea what to do now beyond the obvious, which was stay alive and keep her alive as well, but he had the sense that he _had_ to calm her down somewhat.

"Mary," replied the little girl haltingly.

"Okay," he said, trying to keep the fear out of his own voice. "Mary, here's what I need you to do." What instructions could he give that made sense here? What _should_ he tell her to do? He couldn't afford to think it over, he could hear the footsteps approaching already. He improvised.

"When I stand up," he said, "I want you to get behind me, between me and the wall, and get down as low as you can, and cover your ears." He felt like he was telling her to get under her desk for a nuclear attack, but what choice did he have? "Can you do that for me?"

Mary nodded quietly, but she had a question for him before they proceeded. "Are you gonna stop the bad men?"

Would that he could.

"Yes," he said, hoping it didn't sound like too much of a lie, "but you need to do what I said, okay?" Mary nodded again, and David took a deep breath, and steeled himself, hearing the crunch of footsteps get closer and closer.

"On three," he said. "One..."

Someone stepped next to the shield, still held up like the shell of a tortoise. David could see a pair of boots standing right next to them.

"Two..."

The person next to them bent over and grabbed the lip of the shield, intending clearly on overturning it and blasting whoever was inside.

Gametime.

"_Three!_"

Before the shield could be pried up, David pushed to his feet suddenly, catching the soldier next to him by surprise. The soldier was larger, stronger, and tougher no doubt than David, but the soldier had not expected to be leaped at, and lost his balance as David desperately swung upwards with his baton, cracking the soldier in the chin hard enough to send him tumbling down onto his back where he lay moaning. His counterpart stood on top of the rubble pile before David, and he brought his rifle around, but David aimed the baton down at the rubble itself and blew the pile up like a volcano, sending the soldier rocketing upwards headfirst into the underside of the balcony, before letting him fall senseless back to Earth. A third soldier loomed up from the left, and opened fire, but the shield was on David's left arm, and though built for someone much larger than he was, he managed to plant it and put his shoulder into it as the burst of lasers blasted into it. David ignored the screaming pain in his leg, planting his shoulder against the inside of the shield, and straining to keep it upright. A moment later, the shooting stopped as the soldier changed magazines, and instantly, David swung the shield out, revealing the soldier to him, his baton aimed like a spear straight at the soldier's chest. His rifle exploded in his hands, snapping both wrists and sending him crashing to the floor, writhing and screaming in pain.

Still more soldiers loomed up from behind the three he had disabled, and David stumbled backwards, hoping that Mary had followed his instructions, acting on pure instinct and muscle memory, with no time to think or form a coherent plan. A fourth soldier shot at him from in front, but he brought the shield around to block the shots, and retaliated by blowing the links on the chain that held one of the massive chandeliers aloft. The chandelier plummeted directly down onto the soldier and flattened him beneath its weight with a torrent of sparks and flame. Another soldier rushed in from his unprotected side, and he turned on this one too, swinging his baton in an underhand stroke, willing matter to bend at his command without reference to what it was shaped into. A series of explosions on the marble floor carved a furrow in the rock, sending chips and fragments flying into the soldier's face, upending him. Still more came charging on as he backed towards a corner, a glance from the corner of his eye showing that Mary was in fact cowering in the corner as he had told her to. The bad news of course, was that he now had nowhere else to back into.

He lashed out instead, his powers operating almost on their own behalf, as he willed things to be destroyed, and they were. A soldier who tried to vault an overturned desk caught most of the explosion of a computer monitor in the crotch, and landed on the ground in so much pain that he passed out then and there. Another who was shouldering a rocket launcher found his weapon turned into a fragmentation bomb, which blew him out of sight into the dusty swirls being cast about. Back and forth his baton flew, setting off explosion after explosion, no longer even targeting soldiers, simply trying to form some kind of firebreak to keep the enemy at bay. Lasers flew by like wasps from a nest, many scorching the shield as he crouched behind it. Everything was ammunition. The walls, the floor, the bits of rubble from previous explosions, he blew them all to bits, gouging sections of rock from the walls and the inlaid marble floor like a giant ice cream scoop, desperate, terrified, trying with all his might just to keep the enemy back, just to stay alive.

Soon he had backed up into the corner itself, barely a foot in front of the little girl hiding in his shadow. The shield in his hand was dented and bent and battered and cracked, but it was his only real defense, and he brandished it like a cross before vampires. Two more soldiers charged him, their guns empty and fixed with bayonets, and with nowhere to back into, he could not evade them. He managed to stop one by, once more, detonating a section of the floor, tripping the charging soldier who landed square on his chin on a piece of rubble. The other one lunged at him with the bayonet, and he moved to block it with his shield, but not even the polymerized riot shield of the JCPD could take such abuse forever. The shield split, and the blade drove right through, stabbing into David's forearm. He bit back a cry as the soldier pulled the blade back, ripping the shield out of David's hand, and throwing it back onto the ground behind him. Again the soldier lunged, and this time David simply parried the stab by hitting the side of the gun with his baton. The blade passed by his side by millimeters, and embedded itself in the rock of the wall behind. David swung the baton at the soldier's head, but he was no Robin, and his swing lacked skill, having merely the strength of desperation to it. The man lowered his head and took the blow to his helmet, which rang out but did not give or break. An instant later, the soldier, now too close to use his rifle effectively, dropped the weapon, and slammed his fist instead into the hapless teen's stomach.

The blow hit like a pile driver and knocked the wind out of David so hard that he thought his lungs were imploding. He staggered back against the wall, spots flashing before his eyes, his vision blurry and double, and as he shook his head to try and clear it, he saw the soldier grimacing at him as he stepped back and drew a long knife from his back pocket. Holding his baton up in a pathetic, paltry defense, swaying on his feet, with blood leaking from his arm and his leg screaming protest at having any weight applied, David could only watch as the soldier stepped forward to ram the knife into his stomach and spill his guts all over the floor.

But as the knife came in, all of a sudden, David's left arm lunged out and caught the soldier's wrist.

_"When the enemy comes at you with a knife, the first thing to do is grab for it."_

The soldier reacted in surprise as his knife buried itself up to its hilt, not in David's body, but in the wall he was leaning against, but before he could do anything, David twisted the man's wrist around, eliciting a yelp of pain as the soldier's grip weakened and his arm twisted.

_"Grab for the wrist, twist as hard as you can, then use the momentum to counterattack."_

David's right hand reversed its grip on the baton even as David stepped forward with his right foot, pivoting towards the soldier, he swung as though delivering a hook punch and missing, aiming several inches in front of his enemy's face.

_"Execute your punch and follow through, and the baton will do the rest."_

It did.

The reversed baton hit the soldier in the side of the head beneath his helmet with a crack like a baseball player hitting a home run. David felt the tremor of the impact travel up the baton, up his arm, and into his chest, and watched as the soldier's eyes grew unfocused and and his arm fell limp. And then with all the grace of a tumbling skyscraper, the soldier collapsed backwards onto the ground, and lay still.

And then there was silence.

For a few seconds, David remained standing there, propped up against the wall of the bank, looking for the next soldier that was sure to come looming out of the darkness. None appeared. It wasn't until another ten seconds or so had passed that he permitted himself to think that maybe... there weren't any more.

And then he collapsed.

He slid down the wall onto the ground like a wet noodle, drained physically, emotionally, and mentally. The baton clattered to the ground next to him as he slowly reached up and felt the cut on his forearm. It had already stopped bleeding, for the nomex fibers had prevented the bayonet from driving too deep. Mary was standing next to him, blinking in the dusty light, casting him worried looks every so often, and he knew he ought to be looking for the others, or for her parents, but he was, at this point, quite content to not move at all, and let the others find him.

**O-O-O**

It might have been half an hour before he moved again. It might have been ten minutes, or two, or barely a couple seconds. He couldn't tell the difference anymore. Time seemed to lag, punctuated with the sound of further blasts, explosions, and the occasional cry of pain that, had it come from one of the Titans, might have galvanized him to act. It never did, and as it never did, he managed to half-convince himself in the near-coma of his own exhaustion that his job was to stay here and make sure the little girl was all right. That this dovetailed nicely with his own desire to sit down and never move again was simply co-incidence...

Such he told himself.

The little girl herself, having belatedly determined that the coast was reasonably clear, stood up, and walked over. She looked scared, not that that attribute was in any short supply around here, and coated with dust just like everything else within eyesight. Still David could see no obvious blood or injury, and she was not crying. She said nothing, merely bent down slowly, and picked up the baton, gingerly, as though she was afraid it was going to burst into flames at any second. Slowly, she turned it over in her tiny hands, and then, holding it by the business end, gently handed it back to him. Wearily he lifted his hand to take it, and did so, and as he caught her staring at it expectantly, a soft smile crossed his face and he concentrated on it once more, causing the red aura to spring up around it again. Nevermind that in this state, he would have been lucky to be able to detonate a paper clip, she didn't know that. She gave an ever so slightly perceptible start as the aura materialized, but once it did, her expression lost a bit of its fear, and she smiled at him, revealing her missing front teeth.

As the sounds outside died down, and the dust began to settle, David decided it was time to chance moving. Without a word, he very slowly managed to struggle back to his feet, and gently (after several tries) clipped the baton back onto his belt. His now-free hand, he extended to Mary, who took it without a word, apparently understanding where they were going without question. He was reasonably confident by this point that there was nothing left of the enemy... but not so confident that he didn't stop as he walked towards the entrance to the bank to pick up the cracked, battered riot shield that he had been using. Better safe than sorry.

As it was, he needn't have worried, for he had not taken more than another dozen steps before Beast Boy found them.

A figure loomed up ahead out of the dust, but before he could react with violence, David he saw the greenish tinge and the pointed ears and the small frame, and relaxed. The little girl did not, and ducked behind him, but Beast Boy emerged without weapons or ill-intent, a massive grin on his face, no doubt from the victory the Titans had just scored, as well as from finding both David and the little girl alive.

"Dude!" exclaimed Beast Boy, and he scrambled over the rubble piles towards him. "You're okay! You found her!"

Was this okay? David wasn't sure any more, but he decided that if Beast Boy said so, then it was. "She found me," he corrected, and the girl, discerning that there was no violence in their actions or words, crept out gently from behind the shield to stare at Beast Boy, who was, at least to judge by his actions, plainly used to that sort of thing.

"I thought you might've got knocked out when you fell there," said Beast Boy as he arrived and put a hand on David's shoulder to steady him., "but I couldn't get over to check because of all the soldiers. Raven was wrong, by the way. There was _way_ more than four dozen of them. There was more like fifty."

"... really?" asked David, too tired to point out to Beast Boy that, for all intents and purposes, four dozen _was_ fifty.

"Yeah, but we handled it anyway. Cy and Rob and Star are still cleaning up outside, and Rae went to help them. I came back to look for you and her."

David managed to suppress the unworthy thought that Beast Boy could _perhaps_ have done so a little sooner. No doubt he had had a dozen or more soldiers to deal with on his own. Instead he smiled and let Beast Boy help him towards the door, lightly supported on one side by Beast Boy, on the other side by the little girl, who was still holding his hand, though whether that was for her sake or to make sure he wasn't about to keel over was an open question.

They emerged onto the threshold of the bank, and stared down into the plaza below. Smoke still hovered above it, but the plaza was no longer deserted. EMTs and police cars were parked everywhere, the former tending to the more badly injured soldiers, and the latter carting them into paddy wagons to be transported to jail. Robin was there, talking to the chief of police, and Starfire next to him, pretending not to notice the stares and occasional cheers from the civilians crowded behind the hastily erected police cordon. Raven was off by herself helping the other hostages down the stairs, trying to exhibit the proper gratitude for their gushing thanks (and not one iota more) and glancing almost anxiously towards the T-car, as if eager to be done with the matter and to go home.

For once, David fully understood how Raven felt.

"My _man_!" came a loud and thunderous voice that could only be Cyborg's, and David turned just in time to see Cyborg jogging up the steps towards them, taking them three at a time. "Check you out!"

Cyborg was himself covered in scorch marks, but these seemed to have affected him not at all. "Raven said you went off solo to go get one of the VIPs." Cyborg winked at the little girl, who was unabashedly staring at the giant half-metal Titan.

"Sort of," said David, not sure how to explain what had just happened, not even sure if he could. Cyborg didn't seem to mind. Indeed Cyborg looked more fired up than David ever remembered seeing him.

"So how many?"

"… what?"

Cyborg grinned and patted David on the shoulder, nearly knocking him down. "How many bad guys did you get?"

David blinked. "I… kinda lost count." Were they supposed to be keeping score?

"Well _I_ got twenty-two," said Cyborg, what about you grass stain?

"Twenty-three," said Beast Boy with a smirk. David was not so out of it that he was prepared to believe either one of them and indeed neither were they. Before the heated argument that was no doubt coming could erupt however, David had an important question.

"Cy… what should I do with…?"

"Oh," said Cyborg, snapped back to reality for a second. "She know where her parents are?"

David had honestly not remembered to ask. He turned to look down at Mary, who shook her head no. "You should prob'ly take her down to the police there, see if her mom and dad are in the crowd. I can take her if you don't feel up to…"

"No," said David, "No, I'll… I'll do it." His arms and legs felt like lead weights, under ordinary circumstances he would barely have been able to walk, yet despite that, he was certain that he was able to do this much, and perhaps it showed, because neither Cyborg nor Beast Boy objected, and so he slowly made his way down the stairs into the plaza itself.

He expected, given the sheer number of people, that it would take forever to find the little girl's parents, but it did not, indeed no sooner had they stepped down into the plaza than the girl let out a high pitched shout.

"Mommy! Daddy!"

Over to the side of the plaza, a man and a woman, both middle-aged, were straining against the police cordon, staring into the plaza looking for something, as soon as the little girl shouted, their heads whipped around, and then both of them ducked under the cordon, ran past one of the police officers who belatedly tried to stop them, and raced towards their little girl. The little girl released David's hand and ran to them as well, nearly leaping into the woman's arms, who lifted her up and embraced her and seemed liable to faint, had her husband not been there to steady her. David didn't quite know what he was supposed to do at this juncture, and so he stood there, watching them, as the police slowly backed away, taking one look at him and assuming that he had the situation well under control.

News to him…

Finally, a minute or so later, the little girl, who had been breathlessly relating in her own words what had happened, pointed back at David and said something out of earshot. Both parents raised their heads at whatever was being described, and walked over towards him.

He was not sure what to expect, but… this was not it.

Without a word, without a gesture, without a single indication beforehand, the mother, who had since set her daughter down again, walked up to David and embraced him with enough force to rival Starfire. David felt the air crushed out of his lungs, and his eyes widened in surprise. The woman was crying, with relief, he hoped, and between her sobs could only repeat the same phrase over and over again.

"Thank you."

The father stood nearby, holding his daughter, and there were tears in his eyes as well. David frankly did not know how to react, but fortunately it did not appear that they expected him to, and after a little bit, the mother slowly released him and stood back up, wiping her tears on her sleeve and taking no notice of the liberal coating of dust, blood, and grime she had picked up on the front of her clothes from David's uniform.

Both parents insisted on thanking him a hundred times, or more, as if they feared that if they did not, somehow their daughter would vanish from their arms. David found himself feeling more than a little embarrassed, assuring them over and over that it wasn't any trouble, that he didn't need anything at all from them, that it was all right.

It was the father who noticed first that David was not one of the Titans that everyone in Jump City knew so well. "You're… you're that boy from the waterfront," he said. "The one that fought with that Cinderblock creature, aren't you?"

David nodded slowly. What point was there in denying it? "Yes," he said. "That was… that was me…"

"Are you… are you a superhero then?" asked the man. "Like the Teen Titans?"

So many times he had heard that question asked since this had all started. So many times and always with the same, sometimes desperate reply. This time however, he looked over, past the father, to Starfire and Robin, to Raven and Beast Boy and Cyborg, all of whom were doing whatever they did at times like this, and thought back to what had happened in the bank. Robin had finished talking to the police chief, and, to David's surprise, was watching him, his arms folded in front of him, with Starfire next to him, a broad smile on her face, and as David watched, it seemed that Robin gave just the slightest nod in his direction, as if, as he had long suspected, Raven was not the only Titan who was psychic.

He turned his eyes back up to the father, waiting for him to answer, and smiled slightly, and nodded.

"Yes."

The man did not even blink. He took David's hand with both of his, and held it in a tight, desperate grip. "We can't possibly thank you enough," he said, ignoring the fact that he had just done so, more than once. "Are you certain there's nothing we can… I… I have a great deal of…"

David had seen this before, with Robin and the others, and at least this time, knew how to react. "Really… it's okay," he said. "This is, just sort of what we do."

"Please," said the woman, "at… at least tell us your name. The papers, and the TV, they said that nobody knew who you were. Some of them said that you were even… a terrorist or something."

"I'll write a letter to that studio this very evening!" insisted the man. "They can't be allowed to spread such lies..."

"Gary, please," said the woman sharply before turning back to David. "What… what do they call you?"

David's eyes wandered over once more to the five Titans, who were gathering back together by the T-car, their job now completed, waiting for him to finish with the parents of the little girl he had rescued. Cyborg and Raven and Beast Boy and Starfire and Robin, all of whom were having some kind of discussion at the moment, no doubt about how many of the soldiers they had each taken out. If history was any indication, the total number of claimed 'victories' would wind up to be double the total number of enemies engaged, but that was all right. They had won, they _all_ had won, a clear and unmistakable victory, and soon they would all be going home.

Home…

The woman had asked him who he was… and without taking his eyes off of the five Titans, he answered.

**O-O-O**

"Man, they are _chompin'_ out there," said Cyborg, walking back into the lobby of the Tower. Raven grunted and raised her book over her eyes a bit higher, her feelings on the proceedings abundantly clear as always. Starfire and Beast Boy took the opposite approach, though Starfire appeared to be convinced that David was a lot more nervous than he actually was, and kept trying to tell him that this would all be over soon and they could celebrate with a traditional Tamaranean festival, the name of which required three tongues to pronounce. He couldn't find a way to tell her gently that it was the thought of the "traditional Tamaranean" anything that scared him, not the reporters.

Robin was late, which was almost unheard of except where the press was concerned, as his position on dealing with the media seemed to be the same as Beast Boy's position on training. It needed to get done, but that didn't mean he had to like it. Robin had assured them all that he would be down in a moment or so, that he had to pick something up first.

"So anyway," said Cyborg, resuming the conversation they had been having before he had gone out to check on the hastily erected podium, "don't worry so much about what they ask. These guys make a living out of asking the dumbest stuff in the world. None of 'em are gonna print anything except about how awesome we all are anyway, or their readers'd throw 'em in the trash can, so just relax and take it easy. We all went through this, and it's always…"

"… pointless?" suggested Raven.

"… simple," insisted Cyborg. "Robin'll do most of the talking anyway. He's still worried BB might open his mouth again."

"Which is _totally_ dumb," insisted Beast Boy. "I do _great_ with the reporters!"

"Man, last time you talked to a reporter, you told him Robin was a zombie clone, that I used Gatorade as coolant, and that Raven was obsessed with Alvin and the Chipmunks."

A book slammed shut to David's left, and Raven stood up from her chair, her eyes practically blazing. "That was_you_?"

"I… um… it was…" stammered Beast Boy, before he decided abruptly that discretion was the better part of valor, and turned into an insect before flying up to the ceiling and entering an air vent. Raven narrowed her eyes and vanished into a crackling black portal.

"Her fans started sending her these cards that played music," Explained Cyborg. "Lots of 'em." David nodded, and hoped that it was just his imagination that the tower began to tremble and soft thumping noises emerged from somewhere overhead.

A moment later, Robin stepped out of a different elevator, with nothing in his hands to indicate what he had 'picked up'. Not that this was surprising. Robin could (and did) fit the contents of a small hardware store in his utility belt. He had changed into a fresh uniform, something David, who had just received his earlier today, had not expected to be able to do, only to find that Cyborg had made, not one, but half a dozen copies, and that the others were waiting for him in his room. Raven had gone over his injuries as soon as they got back to the tower, repairing the cut on his forearm, and doing what she could with the laser burn on his calf, though he still had a bandage on that one under his pant leg, and his leg still throbbed whenever he put too much weight on it.

"Are you all set?" asked Robin.

David nodded. Normally, given his preference for remaining invisible in plain sight, this sort of thing would have scared him half to death. Compared to the events of this afternoon however, it was nothing more than a sideshow. The media was used to the Titans running out and saving people, but with David's sudden re-appearance, all of them were clamoring to know who he was, and why he had fought in the latest battle alongside the Titans. It was harmless, he supposed, and besides, Robin would be doing most of the talking.

"I think so," he said back to Robin. "What… what do you want me to _do_?"

"Just relax," said Robin, "they'll ask you a bunch of questions, you don't have to answer anything personal. Don't be afraid to say that you can't answer something, they know how it works."

David nodded. "Right," he said. "So… are we going now?"

"Not quite," said Robin. "There's still a couple things to do first."

Always there was something else that had to be done. "What do we need to do?"

"Well, if that was Raven and Beast Boy chasing one another through the ventilation system, then we need to wait for them."

David hesitated. "I thought… I thought you said they weren't going to be talking to the reporters. At least… Raven said it was stupid."

"They're not," said Robin, "but they should both be here for this."

Something in Robin's voice gave David the impression that he was not talking about the press conference. "… for what?" he asked, and only then did he notice that Cyborg and Starfire had walked over and were standing in a circle around his chair. As he glanced from face to face, trying to figure out what was going on, another black portal appeared from nothingness, spilling both Raven and a very cowed-looking Beast Boy out. Beast Boy was rubbing the back of his head where Raven had no doubt smacked him repeatedly, with her hand if he was lucky.

"This was a field test," said Robin, fixing David's attention back on him, "and I wouldn't call it perfect. You still have a lot to work on. Standing out in the open while people are shooting at you is just not acceptable, and you're still hesitating more than you should be. You know how close a couple of those shots came to being serious."

David nodded slightly, suddenly feeling his throat constricting. It wasn't that he was worried about what Robin was saying now, he knew all of this already. What was beginning to worry him was that it didn't sound like this was Robin's main point.

"But… despite all that, when it came down to protecting your teammates, protecting the civilians in danger, when it counted the most, you did what you had to do. You saved that little girl's life, at great personal risk. If you were a civilian still, they'd call you a hero, but you're not, so instead…" Robin paused as he glanced at the others, all of whom were smiling, "… instead we're going to have to call you something else."

David's head was beginning to spin. One by one, he looked to the Titans with trepidation and apprehension, and one by one, all he saw was smiles, or in Raven's case a bemused smirk. Finally he returned his eyes to Robin. "What… what are you… talking about?" he asked hesitantly.

Robin did not answer directly, but instead reached behind him into one of the innumerable compartments on his belt, and drew out a small round, yellow object that David recognized instantly, and which caused his throat to catch and his heart to suddenly start thundering in his ears like a snare drum. It was an object that was close to omnipresent in the tower, churned out by Cyborg by the half dozen every so often to replace ones destroyed, crushed, or otherwise broken, and yet it was, assuredly, the last thing David had expected Robin to pull out.

It was a communicator.

"I'm talking about this," said Robin.

For a few seconds, David forgot how to speak. He stared blankly at the palm-sized communicator in Robin's hand, his eyes refusing even to blink. Slowly, with immense effort, he managed to raise his head to look Robin in the mask, and his face asked the question that his voice was suddenly unable to.

Robin simply nodded, and extended the communicator towards him in his open hand. Hesitantly, almost gingerly, David reached out with a trembling hand of his own, and picked it up. It was lighter than he expected, with a case made of titanium and circuits of gold and electrum inside. Gently, he turned it over in his hands, opening it with a press of a button, running his fingers ever-so-lightly over the speaker and screen, as if not completely able to believe that it was real.

"There's one other question," said Robin, and David raised his eyes again, his face pale, but not with fear. "I heard what you told those two people whose daughter you rescued, when they asked you what you were called. Is that… the name you've decided on?"

David swallowed several times to try and restore his vocal cords to functionality. "I… I think so… yes," he said. The comment raised several expressions of what appeared to be concern on the Titans' faces, and he quickly checked to see if it was appropriate or not. "I mean… does… is it all right to use that one?" he asked hastily. "It's not… already taken or anything, is it?"

"No," said Robin, "no, it's not taken, and it works just fine. I just…" Robin looked to the other Titans for a second. "We all assumed you'd prefer something else, what with the history there…"

How to explain this?

"That's… actually why I picked it," said David, lowering his head again, and trying to get his words right. Robin raised an eyebrow, and Beast Boy glanced over at Cyborg, but said nothing, as David tried to explain.

"You guys know… my name… David Foster's not my real name, you all know that, right?" He glanced up to see that nobody was reacting in surprise. He had assumed Raven had told them all, but wasn't actually certain, but the looks he received indicated that this was not new information. Knowing he had to give an explanation, but not sure of how to explain it without sounding stupid, he started and stopped a few times before finally just saying it.

"I don't know what my real name is," he said, "and… I've been using David since I was old enough to talk, and I like it, but… I don't know where I got it from, or if it was me in the first place. And I never… I never had any other name really, not even a nickname. I've always just been… well… David." He glanced up again to ensure nobody was laughing at him, and resumed.

"And now… with this whole thing, and me needing this codename or whatever we call it, I know that I don't know where they came up with it, or why… or what they meant by calling me this… but the one thing I _do_ know… is that it's me. I know that it's… not usually how you guys pick these names, and that… it's probably kind of weird but… this is the first name I've ever had that I actually know is _mine_. The first one." He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "The only one."

No laughter greeted the silence after this statement, and he looked up at Robin once more.

"So… if it's all the same to you guys… I think I'll keep it."

And judging from the smiles, nods, and glances at one another from the other Titans, it was.

The sound of the journalists outside was becoming audible even within the Tower, and Robin gestured to David that it was about time to speak to them. He stood up carefully, the communicator still held in his hand like a priceless talisman, and as he did, the others clapped him on the back with a giant metal hand and told him he'd done 'damn good', or lightly punched him in the shoulder with a smaller gloved hand and mentioned that they'd bet Cyborg ten dollars that he was going to faint when Robin gave him the communicator, or nearly crushed his skeleton with what passed for a light friendly hug and welcomed him ebulliently in flowery language from two different planets, or simply said everything that needed saying with one slight nod of recognition. And once all these things were done, David, surrounded by the other Titans, turned back to Robin, who simply extended his gloved, empty hand, took David's and shook it firmly.

"Welcome to the Titans… " said Robin, with only the barest pause before addressing him by his newly-accepted title.

"… Devastator."

The word resonated inside David's head like a gong, but for all the times he had repeated it to himself, for all the nights he had laid awake, wondering if this would ever happen, and not knowing if he dreaded it or not, for all the buildup and the months of work and the battles with Cinderblock and who knew what else, hearing Robin call him by that name made what he had done, what he was doing, where he was, and what it all meant more real than all of Cinderblock's attacks combined.

And as all of them walked towards the front door to confront the flash bulbs and video cameras and reporters with microphones waiting for a statement, in the back of his mind, David knew that the conspiracy that had sent Cinderblock was still after him, was still trying to kill him, or worse, and that he still didn't know why, but for the first time ever, that thought did not fill him with dread. It was still a threat, of course, still terrifying in its own way, but tempering the dread was a feeling of hope and wonder all rolled together that he couldn't describe, like the electric anticipation of a football player moments before the big game. He was a _Titan_. He was a _superhero_. He could scarcely believe it, indeed he _couldn't_ believe it, and doubted he'd be able to for a long, long time, yet there it was. The communicator in his hand, and the name Robin had spoken both served to prove it.

He was a superhero.

So the people who were after him were still out there? So he didn't know who they were, or what they wanted? So they were preparing, even now, new strokes against him and the rest of the Titans?

One glance around him at the others told him everything he needed to know, and he couldn't stop a smile from spreading over his face as he mentally issued his reply back to whoever they were.

'You want me?' he thought, 'All right then, _come and get me_.'

* * *

**Author's Note:** One final reminder, to those who read this far, to please leave a review, long or short, positive or negative, for I cannot make this story the best it can be without your input. Thank you for reading.


	20. Dear Devastator

**Disclaimer:** Even after all this time between chapters, I _still_ don't own the Teen Titans, and to be honest with you, it's starting to annoy me…

**Author's Note:** Hello everyone.

Once again, I'm so sorry that it has taken me this long to finish the next installment of my story. I could list a litany of reasons from being in the middle of an apartment hunt to a series of cluster headaches to heavy workloads at the office, but it all boils down to just not having had the time to give this the attention it needed. Fortunately, I believe (though I've said that before) that this is no longer the case, and that I can now return to a semi-regular schedule. I regret terribly the imposition on all of my readers' attentions that this delay has been.

Before I proceed however, I must first call attention to a remarkable thing. Chaltab, of the Legendverse fame, has graciously seen fit to create an actual_ picture_ of my two principle original characters from this story, David and Carrie, and has posted the results of this drawing upon Deviant Art. As I'm fair certain it is not permitted to post actual URLs in here (if it is, I'll put it up in the next chapter), I will simply say that the picture can be found by going to deviant art and searching for the keywords "Devastator and Carrie" from Deviant Art's homepage. I cannot stress how honored I am that someone should find this story worthy of the mere effort to read it, let alone comment on it, _let alone_ create other works based around it. Chaltab has my everlasting thanks for his boundless generosity.

The chapter below was _fiendishly_ difficult to write, and I fear that this may show up in its quality. I did the best I could with it, being as it was sort of an experimental chapter, but a necessary one to set up the pieces for what is to happen in the next few chapters (you didn't think I was done, did you?). Once again, feedback is priceless,_especially_ in a chapter like this one. Things you loved, and hated, are things I desperately want to know about, so please, be it quick or lengthy, praise-filled or bilious, leave behind a review, that I might know what is to be done in the future. The pointer you give may serve to better the next chapter or the one after that, and that helps everyone. Thank you so much, as always, for reading, and once more I shall do everything humanly possible to finish Chapter 21 in a reasonable time frame.

* * *

**Chapter 20: Dear Devastator**

_"Truly great friends are hard to find, difficult to leave, and impossible to forget."_

- Anonymous

**O-O-O**

**From the desk of Devastator, Titans Tower, Jump City, California**

**To:**

_Malcolm Fisher  
c/o The Martha Wayne Memorial Foundation's Center for Foster Children  
412 John Muir Ave.  
San Francisco, CA  
94112_

_Dear Malcolm,_

_I'm not sure how this is supposed to work, so if this wasn't what you were expecting to get back, I'm really sorry. It seems like for the last couple weeks, every time I talk to someone I start out by saying 'I've never done this before,' and this is just one more time. Robin said that I should just write back a quick note thanking you for your letter and answering whatever questions I could in a sentence or two, but he's also always telling me that I have to figure out how to do things my own way, so I think I'll go a little overboard if it's all right with you. I'll try to edit out the idiotic parts before I mail it. And before you ask, no, I don't know why I have my own letterhead either. I blame Robin._

_So first off, thanks for writing. The others are kind of used to this sort of thing by now, I guess. One day I'll probably be used to it too, but for now... well... let's just say I didn't really expect to be doing this. What else is new, huh? Anyhow, I'll do my best to answer the questions you had, but remember, I'm still pretty new at this, so there's a bunch of stuff I just don't know the answer to, and probably some other things I'm not allowed to talk about. Still, this is sort of a special case, so I'd like to get it right..._

**O-O-O**

"This is wondrous fun, Beast Boy! I had no idea that the pressing of buttons so as to control the actions of imaginary characters projected onto the television screen was so enjoyable!"

Beast Boy did not reply, hammering on his controller like he was trying to drill through it with his fingers, his eyes wide and glued to the TV-screen, disbelief alternating with desperation on his face. Robin, standing behind the couch where Starfire was seated, had a smirk growing on his face, proportional with Starfire's rapdily-increasing score. David, sitting at the kitchen table on a stool, attempting to read a book on meditation Raven had loaned him, found that he was constantly re-reading the same line without any of it sinking in and glancing over at the screen every few seconds to watch the festivities as Beast Boy grew ever more frantic. The changeling's efforts were in vain however, and all too soon the sound of the end of the round brought the usual cheers and garbled expressions of stunned disbelief, the only difference being who was emitting what.

"Nice job, Starfire!" exclaimed Robin, and he might have said more, but Starfire threw her arms around his shoulders and chest in celebration and flatly crushed the air out of him. Beast Boy meanwhile was staring at the screen as though unable to process the words and numbers it was displaying, the controller held limply in his hands. Just the sight was enough to bring a smile to David's face, and when Beast Boy turned to Starfire and Robin with an expression of dumbfounded astonishment.

"Dude, Star..." he said, his voice reflecting his thunderstruck expression. "How did you _do_ that?"

Starfire, smiling as brightly as she ever did, released Robin (who slowly returned to his normal color) and turned back to Beast Boy. "I pressed the buttons on the controller as you instructed," she said. "Was that not the objective of the game?"

"It... you..." stammered Beast Boy, periodically glancing back at the screen, as if expecting the score to suddenly change back to reflect his vision of reality. David gave up all pretense of reading and just watched, stifling his laughter with his sleeve as he pretended to cough. Robin too seemed content to simply watch Beast Boy's mind flail at what had just happened (and to breathe). It took another half a minute before Beast Boy realized what this actually meant, and his eyes (if possible) seemed to open even wider. "You guys _cannot_ tell Cyborg..."

"Tell me what?" said Cyborg from the doorway, and Beast Boy whirled around to see his best friend leaning against the doorframe with a large box in one hand and a grin on his face. "You mean they shouldn't tell me that Star just kicked your green butt in Ninja Racer? Or they shouldn't tell me it was her first time ever playin'?" Beast Boy seemed to wilt, as Cyborg strode into the common room, setting the box down on the table. "Man, the way you suck it up at that game," said the cybernetic teen with a wry smile, "I'm surprised this doesn't happen more often. Pretty soon David's gonna be the only one left here you can beat."

"Hey!" said David in mock-outrage. "Don't drag _me_ into this. You guys cheat."

"Well if he don't, he'd better start," said Cyborg with a chuckle as he set the box down on the table. "Anyhow y'all, it's that time again."

The others slowly began to gather around the table, leaving David, as always, the only one who wasn't sure what was going on. "What time?" he asked.

"Fan mail time," said Robin as Cyborg pried the top off of the box with one hand and began passing letters and packages out, calling each Titan's name as he did so. Raven's mail he set aside in a separate pile for her to collect later. The others began opening packages and letters, occasionally reading a particularly memorable passage out to the others or expressing their surprise at a particular gift. As always, it took a while, and David, who had seen this a hundred times before, returned his attention to the book, trying to figure out both what it was talking about and why Raven had thought it important enough to suggest reading.

"Robin," said Cyborg, passing out another letter, "Starfire, Robin, me, BB, BB again, Robin, all of us, Raven, Star, me again, Star and Robin both, BB..." Cyborg skipped a beat, "Devastator."

It took a second for everyone, David included, to realize that Cyborg had just called his name. "... wait, _what_?" he asked as he lowered the book and turned to Cyborg, his eyebrow raising. Cyborg was holding an envelope in his hand, a beaming smile on his face.

"This one's yours, man!" said Cyborg, and he handed the letter to David, who took it mutely. The envelope was plain and unadorned save for the stamp, address, and return address, yet displayed prominently across the front of it was the name 'Devastator', written in black felt pen in an uncertain hand, followed by the address of the Tower. David stared blankly at it for a few moments as Cyborg handed out the rest of the mail, and was still turning it over in his hands when Cyborg had finished and the others were opening their letters and packages.

"You gonna open it?" asked Beast Boy as he tore open a large cardboard box and scattered packing peanuts around the room as he searched for whatever was inside. Carefully, David slipped a finger under the envelope's lip and detached it, drawing a small folded sheet of paper out. As the others laughed or read sections of their letters aloud to one another, or rejoiced over some particular knick-knack or thank-you gift they had received. He unfolded the letter carefully. Written on the top in the same blocky handwriting was a simple introduction.

"_Dear Devastator,_" it said.

He read the letter slowly, quietly, the sounds of the others fading out as he did so, and when he was done, he read it again, still having trouble believing that he was holding it in his hands. The others were finishing with their mail by now, Starfire glowing over the colored construction-paper thank you cards she had received from a class of pre-schoolers she had saved the week before from a collapsing building and Beast Boy savoring the Tofu sampler he had been sent from the owner of the food mart they'd protected from Johnny Rancid's last attempt at urban renewal, but he still sat there, re-reading the letter again and again, until finally Robin walked over behind the counter to make breakfast.

"Anything good?" asked Robin, snapping David out of his reading, and he looked up at Robin and for a second, didn't know what to say. Instead, he handed the letter over to the Boy Wonder, who skimmed it quickly, as did Cyborg, who had come over to help Robin.

"Heh, nice," said Cyborg, with a chuckle. "You remember the first one of these you ever got, Rob?"

"Batman didn't exactly advertise his mailing address," said Robin, rummaging in the cabinet at his knees for a frying pan. Cyborg handed the letter back to David, who took it carefully.

"What do I... am I supposed to..."

"Write back?" asked Cyborg, taking several pounds of bacon out of the freezer. "If you want. You saw how much of it the rest of us get. Won't be long before you're gettin' the same amount."

"Just a quick note's enough," said Robin. "Otherwise you'd be doing nothing but writing thank-you letters before too long."

"Dudes, anyone wanna try some of this?" chimed in Beast Boy, his mouth stuffed with tofu. Without waiting for an answer, he wolfed down a veggie-sausage in a single bite.

"Hey, BB, you know you're s'posed to cook those first, right?" called Cyborg over the hissing of his frying bacon, an instant before Beast Boy's eyes flew open wide and his face turned a lighter shade of green than usual. Cyborg cackled and flipped the bacon with his spatula as Beast Boy lunged towards the nearest trash can and violently spat out the uncooked sausage. "Told ya."

Ignoring what was likely to become round 4,371 of the never-ending meat/tofu debate, David stood up from the counter with the letter in hand. "I think I'll... just write a quick thing back to him, if that's all right." He could think of no particular reason why it wouldn't be, but...

"Sure thing," said Cyborg, "but once BB stops pretending like that stuff he just got is real food, he's probably gonna want to kick your butt at Ninja Racer, I mean seeing as you're the last one in the tower he can still beat and all..."

"Dude!" protested the offended Changeling. "That's it! You and me, Cyborg, right now, head to head matchup, best of three."

As the posturing continued, David decided it was a good time to make an exit, and accordingly he turned away and walked out of the common room, the sounds of Cyborg and Beast Boy's trash talking still filtering down the hallway

"Soon as I finish breakfast, Grass Stain, I'll be happy to show you how it's done. But if you can't beat Starfire, you think you can beat the reigning king of Ninja Racer?"

"Oh yeah? Guess again, tin-man."

David entered the elevator and pressed the button to go to the floor his room was on, and the doors slid shut an instant after Cyborg's anguished wail shook the tower to its very foundations.

"_She beat my high score?"_

**O-O-O**

_**Is it true you used to be one of us?**_

_Yes, it's true._

_I'm sure there's some kind of reason why I shouldn't be saying this, and I'm sure if and when I show this to Robin he's going to tell me all about it, but Robin's not the one who made a public debut in front of the entire news media and four dozen people he recognized without a mask. And thanks to Marcus... sorry... 'Adonis' deciding that he was going to 'get back at me' the only way he could think of, there's not much point in pretending, even if the DCS people cooperated by not releasing my real name._

_Yes, I've lived in one foster care center or another for most of my life, as long back as I could remember. I was even in the one you're in now for a while. It was pretty nice as I remember (compared to that pit up in Redding at least), but I got transferred out of it after a year, so it could be different now. The one big thing I remember most about that place though, was that it was really easy to break into the records office. The lock on the window facing the courtyard doesn't work, and at night you could jimmy it open and get inside. We all did it at least once._

_Robin's gonna insist that I take that part out, because I'm supposed to be providing an example or something. It's not that I don't care about that, but we both know what it's like to know that your records are there but that nobody will let you see them. Just don't do anything I wouldn't do while you're in there, or I'll probably get blamed for it. And before you go in, do me a favor and think about it for a while. You... might not want to know what's in those files. I knew a few kids who wished they hadn't. Don't let anyone talk you into it if you'd rather not know. But then you probably know all that already._

_**What's it like having superpowers?**_

_I always used to think that superpowers would be the most awesome thing in the world. Then I found out I had some. You wouldn't think it, but when you're seven, real, honest-to-God superpowers scare you to death. I didn't quite think they made me into some kind of monster, but I did think they were something to avoid drawing attention to. Now that I know roughly how they work and how to use them... well it's kind of strange really. You get used to them being there and part of you for so long, that you really don't think about them as being "super". The others all use their powers like it's nothing special at all, like how Raven runs the vacuum cleaner around the room with her mind or Beast Boy turns into a rhino whenever he plays football. Mine are a little different, but even so, with all the combat training... I guess you just get used to them._

_Sorry if I'm not making much sense, but I'm trying to say that superpowers, like anything else, just sort of become normal after a while. I always thought that a superhero could never get over just how amazing his powers were, and... they are, I mean when I sit down and think about it, they really are. But if I've learned anything being here, it's that you can get used to anything, no matter how weird._

_I'm still not making sense, am I? Let's just say, having superpowers is terrifying at first, before you know what they are and how they work, and you're walking around wondering what's wrong with you or how much longer before someone finds out and picks you up. Once you get them figured out though, once you know (roughly) what you're doing with them and how to use them... well there's times when they're more incredible than anything else in the world. Most of the time though, they just are. Like riding a bike or driving a car or turning cartwheels or doing math problems in your head, they're just another thing you can do, and it's not until you step back from them that you realize just what it is you __do__ every day, and how insane that is._

_**Do the Titans ever follow other superheros?**_

_I'm... not quite sure what you mean by this one. Do you mean other real superheroes, or ones from the comic books? The Titans know a lot of the other superheros around the country and even around the world, which I'm sure is not a surprise to anybody. I've met some of them since I started doing this, people like Aqualad, Speedy, or Bumblebee. We keep up with them all the time certainly, but they're all about our age. They're our friends, more than anything else. I'm guessing you meant people like the JLA._

_That one's a little more complicated. I've never met anyone from the JLA, and I wouldn't know what to do if I ever did. Some of us have more to do with the adult heroes than others. Obviously Robin has his connection to Batman, and Beast Boy with the Doom Patrol. By and large though, the adult heroes leave us alone, and we leave them alone. I guess they're trying to make sure we can handle ourselves on our own without calling on them all the time, or maybe they're just busy with their thing. I can't really speak for all the others this time, but the Justice League to me is probably no different than it is to you. I mean... Superman. Superman is sort of what we all want to be like, isn't he, even those of us who __do __have powers and costumes? Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Arrow, The Flash, a lot of people like us are former apprentices of people like that. I guess it depends on each of us if we "follow" them or not, I don't do it much, but that doesn't mean we don't all want to be like them in the end._

_And as to made-up superheroes, like from the comics, well..._

**O-O-O**

David decided, after careful assessment of the facts in question, that either he had lost his mind, or everyone else had.

"There you are!" exclaimed Beast Boy. "C'mon, we gotta get you ready."

The scene before him was such that David had trouble remembering how to form coherent sentences. "... what _happened?_"

Beast Boy blinked at him. "What? Something wrong?"

David tried to say this in the most direct and rational manner he could. "You're _blue_."

"Oh," said Beast Boy by way of reply, and he rubbed the back of his head with one gloved hand. "Yeah. It took forever to get it to work. Looks pretty good though, huh?"

'Good' was not the word David was looking for. Beast Boy's green skin had been colored a dark indigo blue, like the sky shortly after dusk. The Changeling apparently thought it was worthy of praise, but David was still getting past the idea that it was face paint, and not some kind of weird chemical accident. Beast Boy however grabbed his wrist and dragged him into the garage, where he saw Starfire and Cyborg both engaged in applying, if not face paint, then other kinds of coloration. Starfire had exchanged her usual Tamaranean uniform for a green jumpsuit, and had (presumably) dyed a streak of white into her lengthy red hair. She was presently engaged in helping Cyborg, who had applied some kind of silver-chrome makeup to the human parts of his body, face included, and was now spray painting his metallic parts the same color.

It was enough to take one back a bit.

"Guys?" asked David, unsure if he wanted to hear the answer. "What's going on?"

Starfire turned around and smiled. "It is Florgarthab!" she explained, as though this removed all possible question as to what in the name of God was going on here, "the Tamaranean festival of imagination and wonder!"

Beast Boy was on-hand to translate. "Star says it's like an alien version of Halloween, 'cept without the candy. We all get dressed up for the day and pretend to be someone else." He grinned enthusiastically as he walked over to one of Cyborg's work benches and picked up what appeared to be a pair of fake fencing swords and swinging them around wildly.

"... oh," said David, "so... what are you doing?"

"Messin' with Robin," said Cyborg evenly as he finished a section of his arm. His voice indicated that this was a wise and virtuous use of time.

"And Raven too, if we can get her out of her room," added Beast Boy, before an over-enthusiastic swing took him off-balance and he upended himself onto the concrete floor.

"But, if this is like a Halloween thing, what are you guys supposed to be?"

"Aw c'mon, man," said Cyborg, setting down his spray can, and stepping forward into the light, which reflected off his polished silver paint like the fender of the T-car. Beast Boy sprang back to his feet and ran over to join him, crossing his arms and leaning against Cyborg confidently, while Starfire hovered several feet in the air, a beaming smile on her face. "You can't guess?"

And then it hit him.

His eyes opened wide and he fell back a step, his hand over his mouth. "Whoa..." he said, "that's... that's completely."

"Genius?" asked Beast Boy, "I know, it was all my idea. Don't worry though, we've got one for you too."

"Me?" said David, suddenly worried again. It wasn't until Cyborg held up the objects that he had sitting on the table next to him that David realized what Beast Boy had in mind...

**O-O-O**

"So I'm guessing that the explanation for this is going to make me wish I hadn't asked."

Robin was too busy to respond to Raven's deadpan comment, as he was presently engaged in trying to decide which one of the other Titans he was going to kill first. One eyebrow was raised at least an inch above the other and his mouth was slightly ajar he tried to figure out if this was a bad joke or the work of some particularly perverse villain.

Or both.

Beast Boy appeared in front of him all of a sudden, apparently from nothingness, looking like someone had dropped him in a bucket of blue paint. There were _swords_ in his hands, swords he insisted on swinging about like he was trying to decapitate himself and everyone within five feet, and he had attached what looked like a blue devil's tail to the back of his pants. He paused long enough to grin and shout "en garde!", and then suddenly vanished as though he had been vaporized, which given Raven's tolerance for his antics might well have just happened. More likely he had just taken on an invisibly-small form, a theory confirmed when he appeared all of a sudden perched precariously atop the couch. Cyborg, shining like the polished fender of his car, was standing behind him, talking to Starfire in an accent that sounded like a cheap ripoff of Boris Badanov's from the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons. Starfire herself was flying loops around Cyborg, the kitchen, and everything else, crying out periodically how it was necessary that they all rally to do battle with someone called "the Magnetic man".

Suddenly, coming into the kitchen to get some lunch no longer sounded like such a good idea.

"What are you guys doing?" asked Robin, largely without anything else to ask. Beast Boy (why oh why did it have to be Beast Boy?) rushed over to answer, brandishing his swords like he actually knew what he was doing with them, a plain lie.

"Ve have intruderz!" he shouted in the most atrocious German accent Robin had ever heard. "You are spiez from ze Brotherhood, come to stop us!"

"Get them, comrades!" yelled Cyborg in an attempt at a Russian accent that was, if anything, even worse than Beast Boy's German. Robin was still pondering this when all three of the mis-colored Titans tackled him.

Under normal circumstances, Robin was a match for all the other Titans combined, a fact he had unfortunately proven at least once. At the moment however, he was in no position to make his escape with a closed door behind him, nor did he actually imagine that they were actually going to jump him until it was too late to move. By the time he realized it, Cyborg and Starfire had grabbed him and were dragging him into the center of the room. Beast Boy attempted to do the same to Raven, but Raven was having none of it, and simply phased through the floor. Robin hoped for a second that she would re-appear and get him out of here, but she had apparently returned to her room, leaving him at the mercy of his likely-deranged teammates.

He reminded himself to take this out on her in the next training session.

The three of them dumped him unceremoniously in the center of the room, and began to crow to one another at having captured the "dangerous villain". He had time to notice that Starfire too was talking in what passed for an accent, this time a southern one, and that hers, like Cyborg's and Beast Boy's, was almost unrecognizably bad.

"Um... guys, whatever you're doing, do you think I could just get some lunch? I've got a lot of work to..."

"Florgarthab cannot be ended until sundown," said Starfire, breaking back into her usual voice for a second. "And as you have been captured by the participants, you too must participate. Such are the rules of the festival,"

"Yeah man," said Cyborg, "'sides, we got it all ready for you." He reached behind his back and produced a small single-lensed visor that Robin realized had belonged to the Hive Five member See-More until the Titans' last defeat of the super villain team. It had been hastily repainted in gold, and the lens had red cellophane laminated over it, a feature Robin had a chance to see up close and personal when Cyborg summarily strapped the contraption onto his head over his mask and eyes.

With a sigh, Robin slid the visor back off. "Look, guys," he said, "like I said, I've got a lot of work to do. Can't you go and capture David or something instead?"

A cough from behind him caused him to turn his head, and only then did he notice that David was standing in the back of the room, leaning against the back wall. The kineticist had a long unfastened brown trenchcoat on over his red-orange uniform, and wore a black leather headband around his forehead. In one hand, he held one of Robin's telescoping combat staves, presently extended to full length, and planted on the floor like a flagpole. In his other hand, he held a deck of playing cards.

"It's a little late for that," said David, blushing the color of his uniform at the ridiculousness of what he was doing, but doing it anyhow. Setting the staff against the wall, he slid the Ace of Spades off the top of the deck and held it up in his free hand. Frost formed over the playing card as though it had been plunged into a deep freezer, and then he flung it into the air, where it twisted and fluttered and spun and then suddenly exploded into confetti which rained down upon all three of the other Florgarthab participants, and onto Robin. All three of the others laughed and cheered, addressing one another by their adopted code-names, and all Robin could do was quietly resign himself to getting no work done today.

Again.

**O-O-O**

_... no comment._

_**What's the training like?**_

_I don't know what it's like for everyone else, but when Robin's the one training you, it's the hardest thing in the world. I thought I was going to die trying. In fact there were a couple times I wasn't so sure I __didn't__ die trying. It's not just the physical workout, although that stuff's brutal. It's the reaction training, powers training, tactical training... there's no end really. I've seen those documentaries on what Navy SEALS and special forces go through. What we do is kind of like that, but not really. We don't use weapons, for one thing, and we're not trying to kill people, but on the other hand we're going after stuff that not even the special forces would take on. They call us instead._

_Once you're up and running though... then it's a little easier. For one thing, you don't have to learn how to run a lap or throw a punch anymore, you can just do it, which means that you're doing more interesting stuff like the obstacle course, or what Robin calls "lateral solution work", which is where he thinks up the craziest challenge he can simulate in the training room (seriously, the last one involved mutant cauliflower), and just sits back to see how we deal with it. It has its ups and downs still, a lot of it's still busy work, but my favorite has to be Freestyle Combat Training._

_Picture a game of lasertag, only there's no vests or light guns. It's like a free-for-all with all six of us where we all just try to take each other down however we can. The room's padded up with mats and so that nobody can get hurt, and everyone goes really easy on their powers to make sure, and then Robin (or someone) gives the signal, and we all just go at it. You shoot someone or knock them over with one of your powers, and they're out. Sometimes there's teams, three on three or whatever. Sometimes it's everyone for themselves. Sometimes we all gang up on Robin (usually without letting him know ahead of time). Sometimes it's an endurance test, where one of us has to survive against all the others for as long as they can. There's really no end to all the combinations of stuff we can do in freestyle training, and if you ask me, it beats running laps or blasting pieces of vulcanized rubber out of the air._

_**What do you guys do when you're not training or fighting?**_

_Well somewhere in there we try to find time to eat and sleep and all that, but you mean down time? We've each got our little routines I guess._

_Beast Boy's a video game fanatic. Cyborg and Robin play against him a lot, and so do I, but Beast Boy spends most of his time with that sort of thing, or at least with the TV in some way. I probably shouldn't mention that he's obsessed with cartoons, but honestly I doubt he cares who knows that. If it's not the TV or the Gamestation though, it'll be his comics or his pranks, or his games of stankball (don't ask). Beast Boy's kind of hard to keep track of sometimes. When Cyborg's got a second free, he likes to go down into the garage and work on the car, or on some other crazy project of his. He's the only guy I've ever seen who actually likes doing maintenance. Honestly though, Cy just needs to keep busy, or he gets restless. That's one of the reasons BB and him get along so well, or at least that's my opinion. Whatever else might happen, hanging out with Beast Boy is never dull._

_Raven keeps to herself most of the time, but I know she's almost always reading something whenever she gets the chance. Before you ask, I don't know what her favorite genre is. She's loaned me a few things here and there, usually horror or some kind of reference book she thinks I ought to read, but I've seen her with everything from Sci-fi to historical fiction to books that look like they might be able to eat you if you messed with them. If she's not reading though, she'll usually be meditating somewhere in the tower. Starfire's a lot more active than the others, and she likes to be around other people more of the time. She'll be taking care of Silkie, or watching one of her documentaries, or preparing for one of her Tamaranean festivals, or going out to the mall or amusement park or whatnot. Starfire always seems to be busy with something, and usually something with someone else (and more often than not, with Robin). Robin doesn't get a lot of free time, and I think he prefers it that way. He's always doing something more "official", dealing with the press, paying bills, arranging for contractors to come and patch up whatever happened to the Tower last week. When he does get some time off, he likes to spend it training. It's no secret that he doesn't have any powers except his own skills, and so he likes to keep those in top shape. Usually it takes one of the others, Beast Boy or Cyborg or most often Starfire to get him to unwind with more relaxing stuff._

_Of course all that's when we're not doing things together. Wednesday night is movie night, for example, and it rotates between us who gets to pick what to watch. On days with good weather, Starfire or Beast Boy will drag everyone to the park, or just up to the roof of the tower for a game of volleyball or football or just hanging out (getting tackled by Cyborg is... quite a thing). Those days are really the most fun, I think. I'm pretty good at occupying myself around the Tower, any of us from the system would be. There's more to do here than you could do in a hundred years, between everything I mentioned above, but..._

_I dunno... it's just hard to separate everything out like that. When we're not fighting, training, eating, or sleeping, when we're hanging out, we're just doing what anyone else would be. The only real difference is what we do between those times. I know, it's kind of hard to think of people like Robin or Starfire just being like anyone else, but it's really just like that. Sort of..._

_Ugh, I'm not making any sense. I'll come back to this section._

_**So do you have a favorite Titan?  
**__  
Aw, come on, you don't actually think I'm gonna answer that, do you? I'm going to have to show this to Robin at least, just to make sure I don't accidentally give away some kind of deep secret that could get us all killed (unlikely, I know, but you can't be too careful). I'm not about to put down that I like one of the others more than another and then give it to them to read._

_Seriously though... when I first got here, I thought they were larger than life, just like we all do. I mean, they were superheroes after all. The first time I ever saw them fight, it was like watching one of those old claymation movies with the Greek gods and whatever, only it was happening right in front of me. The first month or so, I think they all thought I was afraid of them. I guess I __was__ afraid of them, but mostly it was just awe, you know? And I think that made them a little uncomfortable, so they tried, they really tried to get me past that, so that I wouldn't jump whenever one of them asked me a question, and so I'd just treat them normally, like they were anyone else._

_Well it didn't work. At least not totally._

_The Titans, all five of them... they're... they're like nobody I've ever met. Not just because they have superpowers, not because they fight monsters and aliens and armies, not even because they keep an entire city safe (not that those aren't amazing things). Those are the reasons everyone thinks they're amazing, and the reason I used to think it. But there's more to it than that, there's more to them than just a bunch of powers and a list of bad guys they've beaten, and I don't know if I can explain what I mean and still make sense. They're just..._

_There's days where I can't believe that people like them exist. Not superheroes, people._

_I wouldn't be here, writing this to you, in more ways than one, if it wasn't for each one of the five of them. All of them. Any of them. Starfire's probably the most generous, kindest person I've ever met. Yes, I know what happened when she first got to this planet, or at least I've seen the archival footage. I don't care what it looks like there or on TV when she's fighting. She'd sooner die than hurt someone's feelings, and given the choice, she'd be friends with everyone on the planet, and I think she could do it. It takes a cold person to not like Starfire. Everyone's afraid of superheroes a little bit, but nobody who really knows her is afraid of Starfire, at least nobody who shouldn't be._

_Cyborg, despite everything he's been through in the last few months (long story), is always there to just drag you back to your senses if you're scared or worried or anything. I have no idea how he does it. I know he gets mad, (__everyone__ knows when Cyborg gets mad), but whenever I'm feeling stuck or like I can't do something, he's right there. You talk to Cyborg, and you get the idea that he's basically seen it all. The guy isn't even 17 yet, but he just makes __sense__, you know? He's one of those guys who's just like a rock. Solid, dependable, always there when you need him._

_In a way, Beast Boy is too, and if I don't know how Cyborg does it, I'll __never__ know how Beast Boy does. You'd never think it to meet them (or maybe you would), but Starfire and Beast Boy are a lot alike. It's like he can't stand the idea that there's someone having a bad day, and he'll make you feel better even if it means you're so mad at him you forget what was wrong in the first place. Nothing wakes you back up to reality like a water balloon full of motor oil hitting you in the face (yes, I've fallen for this more than once). He even manages to cheer __Raven__ up when nobody else can (no, she won't admit it, but she's not as impossible to read as she pretends to be). Let's just say it takes a lot of guts to bother Raven when she's in a bad mood._

_Robin... I mean what can you say about Robin? Yeah, he's not the most relaxed guy in the world, and he and Cyborg have had their... issues before (I'm pretty sure that's not a surprise to anybody), but even Cyborg's admitted to me that Robin brings things out of you that you didn't even know you had. It's like he can see right through you and see past all the junk and the fear and the doubt and figure out what you might become with a hell of a lot of work, and then he turns you into it. He's done that for all of the others, and he's certainly done it for me. And it doesn't matter how much work he has to put in to do it to you, he'll do it without even thinking twice, just __because__. There's nobody else like Robin in the world, I'm sure of that._

_No, not even the person you're thinking of._

_And as to Raven, yeah, it's true, she's pretty closed off a lot of the time. She's got a sense of humor like a desert, she's got zero tolerance for stupidity, and she scares the hell out of me (I don't care who reads that, it's not a secret), but like I said before, Raven's not as hard to read as she thinks she is, and anyone who says she's a goth or a witch doesn't know what they're talking about (okay, she __might__ be a witch, but so what? Starfire's an alien). She's very, very protective of the others, of everybody really, and whatever the papers might say, she'd do absolutely anything for them (yes, even Beast Boy, not that she'd admit it). I mean, I'll be honest, Raven and I had our... problems when I first got here, but we've been working them out, and she's been helping me an huge amount, especially since that fight with Cinderblock. I don't think I'd say I was 'close' to Raven, I don't think she lets people get close to her, but I think we finally sort of... understand each other a little bit._

**O-O-O**

"Raven?"

The mail sack felt like a backpack full of rocks to Beast Boy as he knocked on the door with one hand, his padded gloves making a muffled noise against the solid metal door. No sound or signal emerged from inside, and Beast Boy groaned, sliding the bag off his shoulder and dropping it onto the floor of the hallway with a thud. He knocked again, a bit louder this time. "Hey, uh, Raven?" he said, "I've got your mail here." He shoved the bag with his foot, and it moved an inch or so. "Some of this stuff weighs a ton. You wanna see what's in it? Don't worry, I didn't booby trap it or anything."

Neither the door, nor anything behind the door said a word in reply. Beast Boy groaned. "C'mon, Rae," he said, "I know you're in there. Robin said you were in your room." He crossed his arms, facing the door stubbornly as though it was going to respond to him. "I'm not leaving until you at least open the door to take this stuff." As though to indicate his seriousness in this regard, Beast Boy impassively stared at the door, no doubt expecting it to open up and reveal Raven, annoyed or otherwise. It did no such thing, and after several minutes of waiting, Beast Boy's resolve began to wane. Tentatively, he knocked on the door again. "Raven? You there?" he asked. He glanced up and down the corridor, looking for any sign of someone approaching, but neither sight nor sound of anyone could be detected even to his senses.

"Nobody home, I guess," said Beast Boy to himself, but as in reply, no sooner had he said it than there was a noise from within Raven's room, a series of soft 'thuds', like a small landslide of objects landing on the floor. The changeling froze, but there was no other noise to be heard, not even when he crept back to the door and placed his ear to it. He thought he could hear breathing from within the room, soft and even.

"Raven?" he asked again, but he knew there would be no answer. He was starting to get a bit worried. It was not at all uncommon for Raven to tell him to go away when he pestered her, but to say nothing was... not normal. Raven wasn't the sort of person who spared your feelings. He supposed she could be asleep, but it was the middle of the day and Raven wasn't the sort to take naps either. Of course she could have been meditating, but then she would have already yelled at him to leave her alone. Besides, what was that sound?

"Raven, are you okay?" he asked, "I'm... I'm gonna come in, okay?" The door to Raven's room was a sliding steel frame-door, just like all the others, built by Cyborg to withstand everything from battering rams to military-grade munitions. It had not however been built to withstand Beast Boy. It was a trivial matter to change into the form of a gnat and slip under the door. Ordinarily of course, this was unspeakably foolish. Raven would skin him alive for a stunt like this under almost any conditions, but all he wanted to do was make sure that everything was all right... at least that was what he told himself.

And when he finally got inside, he forgot all about Raven killing him, as his insect mouth fell open wide

Raven's room was a mess.

A relative term to be sure. It was not the same deep-seeded disaster zone as Beast Boy's room, which had not been fully cleaned since he had first moved into it. Everything was still more or less in place here in Raven's room, save for the books. Hundreds of books were scattered all over the place, piled on the floor like heaps of treasure in a dragon's lair, hard and softbound both, books written in English and Latin and scripts that Beast Boy couldn't even begin to identify. Behind them, still in place against the walls, Raven's bookshelves stood denuded of their contents.

It took Beast Boy a second to find Raven. The sorceress was at her desk, a single desk lamp illuminating the scene. The desk was completely covered in books, manuscripts, and tomes of uncertain source, one of which, a gigantic reference work that appeared to be longer than everything Beast Boy had ever read put together, Raven was using as a pillow, her head and arms draped over it, fast asleep. As Beast Boy resumed human form and quietly approached, he saw that one of the stacks of books on the desk had capsized, avalanching down onto the ground in a heap. No doubt that was what he had heard. The sound of the heavy hardbound textbooks crashing down onto the un-carpeted ground had apparently not stirred her.

Silently for once, Beast Boy approached the desk. Raven was quite clearly asleep and oblivious to his presence, her head on its side, facing him, but with her eyes shut. Her mouth was moving, making words in her sleep, her brow was furrowed, and her hand twitched every few seconds, her fingernails scraping over the surface of the desk. As Beast Boy drew closer, he could make out some of the titles of the books, which as always seemed to be the exact last things he would ever try to read. "A Comparative Study of Metahuman Psychology", a well worn blue-covered hardback book propped against Raven's hand, "Interpreting Mindscapes", a tie-die-colored softbound book standing open on the back of the desk, and the laughably-named "Brief History of Paranormal Encounters", which despite the title, was the size of a large dictionary, and looked about as interesting. Beast Boy couldn't make hair nor hide of what any of these things were about... but none of them looked like the sort of reading anyone, even Raven, would do for fun.

Partially obscured underneath the books however, was a large manila folder laying flat and open with what looked like legal documents inside. Beast Boy couldn't tell what they said without getting closer, but he didn't have to, for the colorful watermark on top of each page read "California Department of Child Services", and the folder itself was stamped with the words "Permanent Record"

Suddenly Raven seemed to tense up, her teeth baring into a snarl, her fists balling up, knocking several more books off her desk. She shook her head, mouthing words between clenched teeth but making no sound other than the rattling of her chair legs on the floor. Abandoning caution, Beast Boy jumped forward, but was an instant too late as the chair suddenly slipped out from under Raven and overturned, spilling her onto the floor, several more large volumes following her down in a heap.

_That_ woke her up.

Raven blinked awake with a stuttering cough, as the dust from fallen books wafted through the air. When finally she had blinked the dust out of her eyes, only then did she notice Beast Boy crouching down over her, offering a hand.

"Dude," said Beast Boy, "Raven, are you okay?"

Raven seemed completely out of sorts, having just woken up from whatever in the world had just happened. Perhaps this was why she did not instantly react with fire and brimstone. "Beast Boy?" she asked, sounding confused and uncertain. Semi-automatically, she knocked the spilled books off herself and slowly got back up, declining Beast Boy's outstretched hand, but not slapping it away or hurling him through the ceiling either, which was certainly an improvement over the normal reaction his presence here would have engendered.

"What happened?" asked Beast Boy, looking around the room at the spilled and discarded books.

"Nothing happened," said Raven stiffly, still clearly out of sorts. "What are you doing in my room?"

There was more than a hint of menace to that question, and Beast Boy backed up a step or two. "I was just delivering your mail!" he protested. "I heard something collapse and wanted to make sure everything was okay." He cringed, expecting Raven to zap him with something, or at least yell and scream, but she was still somewhat disoriented at having been randomly awoken by falling off her desk, and she simply sat down again with a tired sigh.

"Just... get out of my room," she said as she picked the dictionary-sized book up and resumed thumbing through it, paying him no further mind. Instead of following her instructions however, which would have been the sane thing to do, he walked carefully over to her desk, bound and determined to press his luck.

"What _is_ all this stuff?"

"They're called 'books'," said Raven irritably, "you might have heard of them? They're what some people do instead of watching TV all day."

Beast Boy ignored the jibe as he looked around at more of the books. The titles were all reference titles, "A Study of this" and "The Authoritative that". It didn't make sense. Sure, Raven liked to read, but...

"Are these Robin's?" he asked lamely, picking one of the books up off the floor. It was thicker than the Gamestation, written by somebody named "Garrick". Several of the pages were dog-eared, and he casually opened it to one of the marked sections, only to find pages upon pages of text so dense that even looking at them made his head spin.

"Some of them," said Raven sharply without looking up. "Weren't you supposed to be leaving?" Once more, he ignored her, flipping through the pages hoping for a picture or two, but there was nothing except diagrams of the brain marked with pointers and a whole bunch of long words. He was about to give the book back to Raven when suddenly he came to another marked page that had underlines and other marks written all over it in pencil in Raven's crisp handwriting. One of these marks in particular caught his eye, as it was no doubt intended to, for the words were underlined three times and circled in heavy lines.

'Beast Boy', said the note.

"Beast Boy!" said Raven, snapping Beast Boy back to the present. Only now did he notice that she had stood up again and was looming in front of him. With a snap, she slammed the book shut in his hands and snatched it away from him. "_Go away_," she said, a final warning before the fireworks that would no doubt come.

But Beast Boy still didn't move. The threat she was making had been driven out of his mind by the realization of just how tired Raven looked. There were dark circles under her violet eyes, her eyelids seemed to be drooping, and even her angry stare and threatening posture were almost half-hearted, as though she was about to fall asleep again where she stood.

"Dude, Raven," said Beast Boy, "what's wrong? You look like you stayed up all night playing Ninja Racer."

"I'm just... I'm just tired, okay?" snapped Raven. "I haven't been sleeping all that great, thanks to people barging in here whenever they feel like it."

"You fell asleep at your desk! I've never even seen Robin do that! What're all these books for? And how come I'm in one of them?"

That question took Raven back a second. "What?" she asked. "You're not in..."

"You wrote my name in that one you've got there," said Beast Boy, "and you even circled it. What are you doing?"

"I'm not doing anything," protested Raven. "It's just a little research."

Beast Boy's eyes widened as he gestured around. "This is a _little_ research?"

Anger shot through Raven's eyes. "It is when you have more than half a brain!" she snapped. "Now I'm _not_ telling you again! _Get out!_"

The walls shook with the last words of Raven's demand, but Beast Boy folded his arms in front of his chest and tried to look resolute. "Not until you tell me what's going on here."

"How many times do I have to tell you there's _nothing_ going on?" demanded Raven.

"The last time you said that, I got eaten by your beauty mirror, remember?"

"You mean you broke into my room and tried to play with a sophisticated meditation tool? That's _my_ fault now?"

"No," said Beast Boy, "but since I'm gonna keep looking until I figure it out anyway, you could just tell me what you're doing instead of waiting until I get sucked into your head this time."

Raven looked like she wanted to say any one of a hundred different things, probably all of them variations on the theme of "no", but either they all got in the way of one another, or something else prevented her from saying it. Beast Boy simply tried to look like his mind was irrevocably made up, under the theory that predators could smell fear.

Perhaps it worked.

With a sigh of extreme exasperation, Raven gritted her teeth and practically hissed out an explanation, as the light bulb in her desklamp flickered and rattled.

"I'm just looking into a few things, okay? It's got nothing to do with you."

"Then how come my name's in your book?"

"I was making some notes. It's not about you."

"So then who's it about? David?" asked Beast Boy. "I thought you said we could trust him now."

"It's not about trusting him," said Raven, "I'm just trying to see if there's anything else I can do to help him."

Beast Boy didn't respond for a few seconds. "Uhhh... okay..." he finally said, and if anything, that reply only seemed to make Raven angrier.

"What?" she snapped.

"Just... you're doing that so much you fell asleep at your desk?"

"Well since all you seem to try to teach him is how to play those stupid games of yours, someone has to try and figure out how to make him useful."

Beast Boy dodged the bait. "So... that's why you've got his permanent record? And all those books?"

Now it was Raven's turn to fold her arms. "Yes."

Beast Boy didn't say anything to that for a second, watching Raven with concern. He apparently waited too long, for Raven's frail patience was already worn out.

"Now if you don't mind, Beast Boy, I'm busy. You can either leave through the door, or the window." Given that Raven's windows didn't open, that was not exactly a small threat. Still, something about this worried him. He backtracked slowly towards the door, Raven watching his every move, but before he reached it, he turned around once more.

"Raven,"

"_What_?"

"Are you sure... you didn't find anything in David's head that time?"

"Beast Boy," said Raven, "I am not telling you again. I did _not_ find anything except what I told Robin and David about." Her eyes turned were begining to tinge red with anger as she summoned a black aura around her fists. "Now so help me, if you don't leave this room in_three seconds_..."

Beast Boy didn't wait around long enough to hear what was going to happen to him in three seconds. He yelped and turned and ran out the door, getting halfway down the hall before tripping and landing flat on his face on the floor. Behind him, the door slid shut quietly, solemn and blank once more, though his acute hearing could pick up the sound of Raven sitting back down at her desk once again. He picked himself up off the ground, dusting his uniform off, still watching the sealed entrance to Raven's room. Raven was right about one thing at least, she_had_ been very clear, both then and now, about what she had seen.

But that didn't explain the fear in Raven's eyes when he had asked her, nor did it explain the almost imperceptible hesitation in her voice before she denied seeing anything...

**O-O-O**

_**Do you ever get scared?  
**__  
All the time._

_You have to understand, I wasn't trained for this when I was growing up. I had superpowers, but that doesn't come with special bravery or anything, or living without fear. I was terrified of my own powers when they first showed up, so I just ignored them. When I first started getting mixed up in all this stuff, I bet I didn't react any differently than you would have. For some reason, people seem to think that superheroes never get scared. I do._

_I mean, I haven't been doing this for too long, so maybe that's not normal for us, but I doubt it. I know that everyone talked about how I wasn't scared at all that time I fought Cinderblock on the waterfront. They're wrong. I was scared out of my head that time, but I didn't have any choice but to fight him._

_That's really all there is to this thing..._

_I mean... I'm not sure how to explain this. I'm sure it's different for the others because they've been doing it longer or whatever, but as far as I can tell, being a hero isn't about never being afraid. It's about fighting the bad guys anyway. There's... all kinds of reasons why people do it anyway, and I don't know most of them, but I think a lot of it has to do with being more afraid of what will happen if you don't fight, than of what will happen if you do._

_I know that doesn't sound very heroic, but... I don't meaning being afraid that people won't think you're a hero anymore (although who knows? Maybe that works for some people). I mean... being afraid that if you don't fight, the bad guy will destroy the city, or kill innocent people, or even just hurt one of your friends. Have you ever been so afraid of something horrible that you'll do something else you were afraid of doing, something you wouldn't even imagine being able to do before, just to stop it?_

_I think that's how this is supposed to work._

_Anyway, yeah, I get scared doing this sort of thing, more than you probably would think. You just try to... deal with it I guess, and if your training is good enough, and you've worked at it hard enough, then even when you're so scared you want to find a corner to hide in, you'll still manage to do what you have to do. At least that's the hope._

_**What's it like being on the Titans' team?**_

_You know, on second thought, maybe I won't show this to Robin._

_You asked about superheroes before, so I'm guessing this time you mean being one of the Titans as opposed to being in some other group. Well before I try to answer that, I'm gonna let you in on a little secret. The Titans aren't a team._

_No, I'm not crazy, and yes, they do call themselves that, but they're not a team, they're something else, even if Robin wouldn't agree. A team is a bunch of people who work together to do something, like play football or wage war or even fight crime, and yes, we do that, but that's all a team does. A team exists to do that thing, to play or fight or whatever, and when they're not doing it, they're no longer a unit. I mean, they may come back every week or so to keep doing their thing, but that's about it. Even if they did it constantly though, a team is what they do. That's it._

_This isn't a team. It's something else. Something a lot more... special._

_Boy, how do I explain this?_

**O-O-O**

The bay glistened in the pale light of the full moon mixed with the colorful bursts of home-made fireworks as the sounds of the celebrating city mingled with the waves splashing against the rocks that ringed the Tower's island and the sizzling of Cyborg's portable grill. Drifting across the bay came the sound of brass bands playing, of crowds cheering and mingling, of the whizzing and screaming of children's firecrackers and noisemakers.

"... and then we captured the Mad Mod and restored the city to its normal state of happiness. Unfortunately, by the time we had done so, the birthday of America was already over, and so the people of the city were forced to wait for another year to pass before they could celebrate the birthday once again. That is the reason why it is being celebrated with such vigor."

It certainly was. Fireworks were exploding out of the city every few minutes, sending streams of sparks or explosions of colored light cascading through the night sky, and yet these were nothing but amateur versions, as the official display hadn't begun yet. Out on the bay were fireboats, police cutters, even a navy destroyer, all polished and glimmering as they sailed by, streaming jets of water into the air and firing blank salutes to the oversized American flags draped from the waterfront buildings that echoed across the bay like claps of thunder. Starfire gave a start every time one exploded, not of fright but of wonder, and across the way, David could see Robin watching Starfire out of the corner of his mask with a smile as he endeavored to help Beast Boy set up the portable picnic table. For once, Robin's attention was less than totally committed to what he was doing, and the table gave way and collapsed onto him, prompting Starfire to rush over to help, no doubt on the off-chance that this 'Mad Mod' person had rigged the table to eat Robin.

"Y'all set?"

Cyborg had come out from around the grill, and was walking over to him. David's hand slid to his side and unclipped the steel baton from his belt, feeling it pulse in his hand like a living thing, warm and then cool, the metal expanding and contracting almost imperceptibly. "I think so," he said, and glanced over at the battery of fireworks sitting further along the rocky shore. "You guys sure you want me to do this?"

"You got somebody in mind who knows more about this sorta thing?" asked Cyborg with a grin as he wolfed down half a grilled hot dog in one bite. "'Sides, this is the only way the city'd let us do it. They're still worried we're gonna let BB at the fireworks."

"I _still_ say you oughta play that song when you do it," chimed in Beast Boy from where he was trying to disentangle the partly-collapsed table.

David blinked and raised an eyebrow at Cyborg. "Song?"

"The 1812 Overture," said Raven, materializing from nothing behind them in a manner that never failed to give David a start, though the others barely seemed to notice. Raven walked past David and Cyborg as she moved towards an isolated rock, a large book in her hand. "By Tchaikovsky."

"It would be totally sweet, dude!" insisted Beast Boy, who had finally gotten the table set up again. "Like in V for Vendetta, you know?"

"No way," said Robin, as he and Starfire sat down on one of the tarps that had been set out facing the ocean.

"Why not?" asked Beast Boy, clearly convinced that this was not just a good idea for a joke, but ergo, something that by rights _had_ to be done.

"Because for one thing it's lame," said Cyborg, throwing another package of sausages on the grill, "and for another thing nobody'd be able to hear it over the fireworks anyway."

"Aw, c'mon, we'll just crank up the volume!"

"Didn't you blow the fuses last time you decided to 'crank up the volume'?" asked Raven with a smirk from her perch atop her rock. Beast Boy grinned nervously and rapidly changed the subject, no doubt to everyone's everlasting relief, striking up a running commentary on how Cyborg was cooking his vegetarian sausages, giving a lengthy series of pointers about the hows and the whys that went totally unheeded by Cyborg, who continued to insist that he knew what he was doing, even if he had to physically force Beast Boy back from the grill a few times.

"Don't put them on that way, you'll get meat juice on them!"

"Man, I cleaned the grill before I put your fake-food on there. There ain't no meat juice."

"Turn them now! They'll burn!"

"They're not done on that side yet, I'll turn them when they're ready."

Robin and Starfire sat away, paying no mind to the background noise of Beast Boy and Cyborg's debate, Seating on the tarp overlooking the bay and the fireworks, now pouring off the distant shoreline in a cascade of color and light as the official display began. Starfire was holding Robin's hand, attempting to be surreptitious about it, and failing spectacularly, but not as spectacularly as Robin's attempts to conceal the smile on his face as he pointed up at the exploding fireworks and said something that David couldn't hear from where he was. Staring off across the water, Robin could not see what David could, namely that Starfire wasn't watching the explosions, nor was her attention following where he was pointing. Her sparkling emerald-green eyes were fixed on Robin himself, and a glance at Raven told David that he wasn't the only one who noticed, nor was he the only one amused by the fact that the only one who could possibly mistake Starfire's point of interest at the moment, was of course the point of interest himself.

But what else was new?

He sat down himself on top of the plastic cooler that he and Cyborg had dragged outside, and leaned forward, resting his head on his left hand, his baton still lightly held in his right. He tapped the baton against his leg semi-consciously as he watched the fireworks explode over the city in flowery bursts of green and gold and crimson, like the flamboyant, bright color of the uniform he had sworn he'd never be able to get used to, and after only a week or two, now barely noticed. One could get used to anything. Some things more easily than others.

Beast Boy walked into view, carrying a quartet of fresh tofu dogs, walking over towards where Raven was sitting, and David had to suppress a smile. He turned his head back around towards Cyborg, who was preparing more burgers (his third round), and who rolled his human eye at David and smiled in silent recognition of what they both knew. He returned to facing forward to see Beast Boy offering Raven one of the tofu-dogs. Displaying restrained David (who had tried one earlier and found both the consistency and taste to be that of wallpaper paste) could only describe as 'heroic', Raven semi-politely declined the offer, and the five more that immediately followed it. David watched serenely as Beast Boy made some sort of impassioned plea on behalf of the tofu dogs (typical), and while he couldn't hear what the changeling was saying, he guessed that it was only partly because of exasperation (and the fact that the coast guard might mis-interpret her throwing him into the bay as something requiring an intervention) that she finally, reluctantly, took one of the tofu dogs. Beaming like a lighthouse with this apparent victory, Beast Boy settled down on another rock nearby and watched the fireworks, devouring the remaining three hot dogs like a starving wolf, and once in a while making some kind of comment to Raven about who-knew-what, to which she either did not reply, or replied in monosyllables, her face still buried in her book. David could only smile and shake his head softly. There was a time when he had wondered to himself (and to Cyborg) what Beast Boy thought he was going to get out of Raven with his constant attempts to... to do whatever it was he was doing with her. But now he just watched as Beast Boy persisted in trying to wring blood from the stone...

And experienced people-watcher that he was, Raven's nearly-imperceptible glances up at Beast Boy when he was clearly not watching did not escape his attention either.

Perhaps some rocks _could_ bleed.

Maybe he was more tired than he thought, maybe time simply flew, but sitting there, quietly watching all of the others, he had closed his eyes for what seemed like just a couple of seconds, before he felt a hand on his shoulder shaking him awake. He knew the grip was Starfire's even before he opened his eyes. "Friend!" she said in her eternal voice of joy and optimism, "you will miss the work of fire show if you sleep now! And you are needed to launch our contribution to the display." Behind her stood Robin, and his hand was still held in Starfire's. David blinked a few times to clear his vision and then nodded and stood up. slowly from where he was sitting, lifting his baton to his shoulder, paying no mind to the flame-like emissions surrounding it. Beast Boy was busy dragging Raven over to where the fireworks were set up by the wrist. What feats of self-control she had to engage in to refrain from doing something both unpleasant and hilarious to Beast Boy could only be guessed at, but he dragged her on, oblivious (or perhaps not), babbling about how awesome fireworks up close, and Robin was calling after him to make sure he didn't get too close, quite clearly torn between wanting to go over and push him back himself, and not wanting to let go of Starfire's hand, a debate which ended quickly and in the only way it could. And as he turned to walk towards the fireworks setup, already running through the chemical combinations in his head like memorized multiplication tables or the faces of long-remembered acquaintances, Cyborg stepped up next to him with a warm smile and cocked his head slightly.

"Everything okay, man?"

Perhaps it was the setting, or the lateness of the hour, or something else altogether that made him take a moment before replying, not because he didn't know the answer to the question, but because the question he was answering was not entirely the one Cyborg had meant to ask. The lights of the fireworks lit the island in a technicolor, and reflected off the windows of the mighty tower behind them all, the fortress, command center, headquarters, the place they all called home.

Home.

A smile crossed his face slowly, like a living thing awakening from slumber, and when he raised his head to Cyborg and nodded slowly, the certainty written all over him was such that Cyborg asked nothing further and just nodded back, understanding wordlessly, as always. And then, turning his head and slowly raising the baton, David let the world wash out into a trillion trillion tiny flecks of matter before commanding his power to go forth and perform his will, directing his thought and effort at fuses and firing charges, until the whiz and crack of the first rocket screaming into the air brought a hush over all five of the other Titans. One by one, the fireworks blew upwards as he moved his baton back and forth like a conductor at a symphony, and Starfire held Robin's hand tighter and exclaimed that it was a glorious sight, rivaled only by the solar flares of her homeworld, and Beast Boy even managed to elicit from Raven the admission, albeit sarcastic, that the fireworks were "nice".

But once the automatic charges were going off regularly, and there was nothing to be done, David honestly couldn't have cared less about the fireworks, for wondrous as they were, they couldn't possibly compare to the other wonders present.

For what could fireworks compare... to this?

**O-O-O**

_They've been through more things than I can even think of, and none of them are more than two or three years older than me. They've had things happen just in the last few months, just in the time I was able to understand sort of what was going on, that I don't think I could have survived and kept going on with, but they're still here, and it hasn't jaded them or made them distant or any more 'professional'. They didn't know me when I got here. It was a crazy situation and a lot of people had just died (like, a __lot__), and they didn't know who I was or where I'd come from, and I was so messed up that I couldn't really give them any help with anything, but they didn't just help me, they didn't just fix me back up or help me stop Cinderblock, like you'd think superheroes would. When Cinderblock was chasing me down everywhere I went, they let me stay at the Tower with them, for as long as I wanted, and when things got even hotter they showed me how to be a superhero, how to fight, how to use my powers... but all that isn't even the end of it._

_Like I said before, the Titans' aren't a team, they're a family._

_They're the weirdest, least sane, most dysfunctional family you've ever heard of. They totally should not work. Half of them want to kill the other half at any given time, and all five of them are as different as they come, but... none of that even matters __at all__. Even when they're fighting, really fighting, threatening to leave and quit (they've all threatened it at least once... well all but Starfire), or getting on each other's nerves (which happens all the time), it's just... it's __not__ like when kids, even close friends back in the orphanages or centers fought. In some weird way, they all need each other, and they all know it. It's what's kept them together through all the misery and the fighting and the city-wide emergencies. It may even be why they're still alive. They need one another._

_And I need them._

_And they need me._

_And I don't even know how to explain what that's like. There's just no words for it. The only thing I can think of is, and this'll sound stupid to anybody except people like us, but maybe... maybe this is what being adopted is like._

_With any luck, maybe one day you'll get to tell me._

_Anyway, it's getting really late now, and I've been working on this for way too long. I'll go over it again tomorrow to cut out all the stupid-sounding parts and all the stuff that could somehow be used against us. Maybe I'll clear it with Cyborg or something, just to be sure. Feel free to show this to your friends at the center when you get it, and... just in case, try to hold onto it. Who knows, it could be worth something some day. I know I'm supposed to close this with some kind of role-model instructions to be good and always eat your Wheaties and all that, but if you're anything like me, you know what you're supposed to be doing already, and a letter isn't going to make you behave any more or less than you would anyway. Kids like us learn fast what they do and don't have to do. I will say though, that however bad it gets (and I know how bad it can get for you there), just remember that with a few friends, you can survive almost anything._

_I've spent the last couple months putting that one to the test._

_So write back when you get this, and let me know if it answered all your questions, and if you ever get transferred down to Jump City after they finish rebuilding the center down here, let me know, and I'll stop by to say hi. I'll even bring the others with me if I can. In the meanwhile, good luck in school, and with the other kids, and with the DCS people. Most of them are actually trying to help you, even if it doesn't seem like it. If anything really goes wrong though, if you need help from outside the system with anything at all... you know who to call._

_We'll all be there._

_Sincerely,_

_**Devastator  
**_

* * *

**Author's note:** Once more, whether you loved or (more likely) hated it, please let me know your thoughts on this chapter, be they ever so short. I cannot stress how helpful each and every single review is to me. Thank you all for reading, and I hope to see you for Chapter 21.


	21. The Ghost at the Banquet

**Disclaimer**: But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and the Teen Titans belong to someone else!

**Author's Note:** Greetings again, after such an absence, my inestimable readers. I hope all goes well with each of you. The chapter below is late again, obviously, as I still have not been able to find a way to make them go any faster than they have been going. To be honest, this may simply be the nature of the beast. 15,000 word chapters may come quickly to some people, but not to me. With luck, you will forgive me the abominable wait that it has entailed. I have allotted myself 12 days from the day of this posting in which to compose Chapter 22. That may be too short a time, given everything that I'm going to have to do, but I shall hope to keep to that schedule, or at least near to it.

The chapter in question is... one of the more difficult ones I've ever written. I hope that this is a sign that it will be good, but it could quite easily be the opposite. The choice between I leave to you, in the hopes that you will leave me a review by which I can profit, and render to you all a better chapter for the next time. There is very little else to be said, for I have poured everything into the body of the chapter itself, save of course that I hope that you like the chapter, and that I sincerely hope to see you all again soon. Thank you very much for reading, and may you all find success in every endeavor.

* * *

**Chapter 21: The Ghost at the Banquet**

_"But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars—their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death."_

- Revelations 21:8

**O-O-O**

**Wednesday, July 11th, 9:02 PM**

The tall man's footsteps echoed in the cave system as he paced towards the open cavern looming ahead. There, in the corner, a small yellow light illuminated the empty gloom, half-revealing the figure cloaked in inky shadows that hovered on its periphery.

"What are you doing here?" asked the tall man as he approached the flickering circle of light, his fists held calmly at his sides as he surveyed the scene with a practiced eye.

The figure on its edge did not turn or react physically. When it spoke, its tone was bitter despite its softness. "Get out."

"No," said the tall man sharply, advancing through the open cavern with an inexorable gait. "You have work to do, and I am here to see that you do it."

"I said _get out_!" yelled the half-hidden figure, and a flash lit the cavern like a bolt of lightning moments before something large and heavy smashed itself to bits on the floor in front of the tall man. "This isn't your place anymore!"

"It never ceased to be mine," said the tall man, kicking the smashed bits of rock over with his foot, "but by all means, continue acting like a spoiled child. That will resolve everything to your satisfaction. And while you're at it, be sure to leave plenty of evidence that you were here by destroying things left and right. That should serve nicely."

"Shut up," spat the figure on the other end of the room. "Just _shut up_, okay? I don't want to hear whatever you came here to say!"

"Unfortunately," said the tall man as he approached, "the world does not revolve around you, but I'll be glad to leave you alone with your own childishness as soon as you assure me you understand what needs to happen."

The figure stopped, its words dying in its throat as it slowly turned towards the tall man, its tone suddenly subdued and quiet. "Now?" it asked, almost in disbelief, but the tall man did not slacken.

"Now."

"Can't..." the voice was thin now, pleading, a tone the tall man remembered well, "can't we... try something else? Someone - "

"You've picked an odd time to develop a conscience," remarked the tall man acidly. "But regardless, no, we cannot try something else, even if there was a reason to. Cinderblock is dead, and we are rapidly running out of time. We have to strike now, and hard, or else - "

"Yeah, I know," interrupted the other, turning away. The tall man barely hesitated before lunging forward like a coiled spring, grabbing the still half-shrouded figure by the arm, and slamming it up into a wall.

"This is _not_ a game," said the tall man, spitting the words out like bullets. "You _know_ what's at stake here. This is no time to start pretending that you're above such things." The figure shook and twisted in the tall man's grip, but he did not loosen it, leaning forward to make sure his words sank in properly. "In 48 hours, you will have one opportunity. Just one. If you fail to take it, there will not be another, and you and all of your so-called 'friends' will be butchered like cattle. Do you understand that? Has that sunk through your head, or are you still entertaining fantasies that all this is un-necessary?"

Revulsion coursed through the smaller figure's eyes and expression like a poison, and the Tall man felt steel returning to the arm he still held. He did not slacken in the slightest, letting the smaller figure twist and squirm for a moment before finally releasing it all at once and letting it fall to the floor.

"Will you do what is necessary? Or shall I write the obituary of this world and everything living in it?"

"I'll do what I have to do," hissed the figure on the floor through clenched teeth. "I don't need you rubbing it in my face!"

"My dear," said the tall man, "do you imagine I enjoy dealing with you at _all_ after what you did? If you weren't necessary, you would not even be alive today. Try to remember that before you start thinking that you are somehow unjustly prevailed upon."

Slowly, the figure stood back up, brushing its hair out of its eyes as it stared the Tall man in the face. The Tall man regarded the figure with equanimity as it spat on the ground in front of him.

"You remember the plan?"

"Yes," said the figure in a surly tone that the tall man resolutely ignored.

"Once you've triggered the eruption, you will need to survive long enough for the damage to take effect. Adrenaline will prolong it for a while, but not for - "

"I said I _know_ what to do! I can handle it!"

A smirk crossed the tall man's face. "Oh, I have no doubt of that. In fact, I selected you because of your unquestionable skill in these sorts of - "

He was interrupted by a strong blow to the face, delivered in haste and anger, but still hard enough to snap his head around to the right. He turned it back slowly, to see the figure standing with teeth bared and fists raised, and he snorted.

"You get that one for free," said the tall man with perfect calm. "Any beyond that will be paid for, with interest."

The threat was just barely enough to stop the other figure, who instead snarled like a cornered wolverine.

"_Get. Out._"

For a moment neither one moved, until the tall man finally turned and began to make his way back the way he had come. "Forty-eight hours," he said. "And I will arrange for you to have your chance. Do not miss it, or else..."

Both of them knew what the end of that sentence was.

**O-O-O**

**Thursday, July 12th, 2:12 PM**

The smoke was thick enough to chew on as green flashes dimly filtered through the edge of David's vision. They were not precisely targeted at him, he knew, but at the general area he was supposed to be in, not that this was terribly re-assuring. He stumbled as he ran, nearly tripping as his foot hit something hard and unyielding. He couldn't see what it was through the smoke, not visually, so he shifted his perception and waved away the loose cloud of carbon and water vapor that blocked his sight. It was a metal girder, cast iron, large enough to serve as cover if he crouched. He quickly vaulted over it and ducked down behind, his baton held in one hand, out of sight behind the girder so as not to attract attention with its red glow. Silently, he scanned for threats, but whether looking at molecules or light, he couldn't detect a thing.

Then something knocked him over like a bowling pin.

There was a concussive burst, an explosion without shrapnel, and he landed on his side, hard, but quickly scrambled back to his feet, having managed somehow to retain his grip on the baton. He looked up, scanning automatically for Starfire, whom he assumed was behind the blast, but instead of the sight of the resplendent Tamaranean, he found only empty air. Puzzled, he hesitated for a second, a clear mistake which was rewarded with a birdarang flying out of nowhere and knocking the baton out of his hand.

He made a half turn, backing up towards where the baton had landed, but before he had taken more than half a dozen steps, Robin emerged from the smoke in front of him, one of his ubiquitous telescoping staves held in his right hand like a shepherd's crook, advancing with a poised, measured gait towards a target already disarmed. David gave ground before Robin, who moved quickly and with purpose, brandishing the staff as resolutely as he ever had, his mask-covered face revealing nothing but utter determination to bring down his enemy. As many had learned before, as David himself had determined long ago, Robin might have only been a skinny teenager when you broke it all down, but in combat, he was one of the most imposing things you could ever face.

... but that didn't mean David hadn't learned a trick or two.

Robin advanced on David quickly, but the ground was covered with loose debris, and he couldn't run quite at top speed. The difference was marginal, but it was enough, for an instant before Robin could sweep the staff around and knock David off his feet, David's threw his hand out with his index finger extended like a spear at Robin's chest. Instantly, Robin's staff snapped in half like a twig, the burst of explosive energy slamming into Robin's sternum and arresting him in mid-sprint as though he had run headlong into a wall. It was testament to Robin's skill that he did not fall over, but instead turned the hard explosive shove into a backroll, coming up on his feet poised to strike forward again with both halves of the staff held in each hand like escrima sticks, but the blast had delayed him, and delay was enough. David had already turned and run as fast as he could into the debris and smoke, snatching his fallen baton up as he ran, and ducking behind a pillar a moment later.

This earned him exactly five seconds of respite.

The ground suddenly turned pitch black under his feet, like a cavernous void had opened below him, and before he even knew what was happening, a quartet of black tendrils emerged from the ground, erupting into the air like giant earthworms. Behind them floated the agent of their creation, a figure in black and indigo, arms raised, hands sheathed in black energy, cloak splayed out behind like the aura of pure darkness she would no doubt soon be conjuring. Before David could think of where to run or what to blow up, all four tendrils swirled around him like snakes before rearing up and diving inwards, clearly intent on binding him up like a straitjacket. He tried to dodge, but there was nowhere to go, and all four tendrils latched onto him at once...

... and instantly dissolved.

The exact moment the tendrils touched David's uniform, all four of them dissipated into smoke, streaming up and vanishing into the air. For a brief second, neither Raven nor David moved, but it was David who recovered first from the unexpected stroke of luck. Pivoting on one foot and turning to run, he waved the baton behind him and set off a series of blasts like falling mortar shells, designed to do nothing more than kick up dust, debris, and confusion. In this respect they appeared to succeed, for Raven did not pursue him as he raced along, stumbling and sliding over the scattered debris, looking for a corner or a hidden spot in which to hide.

But suddenly something loomed up out of the smoke ahead of him like an over-sized statue, and he tried to stop himself too late, skidding straight into the thing and bouncing off it like a rubber ball. He lost his balance, slipped, and fell backwards onto the ground with a hard thud, and when he shook his head and focused his eyes again, he saw Cyborg standing over him, his sonic cannon extended down towards David's face. The baton had fallen from his hand again, but even if it had not, the energy coils within the barrel of the cannon were already charging up, the blueish glow filling his field of vision and blotting out all else, save for Cyborg's red mechanical eye boring down at him like a drilling laser. Semi-automatically he raised both hands in an automatic, paltry defense, and shut his eyes, cringing with every muscle in his body as he awaited the inevitable end.

"Bang, you're dead."

A series of mechanical clicks prompted David to crack his eyes open, and he saw Cyborg still standing over him, his forearm reformed into a normal hand, which he was extending down to David with a satisfied smile on his face. Sheepishly, David reached up and took it, rubbing the back of his head where he had hit it on the floor as Cyborg helped him back to his feet. The massive ventilation systems embedded in the walls and ceiling began to pump the smoke and dust out, and gradually the air cleared, revealing the other four Titans one by one.

"Nice trick there with the staff," said Cyborg. "What'd I tell you?"

David stood doubled over, his hands on his knees, breathing heavily and trying to keep his stomach from contracting all of a sudden. The best he could do was nod up at Cyborg with a smile. It had been Cyborg who had pointed out to him that Robin's weapons were almost universally made from a pure titanium-steel alloy, a much easier combination to destroy than the fifty different elements found in the rubble scattered about the floor.

The others had arrived by now, save for Raven, who was hanging back behind Robin a bit. Consumed as David was with trying to remain on his feet, it was Beast Boy who asked Robin the all-important question.

"So?"

Robin already had his communicator open, both halves of his broken staff held awkwardly in his other hand as he punched a few commands in. David hoped he didn't mind the equipment damage. He had _said_ to use any means...

A small smirk crossed Robin's face.

"Sixty-two seconds."

Even before Robin had finished reciting the time, Beast Boy let out a cheer that could have woken the dead and clapped David on the back so hard in congratulations that he would have fallen over if Cyborg hadn't grabbed him by the shoulder. Even as they shook him and punched him in the shoulder (lightly, thank God), David barely heard anything they said. Partly he was exhausted, but partly he was barely able to believe it. A minute. He'd lasted a full minute. As usual, Robin quickly gave his professional analysis, citing the fact that he clearly hadn't been watching where he was going when he ran into Cyborg, that he had hesitated where he shouldn't have several times. All this was true of course, but couldn't blunt the accomplishment, even for Robin. So what if the others had all lasted more than five times longer? It was still a major milestone.

And apparently Beast Boy agreed, or perhaps he simply wanted an excuse to take the rest of the day off, for as they all walked towards the door, he was babbling about how they should celebrate this with a video game tournament or a trip to the pizza parlor. His proposals met no resistance from Cyborg or Starfire, and as they continued out the door and down towards the elevator to the common room, all four of their voices could be heard, debating what else to do for the rest of the day.

It would probably have been five voices, for Robin was already resolved to give the others the rest of the day off, alerts permitting, but instead of joining the others, he had remained behind to have a quick word with Raven about something he had noticed.

"Raven?"

Raven was still standing on the side of the room, and her expression was confused. She did not look as though she had heard a word that had just transpired, indeed she was staring down at the onyx and obsidian gems on the back of her wristguards, lost in thought. It took Robin a second repetition of her name to bring her around.

"What?"

"Um... is everything okay?" asked Robin as delicately as he could. "You... had him there, dead to rights. What happened?"

"Not... not sure," said Raven as she rubbed the side of her head. "My powers just... I don't know what happened."

"Did you lose focus?" suggested Robin, "did he distract you with a - "

"No," said Raven, in a more definitive tone. "They just... they just failed, all of a sudden. As soon as they touched him."

"Failed?" asked Robin, "What do you mean?"

"Look... I don't know what happened. I need to... to think." And with no more explanation than that, Raven walked across the training room and out the door, leaving Robin, once again, with no answers in her wake.

**O-O-O**

**Thursday, July 12th, 9:35 PM**

"You have two new messages."

David looked up from the book he was reading and blinked his eyes, trying to figure out what had said that. It took him a second to realize that it was the computer terminal sitting on his desk. Cyborg had installed it a week or so ago, not a full computer, but instead an uplink terminal to the massive supercomputer in the Tower's basement. So far, save for a few messages, he had barely touched it. He had never had a chance to learn much about computers back at the center, and the one time he'd asked Cyborg for help, he'd wound up more confused than ever. Cyborg's technical explanations were not exactly easy to follow.

He had however, managed to figure out how to check his Email at least, and he set the book down and walked over to the terminal to do just that. All of the Titans had Email, filtered through the central computer to eliminate viruses and spam. The others still got a massive amount of mail even with all of the filters (some were more religious about checking it than others), but David's address wasn't well known yet to the general public, which to be honest was perfectly fine by him. There was still something a bit... weird... about fan mail. He supposed he would get used to it.

Neither message was from an address he recognized offhand, not that this was surprising. The Titans were the only people he knew in the city, and if they had something to tell him, they did so in person. He sat down and opened the first Email with a click of the mouse, and a moment later, the text filled the screen. The subject line got his attention immediately.

_"It's Carrie"_

A smile crossed his face as he scrolled through the text.

_"Hey there! I saw you on the news after the bank robbery, and decided to see if I could get a message to you here. Hope this is the right place."_

_"So you're a Titan now, huh? After all that stuff about how you 'weren't a superhero', I guess I was right :). Seriously though, congratulations! That had to have been pretty hard to do. All the papers have been talking about how you're so mysterious and how you appeared from nowhere, but I guess I know better. Just between you and me, I think you look pretty good in red, but I'm surprised they didn't give you any goggles or safety glasses or something, you know, for all the explosions? I guess they wouldn't look as cool or something."_

_"Anyway, it's been a while since we talked last time, and I never got to thank you for that thing you did on the waterfront. I know that every time we meet up, it seems like something attacks the city, but even so, I was wondering if you wanted to get together some time this weekend, just so that we can hang out without getting interrupted by Cinderblock or whatever. I dunno if you're allowed to do that anymore now that you're a Titan and all, but if you are, you just come down to Patriot Park sometime tomorrow evening. Me and some of my friends are gonna be there, and I'd love to introduce you around. Don't worry, I promise I won't get all weird and ask for your autograph. I bet you've got thousands of 'number one fans' already who do that. We'll just hang out. It'll be fun."_

_"I know that you guys are really busy and that you don't usually do that sort of thing, so if you can't make it I understand, but if you want to, we'll be at the park all day tomorrow. If you want, you can even come dressed like a normal person, and I'll pretend you're just a friend from out of town. It's up to you."_

_"I hope we get to see you there!"_

_- Carrie_

David sat back in his chair and shook his head, smiling. Carrie hadn't said how she had gotten his address, but then he supposed "Devastator at TitansTower . Meta" wasn't particularly hard to guess. He made a mental note to see what Robin's policy was on going incognito in public. None of the others ever seemed to try to blend in (Cyborg and Beast Boy simply couldn't), but normal as it had become to wear, he didn't relish the attention that his uniform would get him outside the tower. Lazily, he leaned back and punched up the next message, already in his mind formulating plans for the next day...

... all of which vanished as soon as the message came up on screen.

The subject line, _"Concerning Devastator"_, was innocuous enough, but the message inside was anything but.

_"MURDERER!"_

It had his attention, at least.

_"You may have fooled the papers and the media, but I KNOW WHAT YOU REALLY ARE! You think you can just come into this city and like nothing really happened? You think I don't know that you're here to kill us all just like TERRA WAS? I don't know how you manipulated the Titans into thinking you're here to help, but you CAN'T FOOL ME! You're a LIAR, a MURDERER, and I WON'T STAND FOR IT! I'm gonna MAKE SURE EVERYBODY KNOWS WHAT YOU REALLY ARE!"_

_"The army denied entry to the city,  
The Duke will enter through persuasion:  
The army led secretly to the weak gates,  
They will put it to fire and sword, effusion of blood."_

_"YOU DON'T FOOL ME! I KNOW THE APOCALYPSE YOU BRING, 'DEVASTATOR!'"__**  
**_  
David didn't move for a little while, staring at the screen as though expecting it to change, like this was all some form of practical joke that would be made good any second now, but instead it continued to sit there, daring him to do something about it. Part of him wanted to react like it was just spam, a random message from the bowels of the internet that had somehow slipped through the filters. Part of him wanted to say that there were crazy people out there who had crazy things to say (and apparently, to say in verse). But within the body of the text, a single word stood out.

A single name.

The text remained immobile on the screen, and finally he shook himself out of his thoughts. He felt like the temperature in the room had dropped ten degrees and he didn't know why, but his eye was constantly drawing back to that one name in the middle of the opening paragraph. He had resolved to delete the Email, to get rid of it and try to put it out of his mind as the work of a kook, when he noticed something in the address line.

_CC: Titansgroup (Raven; BeastBoy; Cyborg; Robin; Starfire; Devastator) at TitansTower . Meta  
_

There was a knock on the door...

**O-O-O**

**Thursday, July 12th, 10:07 PM**

"Man, what did I tell you about bringing apocalypses in here without letting us know first?"

"Yeah dude, that's totally unfair! Robin won't even let me have a moped, and you get a whole apocalypse to yourself? What gives?"

That one elicited a nervous chuckle from the psychokinetic sitting on the stool at the kitchen table, as Cyborg and Beast Boy did what they always did, making troubles and worries seem insignificant. There was nothing in Raven's expression to indicate how much she wished they would not speak about the apocalypse though, at least not tonight. There was no sign she could give that wouldn't raise... questions.

"I know it's stupid..." said David, sliding one of the printed out copies of the Email he had received (printed courtesy of Beast Boy, of course) across the table. "I just... didn't really expect something like this."

"Don't let it get to you," said Cyborg. "There's a whole bunch of idiots out there who send us stuff like this. They're always goin' on about how Raven's a witch, I'm the Terminator, and Starfire's really here to get us all ready for an alien invasion. These guys need a hobby, you ask me."

"I guess..." David didn't sound too convinced. Raven didn't need her empathy to tell that he was more worried about this than he was letting on. Or was it this at all? Surely not even David could be so sensitive that a random online lunatic could upset him with some badly-phrased warnings of doom. Raven herself never checked her Titans Email, partly because of the sheer number of 'burn the witch' messages she received from the depths of the internet. Glancing at the printout again, she wondered if perhaps there wasn't another reason he was worried by it.

"The Duke will enter through persuasion?" asked Beast Boy, mispronouncing the last word. "What is this, some kind of song?"

Raven said nothing, though she knew what it was. It was one of the prophecies of Nostradamus, a favorite source for would-be occultist lunatics. His prophecies were considered bad jokes by anybody except for a few easily-fooled people, but it was still worrisome that it should have appeared today of all days.

She turned the page of her book, so as to make it appear that she was doing nothing but reading. Instead she listened to Cyborg and Beast Boy making light of the Email, jokingly speculating about who had sent it, and what types of mental disorders the author was suffering from. It was working, she could tell, but not as well as it should have, and Raven caught David occasionally glancing over at her nervously, as though he could tell what she was thinking. Had he felt something odd from the afternoon's training session too? She couldn't discount it, though he seemed to be maddeningly incapable of detecting anything wrong whatsoever with his own powers. He hadn't even noticed what had happened when she entered his head that time some weeks ago, or at least he had _claimed _not to have noticed. But then why would he lie?

And what the hell had happened today?

She'd had him. She'd had him dead to rights, as Robin would put it, caught between four tendrils. He had been distracted, disoriented, unable to do anything, and yet when she had moved in for the simulated kill, her powers had failed as though someone had thrown a switch. After leaving the training room, she had meditated for hours, searching for what had gone wrong. She hadn't fumbled a syllable or mis-channelled the energy, that at least would be an answer. The more she thought about it, the more certain she was she had done everything right... something had to have disrupted her.

What?

Was it David? She'd used her powers on him a dozen times before, healed him back from near-dead, even gone inside his head. No problem, no resistance. Had something else happened? Was it tied to...

"Raven?"

Beast Boy was staring at her, and Raven realized all of a sudden that the mug of tea on the table in front of her had just cracked. Refusing to meet the others' gazes, she swept the debris into the trash with a wave of her hand, and returned to her book, leaving the others to quietly return to talking, occasionally glancing back over at her whenever they thought she wouldn't notice.

"There is no such thing as coincidence." That was one of Azar's precepts. She'd always taken comfort in that thought, that she had not randomly met her friends, or defeated all of their enemies by luck, but instead because she was 'meant' to. Recently however, that age-old mantra had begun to take on a decidedly sinister tone, for if there was no such thing as coincidence, then what was she to make of all this?

"_Demonspawn, begone!_"

Robin was better at this than she was.

"Hey, guys? What's that?"

Raven shook herself awake and saw David pointing at the living room window of the Tower, out towards the night-shrouded ocean. Cyborg glanced outside. "Oh that?" he asked, gesturing at a black spot on the horizon, barely visible against the indigo sky. "That's San Saltador. It's an offshore oil platform." He chuckled. "You got good eyes if you can make it out at this time of - "

There was a bright flash, like a bolt of lightning, that briefly illuminated the entire sky, followed by a series of lights bursting to life on the distant oil platform. Cyborg quickly abandoned what he was saying, and Raven put her book down, standing up as she watched the lights flicker, then stabilize, causing the entire rig to glow like a false dawn on the horizon.

Everyone's communicator went off at once. Cyborg opened his first, revealing Robin and Starfire, who were out on patrol. Within moments, everyone was scrambling out of the common room to meet Robin and Starfire at the T-sub and go and investigate whatever was happening out there. Raven brought up the rear of the four superheroes, her mind still refusing to release what had happened today, for fear of having to consider what might happen tomorrow. It struck her, as she floated down the hallway, that the message had specifically mentioned Terra, and yet neither Cyborg nor Beast Boy had said anything about her. Then again, she supposed that wasn't so surprising.

Terra was a subject that none of them were ready to face if they could avoid it.

**O-O-O**

**Friday, July 13th, 12:31 AM**

"Look man," said Cyborg, his voice muffled by the donuts he had stuffed into his mouth. "Raven does weird stuff sometimes. Just let it go."

Beast Boy frowned as he took a bite from his vegan donut and washed it down with a gulp of soy milk. "I'm telling you, dude," he said, not bothering to swallow first, "she's acting totally strange, even for her. What's so special about tomorrow that she's all worried about?"

The disturbance on the oil platform had been the work of Doctor Light, who in a less than brilliant move (pun intended), had decided to attack a target literally within sight of the Tower's common room. What he had been planning to do out there was beyond Beast Boy, something about flooding the city with light or some other lame excuse for an evil plot. They had just been warming up to take him down when Raven had shortcut the entire process by appearing in front of him, ready to strike. One look at her, and Doctor Light had actually _asked_ to go to jail, and yet when Cyborg had proposed that they all go celebrate, Raven had turned back to the tower, saying that she needed to be back home before tomorrow.

And of course, she hadn't explained why that was.

"Man, I don't know," said Cyborg. "Maybe she's got some ritual or somethin' to do. Look, if it was a problem, she'd let us know."

"Perhaps there is an astronomical significance to the date?" suggested Starfire, who was busy lathering relish on her chocolate donut. "She explained to me once that certain types of magic involve various planetary alignments that occur only on specific dates."

"It's not just that," insisted Beast Boy. "She's been acting weird all week. I told you that she fell asleep at her desk, remember?"

"Is... that uncommon?" asked Starfire. "Robin does this quite often. I believed it was normal behavior for certain people."

"Only for bird-boy," remarked Cyborg, glancing back at Robin, who was safely out of earshot up at the donut shop's counter, chatting with several cops who had stopped in for a quick snack. "But even Raven's gotta study for her magic, don't she?"

"I told you, it wasn't magic stuff," said Beast Boy. "She had this big book full of technical mumbo-jumbo, and she had _my_ name written down in it."

"Maybe she's tryin' to make a voodoo doll?"

Beast Boy scowled. "Dude, that is so not funny."

Cyborg appeared to disagree, judging from his grin as he tore into his fifth donut, but Starfire stepped in with a suggestion. "I have... perhaps seen this book," she said. "Raven was reading from it one day several months ago. She said it was a description of the various powers that people such as us possess. Perhaps she wished to conduct further research."

Beast Boy shook his head. "I'm telling you guys, ever since she did that Vulcan mind-meld thing with David, she's been acting weird."

Cyborg remained unconvinced. "It ain't exactly weird for Raven to not come out for donuts with us. You know how she is, man."

"Indeed," said Starfire. "Raven does not typically engage in these activities, and after all, did not David also ask to stay behind?"

"That's different, Star," said Beast Boy. Right before Raven had 'convinced' Doctor Light to surrender, David had gotten blasted in the eyes by a light beam that had left him dazed and blinded for a few minutes. He had still been seeing spots when they dropped the Doctor off at the jail, and though Raven had assured them all that he would be fine in a couple hours, he had elected to skip the donuts in favor of going home and finding some eyedrops. "David didn't say he had to get home because of some mystery thing that's s'possed to happen tomorrow."

"So what're you sayin'?" asked Cyborg.

"I'm saying, dude, that we should figure out what's so special about tomorrow." Beast Boy gulped down the last bite of his donut and crossed his arms in an attempt to look serious and convincing.

"What, you mean snoop around in Raven's business again?" asked Cyborg. "No way, man, the last time I did that, I got sucked into a magic mirror and dumped into Raven's brain."

"But what if this is something we really oughta know about? What if it's like that time with Malchior?"

"Raven pledged to alert us in the future if anything potentially dangerous was the matter," said Starfire. "Surely whatever her concerns about the coming day, she would not hide it if it was of potential concern to us."

"But it might be serious! You gotta help me figure it out."

"C'mon, BB, calm down," said Cyborg, "it's probably nothing anyway. Even if it ain't though, Raven's a big girl, she can take care of herself whatever it is, and if she can't she'll ask us for help. You know she doesn't like people gettin' all up in her business, and you're just gonna get her mad at you if you go off trying to pry it out of her. Besides, I remember what happened last time you decided to go playing Raven-detective, and I don't need another round of that. If you're gonna go doin' something that's gonna piss off Raven, you can do it yourself."

Beast Boy opened his mouth to reply, but then stopped as a thought hit him. A grin that the others no doubt would describe as 'worrying' crossed his face, but all he could say back to Cyborg were two words.

"We'll see..."

**O-O-O**

**Friday, July 13th, 10:50 AM**

"This is _such_ a bad idea."

"It'll be fine, just watch for anyone coming."

David glanced back up and down the corridor nervously. "And what are we supposed to do if someone _is_ coming? I can't turn into a mouse and hide in a corner, remember?"

"Just say you got lost," said Beast Boy. "It still happens to me."

"Right, lie to Robin, _that_'s a smart idea," said David. "Just hurry up. I really don't want to be running laps all morning tomorrow."

"Almost finished," said the changeling, tapping some more commands into the master computer before grinning and stepping back. "There we go, we are officially inside."

Forgetting his many objections to what they were doing for the moment, David walked back over to the computer. "We're logged in?" he asked.

"Better, dude," replied Beast Boy with a smile as he brought up a series of folders on the screen. "Those are the secure files. I bet that's where we'll find out what's so special about today."

"But I thought those were locked?" asked David, confused.

"They are, but you're working with a master here..." said Beast Boy smugly. He flexed his fingers before bringing up the login screen, and quickly typing in a username and password combination. The computer thought for a few seconds, before a green window blinked up with the words "Access Granted" written in bold letters.

"_Voila!_" exclaimed Beast Boy, stepping back to permit David to admire his handiwork, and looking around as though expecting applause to emanate from the walls. "We're all set."

"Where'd... how'd you find Robin's login and password?" asked David, still scarcely able to believe that they had gotten inside so easily.

"I used my amazing detective skills," said Beast Boy, smiling serenely.

"Meaning you asked Starfire?"

"Yeah, pretty much. Anyway I'm gonna see if I can find anything. You keep a look out." Beast Boy began typing on the computer's keyboard as David turned around and faced the hallway, letting the world dissolve into constituent parts again, until he was no longer looking at the door, but through it, at the molecular basis of the tower itself. Anyone even exiting the elevator on this level would be clearly visible to him.

"So you're okay, now I mean?"

"Yeah," said David as he sat down in a folding chair, facing the door, "Raven was right, I just needed a few hours. Who _was_ that wacko anyway?"

"Who, Doctor Light?" asked Beast Boy without turning around. "He's some wannabe hotshot who can control light or something. He's kind of a doofus. Raven really cooked him last year, and he's been terrified of her ever since."

"Smart guy," commented David. "I'll just remember to duck next time."

"Wait," said Beast Boy, pausing in mid-keystroke, "you didn't know who he was? I thought Robin told you about all the local bad guys."

"David shook his head. "Just some of them," he said, "Those kids from the H.I.V.E. academy, that crazy British guy, we haven't gotten through all of them yet. I guess this guy didn't qualify as 'major'."

"Yeah, probably not," said Beast Boy, resuming typing. "Anyway, he won't be back for a while, so don't worry about it."

"I'm not worried," said David, and for once he meant it, and he chuckled lightly. "It's just a little weird..."

"What is?" asked Beast Boy

"You remember... I told you about Carrie, right?"

"Your new girlfriend?" Beast Boy asked with a smirk.

He smiled and shook his head. "Whatever man. Anyway, I got a message from her yesterday, before Doctor Light showed up, and she said she'd saw me on TV, and she thought I should start wearing safety glasses or something, in case I blew something up too close. Maybe she was right."

"Pft," scoffed Beast Boy, "dude, glasses never look good. I remember once when Rita..." he stopped suddenly, and his eyes lit up. "Jackpot!"

David raised an eyebrow as he walked over to the screen. "You found something?"

"Not just something, I found out what's so special about today!" He slid his chair back and pointed at the relevant entry on the screen. "Check it out!"

It took David a second to realize what the information on the screen was. When he did however, his eyes widened in recognition. "I don't believe it," he said incredulously...

"It's all there in black and white, dude! And you know what this means, right?"

David had the distinct feeling that he did...

**O-O-O**

**Friday, July 13th, 3:41 PM**

"I _need_ more flour!"

"You already used the entire bag!" protested Robin in something approaching horror. "How much cake are you making?"

"I don't call it the eight-layer cake 'cause it's got seven layers. Star's sendin' you out to get the steak for that crown thing she's puttin' together, right? Just pick up another sack of flower and about thirty more sticks of butter while you're at it." As though to counter all potential arguments, Cyborg turned his back and returned to the mixing bowl, his white chef's pastry hat sliding down over his robotic eye as he did so."

"Yeah, and get some more ice cream while you're out!" called Beast Boy from up in the rafters, where he was helping Starfire string up the large banner. "Be sure to get some non-dairy stuff, will ya? And where's David at?"

"I'm here, I'm here!" said David as common room door slid open and David entered, nearly obscured behind rolls of streamers and boxes of party hats and balloons. "These are all I could find."

Beast Boy turned into a bird, fluttered down from the ceiling, and turned back into a human again. "I thought there were more..." he said thoughtfully as David set the boxes down, "did you check the basement?"

"You know _big_ the basement is here?" said David in mild exasperation as he tried to prevent the boxes from avalanching over. "I checked everywhere I could find. You want anything more down there, you're gonna have to call Indiana Jones or something."

Beast Boy however wasn't listening. "No, dude, I'm sure there's some blue ones down there somewhere. Raven likes blue. We should look for those."

David knew by now exactly what Beast Boy meant by 'we'. "Beast Boy, you could hide the _Titanic_ in that place. How am I supposed to find a box of blue balloons?"

"Simple, man," shouted Cyborg over the noise of the food processor. "Just use your powers and look for latex."

David suppressed the urge to detonate Cyborg's food processor, and settled instead for a soft groan, which Beast Boy took to be acquiescence. "It's down there somewhere, and blue's Raven's favorite color. It'll be worth it." He turned back into a hummingbird and flitted back into the air to help Starfire, leaving David to turn around and trudge back down the hallway towards the elevator.

The entire day had been spent in preparation. Robin and Cyborg had made two trips to the store already to get food, and from the sound of things, would require a third to for everything they had forgotten. Beast Boy had been directing the efforts along with Starfire, and for once, Robin had not felt the need to overrule him. Though the other Titans had been together long enough to have done so, this was the first year they would get to celebrate Raven's birthday, and Beast Boy seemed determined to pack all of the would-be celebrations from the previous couple years into one day. Questions about whether or not Raven might perhaps have preferred it low-key way went unasked, or at least unanswered. Beast Boy brushed aside all concerns of the sort, and nobody was particularly interested in contradicting him.

The upshot was that David found himself back in the cavernous warehouse that the Titans colloquially called the "basement" for the third time today, looking for a needle in a haystack made of needles. Cyborg's suggestion might have sounded reasonable to him, but latex was an organic compound, made of a hundred thousand different things, and moreover was found in everything from balloons to clothes, rubber, paint, and chewing gum. It took about thirty seconds of trying to sift through the soup of molecular structures present in the crowded basement before he gave it up as hopeless and returned to his normal vision.

Or rather he was about to, when he spotted something... odd.

Off in the corner was a mass of dense molecules hidden underneath several layers of more common material. The molecules were silicon dioxide, sand, not an uncommon thing to see in a city near the ocean. What was uncommon was the formation and density of the molecules. Rather than sitting loose, they were closely packed together, in a crystalline structure of some kind, quartz or chalcedony. Even that wasn't particularly strange, save for something odd about the shape and formation of the crystals, which seemed much tighter packed, much denser than anything else around them, and thus stood out as a solid mass of crystal. His curiosity piqued, he made his way over to the side of the room and reverted to his normal vision, shifting the tarps and loose coils of rope and cable aside that covered whatever the thing was. Underneath, sitting buried amidst the building materials, he found something entirely out of place.

Wedged underneath a pile of assorted junk sat a pair of bottlecap goggles mounted in flexible black rubber frames attached to an elastic headband, also black. The lenses were quartz with just enough boron sprinkled in to give them a deep blueish color. While quartz was nothing special normally, David had never even heard of someone making a lens out of them. Gently, David picked up the goggles and peered through them. The lenses were unblemished, perfectly transparent except for the light blue tinge that the boron gave them, and flexed easily in the rubber polymer frame. The layer of dust over everything he had sifted through indicated that these had likely been here for quite a long time, and yet no cracks or scratches or any other imperfection could he detect. Though he was no optical engineer, even David could tell that the workmanship on these was astonishing, but for the life of him he could not figure out why someone would bother to create such a thing, when any eyeglass store in the world could have made the same thing in less than an hour without the fuss of trying to form glasses out of transparent stones.

But then suddenly he remembered what Carrie had said, and an idea came to mind...

Carefully, almost gingerly, David tugged on the elastic band attached to the goggles. It seemed to be in perfectly good shape, stretching without any signs of wear, and so he gently slid them on over his head and eyes, adjusting them. The lenses had no prescription in them, and no imperfections even from this close a distance, such that other than a blueish tinge, he could still see perfectly well in either mode of vision. He turned back, walked across the basement and through the door into Cyborg's garage, approaching the T-car, which Cyborg always kept waxed and washed to a mirror shine in between missions. The overhead light was enough to show David his reflection in the front passenger window, and he considered the sight for a few moments before glancing around, just to make sure that nobody else was down here. Once he had verified that he was alone, he drew the baton from his belt and 'lit it up', so to speak brandishing it in his right hand and dropping into his ready position, the one Robin had drilled him in for weeks on end. He rocked back and forth gently shifting his weight from his front to his back foot, smirking inadvertently at the reflection in the window. The goggles held in place easily, snug against his forehead, and made not of plastic or glass but of rock crystal, they would serve admirably to keep out shrapnel, debris, and maybe even errant beams of blinding light.

And on top of that... he had to admit, they looked pretty good.

He pulled the goggles up onto his forehead as he resumed his search through the basement. It took nearly twenty minutes before he finally found a package of blue balloons (rubber, not latex), and pulling it free from the coils of electrical cable it was sitting amongst, he finally turned back to the elevator to go back up to the common room. As the elevator rose up the Tower's spine, he quickly slid the goggles back down over his eyes. He still wasn't sure which one of the Titans the goggles belonged to, but as he had come across them buried in the basement, he doubted seriously that anyone had touched them for a long time. Probably a relic of some adventure they had all had before his time. The Tower was full of those.

He exited the elevator, walked briskly down the hallway, clipping the baton back onto his belt as he did so, and walked into the common room as the automatic doors whisked aside to let him pass. "Found 'em," he said as he tossed the balloon package onto the table where Beast Boy had stacked up the party decorations. "And check it out, I also found these really cool..."

The words died in his throat as he saw the looks on the other Titans' faces.

All four of the Titans were staring at him in various degrees of abject shock, as though he had walked into the room brandishing a severed head. Cyborg's human eye was open as wide as his mouth, the wooden spoon in his hand held as if frozen, sticking out of the cake batter he had been mixing. Robin had been holding a glass of water, which fell from his hands and shattered on the floor as he did a double-take at what David was wearing on his hear. Starfire actually gasped and clasped her hands over her mouth, her bright hazel eyes stretched out in appalled horror, a sight that, even if only for a millisecond, was time enough.

But the worst was Beast Boy, who was staring at him with an expression David had never before seen or imagined, his face paling from its customary emerald to a more sickly color, his eyebrows arched, his breath stopped, his mouth open and quivering, his eyes...

The look in his eyes, the pained, stunned look, like a deer caught in headlights, seemed to drive right through the blue quartz goggles and hit David like a sledgehammer to the face. Like Beast Boy, David seemed to lose the power of speech as he suddenly, appallingly realized that he had flagrantly breached some sort of compact he hadn't even known existed.

And then his nerve broke, and before anyone could say anything further, before anyone could so much as move a muscle, David stumbled backwards into the door he had so triumphantly entered just a second ago. It opened as before, permitting him to turn and run back down the hallway towards his room, heedless of what anyone else might have been saying or calling after him, thinking of nothing but escape and flight, knowing only that he had made a terrible mistake, and that the look in Beast Boy's eye had been enough to shatter his will like a pane of glass.

And on his forehead, the blue quartz goggles still sat, advertising his terrible error to the world like a scarlet brand.

**O-O-O**

**Friday, July 13th, 5:53 PM**

That pretty much set the tone for the rest of the day.

He had raced back to his room and locked the door behind him, the first time since he had arrived at the Tower that he had ever seen fit to do so. For hours, he had stayed there, pacing back and forth, with the goggles sitting on his desk, trying to puzzle out what he had done. Once or twice, someone had knocked on the door, Starfire perhaps, or Cyborg, but both times he had simply frozen and made no noise, as if he were asleep. Given who the other Titans were, he doubted he was fooling them, but they let him be regardless. It would have been criminally simple to just ask them what had happened, but he couldn't do that. He couldn't face those empty, breath-catching expressions again, looks of deep-rooted pain and fear and utter, helpless terror that, coming from the rest of them, felt like knives boring into him.

Besides... he was pretty sure he already knew the answer, at least in general.

When finally someone had knocked on the door and not gone away, David had tentatively crossed his room and opened the door, only to find Beast Boy standing there, his color returned, but his expression still as grave as anything David had ever seen. Still, the changeling made an effort to pretend that nothing had happened. "Almost party time," he said, omitting his usual appellation, and forcing a smile that looked like it desperately wanted to be genuine, but wasn't quite able to manage it.

"Beast Boy, I..." said David, trying to think of what to say, and finding nothing that sounded remotely applicable. "I'm sorry. I didn't meant to..."

"Dude... it's okay," said Beast Boy, his voice quiet, but at least no longer forced. He too was struggling for words, and not finding them. "You just sorta... you surprised us, is all." The changeling's gaze was fixed on something behind David, and David turned his head to follow it back to the quartz goggles still sitting on his desk, in plain sight. It was clearly far too late to move them, and kicking himself for leaving them out in the open wouldn't help anything. Previously, Beast Boy had looked like someone had just dropped his best friend's heart on a plate in front of him, but now his expression was less stunned and more wistful, as though he had zoned out of everything around him.

"Beast Boy?"

Beast Boy snapped out of his thousand yard stare, blinked a few times, and fixed his eyes back on David. "Um... right, the... the party. We're gonna surprise Raven in a few minutes. You... wanna come?"

There was only one possible answer to that.

"Sure,"

Out of sight, out of mind. Or at least he hoped that was how it worked.

They walked back down towards the common room in silence. David came within millimeters of stopping Beast Boy and asking him if what had happened had anything to do with the name that kept creeping around the periphery of his perception all the time he was here at the Tower, a name that held terrible importance, but that seemed to be as ephemeral as whispers on the wind, always vanishing whenever he tried to listen for it, or look at it. A name caught in snatches of overheard conversation, one he had only asked about once, and then indirectly, and been told it was not something that could be spoken of. Not yet. Perhaps not ever. He nearly asked, but every time he drew breath to do so, his throat caught, and he refrained

They arrived at the common room. Cyborg had prepared a veritable feast, more food than even he could possibly eat. The banner proclaiming "Happy Birthday" stretched from wall to wall, buttressed with the blue rubber balloons he had dug up from the basement. Starfire and Cyborg and Robin were there, and David caught the glances that they cast at one another and at him when they thought he wasn't looking, but none of them said a word to indicate that anything was wrong. The uncomfortable silence was there however, an elephant in the room that nobody was acknowledging, despite Starfire's customarily pleasant (and wordy) greeting, and Cyborg grinning and offering David a hot dog even as he explained the plan for how they were going to surprise Raven. For David's part, he just hoped that whatever happened at this party would take everyone's mind off whatever terrible error of propriety he had made.

It did.

**O-O-O**

**Friday, July 13th, 6:02 PM**

In the end, David had to admit that he could not have done a better job himself. Or a worse one, for that matter.

Raven reacted to her surprise party, not with gratitude (which Beast Boy had clearly hoped for), nor with indifference (which David had assumed she would adopt), nor even with annoyance (which he had considered the worst case scenario). She reacted with hostility, panic, and fear.

Yes, _fear_.

It went completely wrong right from the start. The 'surprise' party came as something more of a surprise than anyone had expected. When they surprised her, Raven melted into the floor like an ice sculpture and only reappeared after Starfire re-assured her that it was only her friends about. When she did, she was fuming mad, both at Beast Boy (which was nothing new), and at everyone who had gone along with it (which was also nothing new). She forced Beast Boy to admit how he had found her birthday out (although he omitted any reference to David himself, David saw several suspicious glances aimed in his general direction), and then utterly refused to have anything to do with it. "I'm not interested," was her verdict, delivered with all the warmth of a glacier. When the others tried, gently, to talk her into staying, she rebuffed them all in turn, until finally Beast Boy's final plea snapped whatever thin thread was suspending Raven's patience, and she blew up.

Or rather, she blew everything _else_ up.

Her eyes blazed with some kind of inner fire, and before David knew what was happening, her powers tore the entire setup to shreds. Balloons, banners, refreshments, cake, everything, obliterated in half a heartbeat. No sooner had she laid waste to the common room, than she departed as quickly as she had come, back through the doors towards her room, leaving behind yet another scene of stunned and hurt silence. Robin hastened after her to try and figure out what was wrong, as this was extreme even for Raven. Cyborg and Starfire made some halfhearted efforts towards cleaning up the mess, but elected in the end to leave it for the morning. Beast Boy stood there in the center of the room like a mannequin, part of Cyborg's cake stuck almost comically to his head, a pained expression on his face that his stale attempts at humor could not dispel. He looked like someone had just run over his pet, and indeed, Cyborg had had to drag him back out of the common room, explaining that Raven just needed to be alone, and that there was nothing left to do here.

David required no such encouragement. Bidding a good night to Starfire, he had made his way back to his room via a roundabout route, staring down at his shoes on the floor and, for the first time in a long while, wishing that he were somewhere else entirely.

Which is how he wound up walking right into Raven.

He had turned a corner at the same time as her and before either of them could stop, he had collided with her head on and bounced back, for Raven, while hardly enormous, was older and larger than he was. He steadied himself against the wall and stopped, as did she, and the two of them faced one another for a moment in silence.

"Sorry," he said, not averting his gaze from the sorceress. Her stare was entirely unsettling, so much so that he had an urge to reach for his baton, which he suppressed only with difficulty.

Raven seemed torn between several different things to say, but settled after a few moments for another sharp comment. "Don't _ever_ go snooping around in my files again," she said, though how she had intuited that he was the one who had helped Beast Boy was beyond him.

"I wasn't snooping in anything," replied David lamely, "Beast Boy just wanted to know..."

Wrong answer.

"It's _none_ of your business," she said furiously, "_or_ his. My birthday is nothing to celebrate."

That one confused him. "What are you talking about?"

"You wouldn't understand," she said simply, and turned to walk away, but in the spur of the moment, David decided to speak up.

"No, Raven, I think _you_ don't understand."

Raven stopped in her tracks and turned around sharply. "What?"

"Look," said David, "I don't know what this weird thing is with you and your birthday..."

"That's right," interrupted Raven, "you _don't_. Like I said, it's none of your business."

"Fine," said David, "but I don't _have_ a birthday, remember? And what you don't know and I do is that I'd _kill_ to have one that my friends would want to celebrate so much that they'd go to that level of effort."

"So pick one," said Raven dismissively, "there's lots of days in the calendar."

"That's not the point, and you know it," countered David. "What's going on here?"

"It is _none_ of your business." repeated Raven for the third time, and she turned to leave, apparently considering it her last word on the subject. Any other day, David would have let it go. His usual policy vis-a-vis Raven was the same one he took with large and dangerous predators: avoid eye contact and hope they weren't hungry.

This wasn't any other day.

"Oh _come on_!" He demanded. "What _is_ this? Look, I'm _sorry_ about whatever I did with those stupid goggles, okay? I didn't even know what they were... I _still_ don't know what they - "

"What goggles?"

The question calmed David down enough for him to notice that Raven had stopped in her tracks, and was half-looking back towards him, silhouetted by the dim overhead lights.

"The... the blue ones," he said, only now remembering that Raven had been the only one not in the room when he had made his 'grand' entrance. "I... found a pair of blue safety goggles down in the basement. I thought... I assumed that since they were stuck down there that nobody was using them, so I brought them upstairs to... to see if... Raven?"

Raven wasn't moving.

From where David was standing, he couldn't see Raven's face, but he could see her fist, clenched tightly with a black aura of magic (or whatever her powers actually were) shrouding it like a boxing glove.

... well _that_ was a bad sign.

"Where did you find those goggles?"

"In... in the basement," said David, unconsciously taking a step back. "They were stuck under a pile of - "

"Blue goggles?" asked Raven, her voice short and sharp like a dagger. "Made of crystal?"

"Um... yeah..." said David guardedly. "Quartz and boron..."

Raven turned back towards him slowly, both of her fists clenched shut and sheathed in energy. Her expression was not angry or aggressive, as he would have expected it to be. It was instead fearful, her eyes wide, her forehead knotted with worry and apprehension. In a way, this was even worse than angry-Raven, for David did not recall having ever seen Raven afraid of _anything_. Without any thought on his part, David's hand slid down to the hilt of the baton clipped to his belt, as he took half a step back from the sorceress.

"There's an awful lot of coincidences around you," said Raven. "Your mystery powers, your missing records, name, date of birth, the way Cinderblock kept herding you towards us? I guess you don't know anything about this either?"

"Anything about what?" asked David, sensing the threat, but not where it was coming from.

"Where did you find those goggles?" asked Raven in a voice that brooked no equivocation.

"I told you already, they were in the basement, buried under - "

"_Bullshit!_" she shouted, plunging them into strobe as the lights flickered overhead. David throat caught and he backed up another step as Raven stared at him with eyes like laser beams, wide, unblinking, and filled with equal measures of fear and wrath. "Cyborg and I searched through the Tower for _two weeks_ looking for any _shred_ of Terra, and you found a pristine pair of her goggles in _twenty minutes?_ We _emptied_ the entire basement to make sure, so _don't tell me_ they were just laying in there! Where did you _find_ them?"

The very walls were beginning to vibrate with Raven's raging temper and David, who now if not before was scared out of his wits, could only continue to back up before the barrage of accusations and try and stammer a rational reply.

"I found them in the basement!" he insisted. "I don't know how the hell they got there! I don't even know who - "

"Just like you don't know how you resisted my powers yesterday?"

David nearly lost his footing as the question hit him like a physical blow. "What?"

"Don't play _stupid_ with me!" snapped Raven. "Yesterday in the training room, you dispelled my powers like they weren't even there! Don't tell me you didn't even notice! I won't just write this stuff off forever, _Devastator_! Cute trick by the way, picking that name. We're all supposed to just forget where it came from?"

"This is _insane!_" cried David. "I don't _know_ where it came from, and I _told_ you why I picked it! I didn't dispel anything of yours, I didn't even know anything went wrong!" Only too late did he realize that he had just said, in essence, exactly what she had told him not to say.

Raven's powers send a tremor through the walls and ceiling, strong enough to be felt, and she clutched at her head with one hand, clenching her eyes shut. "I can't deal with this tonight," she said through clenched teeth. Slowly the tremors subsided, and she opened her eyes again and pointed a black-shrouded finger accusingly at David. "But if I find out that you _ever_ lied to us about any of this, _it will be the_ _last thing you ever do_."

David stopped retreating.

In one even motion, streamlined through weeks and weeks of practice, David pulled the baton off his belt, flipped it around into to hold it right-side up, and ignited the fiery aura around it, the one Raven herself had shown him how to produce. He raised the baton in his right hand, a flaming beacon amidst the darkness pouring off of Raven herself, and locked his gaze with hers.

"Raven," he said, his voice barely rising above a steel-coated whisper, "don't you _ever_ threaten me!"

Time hung for a few seconds as the two superheroes faced one another down, but amidst the fear and anger and boiling _something_ in Raven's gaze, David caught a glimpse of what looked to be doubt. Clearly not sure of what to do here, perhaps perceiving, if nothing else, that she had backed David into a corner, Raven hesitated and then slowly lowered her hand, though her eyes never left his.

"I don't _make _threats," she said in a near-whisper, and with that, she turned and walked away down the hall, leaving David standing in the hallway with his baton still held uselessly in his right hand. Even after she disappeared around the corner, he did not even dare to blink, his breath coming in ragged gasps, and his heart pounding in his throat. It wasn't until he heard fast-approaching footsteps that he lowered his baton, extinguishing the aura around it as he turned his head and saw Robin jogging towards him.

"What happened?" asked Robin, and he noticed that Robin had a birdarang in his hand. "We felt the tower shaking, and I heard someone shouting."

David looked down at the baton in his hand, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath to calm his racing heart rate. "Nothing," he said, without even turning back to look at Robin. "Just a misunderstanding. And before Robin could ask any more questions, David turned and walked past him down the hallway and away from the scene of confrontation, looking to all the world like he was just heading back to his own room, and didn't want to talk about what had just happened. Raven was imposing even when she was just sitting in a corner, reading a book, let alone when she was fuming mad. David was usually one who liked to think things over before he did anything, and normally he would have gone back to his room, and stewed for a while, and tried to come up with a plan for what he should do such that Raven would not carry out the threat she had just made.

In this case however, between one word and the next, he had already decided.

**O-O-O**

**Friday, July 13th, 8:37 PM**

"Enter Login and Password."

"Username: 'Robin'. Password: 'Pennyworth'."

"Processing..."

David sat back in the the computer chair and listened to the soft sounds of the computer working. Other than the low mechanical hum of the Tower's generator next door, he could hear nothing, which wasn't a surprise, as everyone else was at least twenty stories above him. So quiet was it, that the computer's chime actually gave him a start. Technically, now that he was a part of the team, he had just as much right as anyone to be down here in the basement, but he was pretty certain he had no right whatsoever to be using Robin's login like this.

It was a risk he would have to take.

He leaned forward and looked at the file structure that came up on the main computer, certain of what he was looking for, but not entirely sure of how to find it. One of the headings was titled "media archives", which sounded promising, and he opened it up, only to find a massive listing of various recordings of radio and television programs from the Jump City area, as well as digitized microfilm copies of the Jump City Tribune and several other local newspapers. It would quite plainly take years to sift through it all, he would need to narrow the search. He pulled up the search box, and the computer prompted him to enter a search term.

He hesitated only slightly before entering it.

"Terra,"

"Working," said the computer, and then a moment later another box popped up. "271 references found," it said, "166 print, 77 audiovisual, 28 audio."

He clicked on the 'print' heading, and the first few articles appeared.

_"Unknown Superhero Destroys Mutant Scorpion near Almond Hills Elementary"_

_"Titans Plus One Defeat Slade at Los Palmas Diamond Mine"_

_"Still no word on new superhero's origins, Robin declines comment"_

It was all here.

Every whispered mention of a name he didn't recognize, every sideways glance that seemed to reference some apocalyptic event that he had no knowledge of, every half-assembled theory he'd had regarding what had happened before he arrived, built on shreds of evidence garnered unwillingly from random outbursts by the other Titans, everything led here, to the truth. He had long suspected that Terra was a metahuman, someone who the Titans had known well, someone who was no longer with them. He had tried not to think about it, tried to push aside his doubts as being the natural result of coming late to this strange family. He had silenced his questions and let the matter go, but it wasn't until Raven had burst the name out in the middle of accusing him of being all kinds of terrible things that he realized he couldn't ignore the issue any longer. He had to know who Terra was. He had to know what had happened to her.

And here, in an unending list of headlines and articles, here was the whole story.

_"Titans induct new member. Public Press Briefing Scheduled Wednesday."_

_"World First Interview with the newest Teen Titan, Details Inside."_

_"Attempted Bank Robbery Foiled by Geokinetic Titan. Mayor Expresses Thanks."_

_"Enquirer Exclusive! Beast Boy and Terra: What the Titans don't want you to know about their Illicit Love"_

The last one, from a tabloid David remembered Cyborg mentioning once, nearly made David spit out his tea. While he was pretty sure that the article's claims of "Venezuelan Voodoo Love Enchantments"were probably not too accurate, there were several other articles from the Society sections of the more reputable papers that seemed to confirm that Beast Boy and this Terra girl had been something of an item. One letter to the editor predicted that the entire affair would end in tears, and was roundly condemned in the very next issue by a dozen other readers, all of whom publicly wished Beast Boy and Terra all the best.

Even without reading on, David knew that their wishes had not been enough.

The shift was as stark as it could be. The very next article was a banner headline from the Tribune:_ "Attack on Titans Tower! Casualties Feared!"_ followed by a grainy picture taken from helicopter of hundreds of robots swarming towards and into the Tower's front door. Several more articles followed in quick succession, unsubstantiated reports of attacks at the Amusement Park and elsewhere, followed by a recap headline a week later: _"Terra Feared Dead. No Comment from Titans on Whereabouts."_

David felt a knot tying in his stomach. He had suspected that this "Terra" person had met an untimely end, but to have it confirmed like this was something else. There were more articles though, many more, and he continued to sift through pages of idle speculation about what had become of Terra. Bad as it was if she was actually dead, while it would make sense for the others to have avoided speaking of her, it still didn't all quite fit...

And then he found it.

_"Titans Betrayed!"_

The headline was twice the size of a normal one, and the article below was written like it was announcing World War III, describing in shocking, blunt terms how this Terra person had turned up armored and twice as powerful as before, and set to work trying to slaughter the other Titans in a very public battle in the middle of Downtown. The paper called it a draw, God alone knew what it actually was, and there followed some opinion pieces about what this new development "meant", each one as inane as the last, until the next day's headlines laid the events out in terrible declarative statements that left no doubt at all.

_"Massive Breakouts from Jump City Jail, JCPD in Chaos."_

_"Robotic Army Invades Suburbs, Governor Calls out National Guard."_

_"Eyewitness Reports Beast Boy and Cyborg Killed by Terra. No Sign of Remaining Titans."_

_"Police Recover Robin's Effects. Entire Team Feared Dead."_

_"President Appeals for Calm as Jump City Evacuation Orders Issued."_

_"Justice League Announces Imminent Campaign to Relieve Jump City."_

David remembered most of these events vaguely. Geopolitics had not been his thing, but Jump City had been close enough by to generate a certain amount of worry among the staff of whichever place he had been at then. All he remembered was that some enormous attack had occurred in Jump City, and that various superheroes were dealing with it, as they always did. Reading it all here however made it quite clear just how serious a matter it had been, particularly the cover of a magazine called "Heroes and Villains" (which David had honestly never heard of), that showed simply a picture of Titans' Tower, dark and abandoned, with two words written below it. _"The End?"_

But of course, it hadn't been the end, as he well knew...

_"Titans Sighted Alive, Air Force Confirms."_

_"Battles Rage on Main Street, Cinderblock and Overload Defeated."_

_"National Guard Occupies Almond Hills. Light Resistance Reported."_

_"Earthquake Disturbs Jump City Fault Lines. Robot Armies Deactivate."_

_"No Sign of Terra or Slade as Titans Return to Tower. FEMA Pledges Rebuilding Assistance."_

_"Reports Confirm Terra and Slade dead. Governor Issues Statement."_

Ten minutes might have passed, maybe fifteen, before David put down the now-cold mug of tea. The room still hummed quietly, no other sound or person disturbing him, but to be honest, he no longer cared if the others should find him down here. At long last, after months of dancing around the subject, he finally knew what had happened.

And as he hoped it would, it explained everything.

He had believed that Terra had died, perhaps even had been killed by someone in a particularly grotesque way. Superheroes led dangerous lives, and had many sadistic and twisted enemies. He had semi-constructed a likely scenario in his head for what had happened, but never in his wildest dreams had he imagined this. He had been right before. They had been burned, but not by some villain... by one of their own.

Those goggles, transparent rock crystal, almost impossible to create conventionally. Terra had been a geokinetic, a controller of earth and stone...

He closed his eyes and lowered his face into his hand. They were _hers_.

No wonder the others had reacted so strongly. No wonder Beast Boy had looked so shocked. Raven had mentioned that she and Cyborg had swept out the Tower of all of Terra's personal effects. Had it been for Beast Boy's sake, or their own? Or both?

There were only a few articles left, and for the sake of completion, he browsed through them quickly. An Op-ed piece about how the entire incident proved that metahumans all needed to be rounded up and interned. A handbill from some conspiracy group explaining how Terra had actually been part of the New World Order and that the UN was going to use Superheroes to plant mind-controlling chemicals in the drinking water. A recap summary of what had happened in the Tribune, this time with actual pictures. Most of the time, microfilmed copies of newspapers omitted the images except for cover pages and the like so as to save space. This one apparently had been deemed important enough to film unedited however, and the images showed Beast Boy in gorilla form smashing robots to pieces. It showed Robin and Starfire battling Cinderblock in some kind of rock quarry. It showed...

David's heart froze.

It... it couldn't... there was some kind of... some kind of mistake! It...

"Oh my God..."

David's blood turned to ice-water, and he clutched one hand over his chest as though trying to ward off a heart attack even as his mouth worked up and down soundlessly. Ten thousand disparate thoughts and bits of half-remembered information all suddenly collided together into a single, inescapable mass. He staggered backwards, upending the chair, tripping over it, falling onto the ground and scrambling back away from the monitor as though he was afraid whatever was on it was about to climb through and consume his soul. "Oh my God!" he said to nobody in an abject panic. "Oh my God, ohmyGod, ohmy_God!_ NononononoNO!"

The last 'no' was a scream, and he clutched at his head and doubled over as a wave of nausea flowed through him. The implications were swirling around inside his head, and he could not shut them up no matter what he tried to do. What the hell was he going to do now? What _could_ he do now? As soon as the others... they would... oh _GOD_...

The Email.

He got up and practically sprinted back to the computer, kicking the chair aside and hammering on the "Print Screen" button on the keyboard. Seconds later, the laserprinter next to the computer spat out a sheet of paper, which he grabbed in one hand as he turned around and ran out the door, nearly bouncing off the back wall as he did so. Down the hall he ran, as fast as he could, blind panic propelling him with speed as he raced towards the garage and the tunnel beyond it, already trying to figure out just what the hell he was going to do when he got to where he was going.

**O-O-O**

**Friday, July 13th, 9:02 PM**

"I'm serious, man, you want me to talk to her? There just ain't no call for that sort of thing."

Beast Boy wrapped his arms around his knees and clutched them to his chest as he stared out over the waves. "Nah, thanks Cy. It's okay."

"You don't gotta worry. She ain't gonna take it out on you. Hell, I might do it myself after what..."

"Seriously," said Beast Boy, turning his head to the half-metal Titan crouched on the rooftop next to him. "It was a dumb idea to begin with. I'll go apologize tomorrow."

"Ain't nothin' for you to apologize about this time, man. She was totally out of line."

"Yeah," said Beast Boy with a sheepish grin, "but by tomorrow I'll probably do something else that I need to apologize for, so it'll all work out."

Cyborg raised his human eyebrow at Beast Boy's expression, and shook his head as he chuckled. "You are one weird little dude, you know that?"

The broad smile on Beast Boy's face told Cyborg that the comment had worked, which was a relief. He quickly changed the subject before it could wear off. "So we still on for tomorrow? Saturday Afternoon Ninja Racer IV Tournament o' Champions?"

"Well that depends," said Beast Boy. "What do I get when I kick your butt this time?"

"I was thinkin'... loser has to eat whatever the winner wants for dinner."

Beast Boy recoiled violently. "Ugh, _sick_ dude! You'll probably make me eat spareribs or something."

"Well," said Cyborg, whistling nonchalantly and blowing on his metal knuckles before polishing them against his chestplate. "I mean, if you wanna turn and run at the first sign of the inevitable crushing defeat I _will_ lay on anyone who tries to challenge me..."

It worked.

"Dude, you are _so_ going down! You're gonna be eating so much tofu, it'll be coming out your ears!"

"Well bring it _on_, green bean." said Cyborg with a broad grin. "I'm gonna kick your butt so hard you'll be prayin' for an alert to come and save your sorry - "

A klaxon sounded, and the roof suddenly flashed red. Both Titans froze, but Beast Boy recovered first, turning smirking as he turned back to Cyborg. "Nice one..."

"Oh shut up," said Cyborg as he punched the red button on his right arm. "Cyborg and Beast Boy here, what's goin' on."

Robin's face appeared on the screen. "Trouble downtown. Some kind of intruder at the bottling plant. We don't have any details. Grab David and meet us in the Garage. Star, Raven, and I are on the way."

"Roger," said Cyborg, and he shut the screen down before hitting another button. "Cyborg to Devastator. We got trouble downtown. Meet us at the T-car."

Cyborg got up and was running towards the stairwell after Beast Boy when he realized he hadn't heard a reply. He glanced back down at his arm, only to see a screenful of snowy static. Puzzled, he reset the communicator, to no effect at all.

"Cyborg to Devastator, you readin' me?"

"Dude, come on, we gotta go!" called Beast Boy from the stairs.

"Hey BB, try and raise David, will ya? I ain't gettin' nothin' from my comm."

Beast Boy pulled out his communicator. "Beast Boy to Devastator, come in." The sound of static told Cyborg everything he needed to know. Beast Boy tried several more times, then looked back over at Cyborg. "What gives?"

"I don't know," said Cyborg, already punching commands into his scanners. "My comm's reading right, so's yours. I'm tryin' to track him, but the scanners say he's not in the Tower. I don't get it. It's almost like..." He paused.

"Like what?"

"Like he's... not answerin'."

"But... why wouldn't he answer his communicator? Wouldn't he get the alert message?"

"Yeah," said Cyborg, looking confused. "The communicators automatically get the alert signals broadcast to 'em. Robin and I made sure he knows he's always gotta answer whenever one o' those goes off so..."

"So what's going on?"

"Cyborg shook his head. "I don't know, but we don't have time to sit around and figure it out. Call Robin, tell him we're comin' alone."

"Rob's not gonna be happy about that,"

"Yeah... he ain't the only one..."

**O-O-O**

**Friday, July 13th, 9:23 PM**

July meant warm nights, and warm nights meant barbecues, baseball games, and a generally crowded atmosphere in Patriot Park. Families, kids, young couples and older ones were out, enjoying themselves and relaxing in celebration of the weekend's arrival. It was a bustling, happy, energetic crowd, the sort of crowd David adored to get lost in, to vanish within and be un-noticed and unseen.

That was not what he was doing now.

He had been forced to walk Robin's bicycle, as the crowds were too thick on the pathways to ride through, and he couldn't ride it effectively over the grass. Had the bicycle, bright red and stenciled with the Titans' logo not drawn attention, surely his brilliant red and orange uniform would have succeeded in doing so, complete as it was with a riot baton that, even if not presently on fire, still looked wicked enough. People stopped. People stared. He was not yet well known enough for everyone to identify him on sight, but some were able to, and he heard their whispers as he walked past. Most of the people did not pay _that_ much attention. It was not at all uncommon to see the Titans out in public, but ordinarily even this little notoriety would have bothered him, made him timid and hesitant. Tonight, however he ignored them entirely, walking past their stares, brushing aside their whispers, for he was looking for only one thing.

And then he found it.

Ahead, through the mingling crowds was a series of picnic benches, and standing around one of them was a teenaged girl. Shortly after David spotted her, she spotted him, and smiled as she jogged over to meet him.

"There you are!" she said, "I was wondering if you were gonna show up." She glanced at his uniform. "Nice getup, I thought you didn't like the attention from this superhero stuff. C'mon, there's a barbecue going on in a couple..."

Carrie's voice faded out as she noticed the expression on David's face.

"Is... something wrong?"

David didn't respond in words. Instead he reached down into his pocket and drew out a crumpled up piece of paper with a picture printed on it. Smoothing it out on his uniform, he held it up with one hand in front of her, his eyes never leaving the blue-eyed, blond-haired girl standing in front of him as the color slowly drained from her face.

The picture was that of all five of the original Teen Titans posing for a snapshot from the local newspapers. With the five of them stood a sixth figure, dressed in a light-gray long-sleeved shirt with a darker vest on top of it, blue denim shorts, hiking boots and leather gloves, her long blond hair pinned up with a butterfly clip, her bright blue eyes sparkling from beneath tinted goggles mounted in a black latex frame.

David watched Carrie's expression pale as she realized what she was looking at, and her eyes flickered back to him as he lowered the piece of paper and dropped it on the ground.

"I... think we need to talk..." said David in a voice that was barely a hollow whisper. "... Terra."

* * *

**Author's Note:** And so ends Chapter 21. Tune in next time for another edition of "The Measure of a Titan". And please, that I may make the next episode valuable to you, do not fail to leave a review.

Thank you.


	22. The Boulder and the Flame

**Disclaimer:** Take a guess who Teen Titans belongs to. I dare you.

**Author's Note:** I missed the internet.

Yes, once again, I am very late in posting this chapter. This time however, I have a reasonable excuse, for I was unable to use the internet for several weeks, and thus unable to work on said chapter. I have finally managed to get the internet back and to finalize the chapter, and I beg once more your indulgence for the terrible and unconscionable delay it has required. I continue to strive to get these chapters out in a reasonable timeframe, as I am well aware that my readers' patience is not infinite, but that is the project for Chapter 23.

This particular chapter represents, as always, a very new sort of thing for me, a test if you would, that I am running into the types of writing one can do. It is my fervent hope that you will enjoy it, though if you do not, I wish equally to hear from you. To that end, please please please do not hesitate to leave a review behind, be it ever so short, for I can only make the story better if I know your opinions on the matter.

Thank you all for reading, and I shall bend every effort to post 23 on time for once. May you find success in every endeavor.

* * *

**Chapter 22: The Boulder and the Flame  
**

_"Betrayal is the willful slaughter of hope."_

- Stephen Deitz

**O-O-O**

Nothing else existed.

The crowds around, the noise, the bustle, the hundreds of pairs of eyes that might or might not have been focused on the two teenagers standing on the grass in the middle of the park simply did not exist. Nothing existed, not the air around, not the water of the bay, not the city or the park, not the people within them, nothing. There was only the piece of paper he had dropped to the ground, and the girl standing in front of him with a face like a white sheet. He had told her that they needed to speak. He had meant it. But there was no question remaining to ask. He knew the instant he looked at her that it was no mistake, no trick of illusions or twin sisters or the light. The look in her eyes was that of horror, of fear, of dread...

... but not of surprise.

He had no idea what to do now. He had no idea what he _could_ do now. The implications of the discovery he had made were too large, too widespread, dependent on too many factors that he knew too little about. He had rushed out here with no idea what to do once he got where he was going. Too many competing thoughts and sudden realizations crowded his head, and he could do nothing but sit there and stare, a cold mass forming in his stomach, heralding the catastrophe that he was suddenly in the middle of.

Carrie recovered before he did.

"David... I can - "

"... explain?" Carrie's voice brought David's back to life, though his eyes remained unblinking, and his mouth still hung open. "Where were you gonna start?" he croaked, his words running on their own accord, with no input from his brain. "The part where you lied to me, the part where you tried to kill the others, or the part where you came back from the dead?"

She looked away, turned away entirely, one hand over her face as she took a few steps away from him back towards the picnic table. "This isn't... you don't understand."

"No, I _really_ don't." Bitterness was creeping into David's voice unbidden, his throat constricting as he spat his words out like mouthfuls of poison. "I don't know what the hell is going on here, but I think you'd better start explaining it."

His advice went unheeded, and she neither explained herself nor faced him, but instead raised one hand to her forehead, gripping her head like she was afraid it was going to fall apart as she leaned against the picnic table with the other "This isn't what I wanted," she said quietly, her voice thin, like a plea for mercy. "This... this isn't how I wanted it to be."

Perceptive as he usually was, David would normally have caught the rising panic in Carrie's voice, would have heard the warning implicit and heeded it, backing down once more, but his blood was thundering in his ears, drowning out the warnings that should have been as apparent to him as daylight, and instead of retreating, he stepped forward, closer to Carrie, his entire body quivering with emotion, his voice drawing the stares of the other bystanders, though for once he couldn't care less.

"Who are you?" he asked through clenched teeth. "_What_ are you? How are you even _alive_?! Why did you pretend to be someone else?!"

"I didn't... I didn't have a - " Carrie caught herself in time to prevent from saying whatever she had meant to say, but David pressed on relentlessly.

"Didn't have what?" he demanded. "What didn't you have? A choice? Or were you gonna tell me that it was all co-incidence that you came back from the dead and then started hanging out with the one person from Titans Tower who couldn't recognize you? Just like it's supposed to be a coincidence that every single time we met up, something tried to _kill_ me?!"

Carrie did not move or speak, giving no indication that she intended to reply, and David's frustration boiled over. "Terra, _I'm talking to you!_" he screamed, "Answer me!" The various conversations around him fell silent, and all eyes in the immediate vicinity moved to him and to Carrie. The whispers and stares should have thundered louder than a brass band in his head, but everything he had discovered was louder still, so loud in fact that he almost missed Carrie's quiet response.

"I'm sorry..."

David paused then, though not because he deemed that the reply was adequate to his questions, indeed quite the opposite. "You're... _sorry_?!" he asked incredulously. "Sorry for _what_?!"

The reply was little more than a whisper, a single, soft word spoken only at length, after a long deep breath, said with eyes closed and hands holding tightly to the lip of the picnic table. A word that, in an instant, changed everything about what David thought he was doing here.

"This."

And with the suddenness of a gunshot, the very ground David was standing on gave way and bucked upwards, a huge volume of loose dirt and rock slamming into his chest like a pile driver, flinging him through the air like toy before slamming him back down into the ground. And just before the quarter ton of earth and stone landed atop him, he saw, out of the corner of his eye, a soft yellow glow encasing Carrie's hands, still clenched to the picnic table, and only then did he realize, all at a rush, what was in store.

As always, too little, too late.

**O-O-O**

"Maybe it's broken,"

Cyborg glared at Beast Boy, who shrank down in his seat. "I'm just sayin', it could be!"

"I'm pickin' up all of you," said Cyborg as he punched a command into his communicator. "I'm pickin' up the Tower. I'm even pickin' up the Titans East and the Honoraries. So why ain't I pickin' him up?"

Beast Boy shrugged. "How should I know, dude? Maybe he broke his, or lost it?"

"There's a killswitch inside every communicator," explained Cyborg as he drove. "If it stops broadcasting, it alerts the central computer and records where the last signal was from. If he got it smashed, it'd show up. It's like it's been switched off."

"And he knows he's not supposed to lose it," said Robin from the front passenger seat of the T-car. "I made sure of that."

Robin sounded angry. He _was_ angry, not that it took psychic powers to figure that much out. He was staring out the passenger-side window of the T-car as though looking for something, though Raven knew it was more to give him something to look at than anything specific. Cyborg was annoyed too, but Cyborg hadn't spent days drilling into David's head the _absolute_ necessity of responding to every alert that came in _instantly,_ only to have this happen. Obviously they couldn't afford to wait around and hope that he'd show up. There was an alert to respond to at the bottling plant on the other side of town, a report of an intruder, and all of them were on their way now. There would be time to chew David out for this when they got back.

Raven sat on the passenger side as well, in the back seat, and also stared out the window, not actually registering anything that she saw. Next to her, Starfire and Beast Boy were quiet (for once), apparently not wishing to push Robin any further... or was it because of her eruption earlier tonight? Beast Boy had scarcely glanced in her direction since the alert had come in, as if his mere gaze could set off another incident. On a night like tonight, it might well have. She tried to repeat her mantra to herself quietly, tried to calm her thoughts as usual, but the best she could do was sit there and try not to make her discomfort too visible, sneaking occasional glances at the dashboard clock.

"9:26"

Two and a half more hours. It might as well have been two and a half months. Why in all the Hells couldn't this day just _end_ already? The nightmare/hallucination thing from barely twenty minutes ago had been bad enough, and only the alert had saved her from having to explain everything to Robin. In that respect, David's failure to reply to the alert was almost a blessing. It meant the Boy Wonder was occupied with a different mystery than the reason why she had screamed.

It also meant she didn't have to face the car ride with David present.

"Here we are," said Cyborg, and he pulled the T-car into the parking lot of the plant. Raven phased through the door rather than pause long enough to open it, so eager was she to get out of the car, and get this alert over with. If any of the others noticed anything, they didn't say it, no doubt because they didn't want to wind up wearing parts of the T-car.

She suppressed the wave of regret that engendered. Beast Boy should have known better than to push her, after all. What was _with _him, anyways? Why the hell could he _never_ leave well enough alone? He had never gotten the chance to admit it, but she knew that the surprise party _had_ to have been his idea. Starfire barely understood what a birthday party _was_, and the others all knew better than to throw her a surprise party. She _hated_ surprises. How could Beast Boy _possibly_ spend all that time trying to get to know her and still not know that? There were times when she wondered if he had any...

"Raven?"

Beast Boy's voice snapped Raven out of her thoughts like a switch had been flipped, and she stopped and turned around, and only then realized that she had been about to walk straight into a wall, rather than the front entrance. She said nothing as she turned away and walked back towards the others, giving Beast Boy a sharp look that indicated exactly what sort of answer would be generated from a question of if "everything was okay".

The inside of the factory was cold, cold and dark and filled with noise. Automated machines chugged along oblivious to the Titans' presence on both sides, enormous pistons churning up and down, while further ahead a metal catwalk ran high above the floor near to a sequence of gigantic gears, large enough to run a clock tower. The entrance wall was covered in large spinning ventilation fans, pumping air in and out of the facility, and the metal grates that formed the floor resonated with every footstep. Steam and hydraulic power systems added their hissing and roiling noises to the din, such that when Cyborg spoke up, his booming voice had to compete with the background in order to be heard.

"So," said Cyborg, his voice more even than it had been in the car, all swagger and confidence. "Who's the bad guy 'du-jour'? Gizmo? Mad Mod? Killer Moth?"

Raven let the others take the lead, hanging back and peering into the shadows that cloaked the corners and nooks of the massive factory. She could feel that something else was here, something that shouldn't have been, but she couldn't tell what.

"The report simply stated there was an intruder," said Starfire, also glancing about for any sign of opposition.

Beast Boy (as always) had no such worries, confidently walking ahead right behind Robin. "Well whoever it is," he said with a grin, turning his head back to Cyborg and Raven, "we're totally gonna kick their - Oof!"

Robin had stopped all of a sudden, and Beast Boy, who wasn't looking where he was going, had walked right into him. He turned his head back, no doubt to make some kind of sarcastic comment, but Robin ignored him, his eyes fixed on something up above and ahead, in the shadows of the catwalks and rafters. The other four followed his gaze, and then they saw it.

"... no!"

Up above, a tall, lean figure stood cloaked in darkness on the end of a catwalk, leaning against a large utility pipe, its leg resting confidently atop the guardrail. Neither marking nor feature was visible from this far away, but no sooner had Raven set eyes upon the figure than she knew who it was, and all efforts to pretend that nothing was wrong flew right out the window. All five Titans stopped in their tracks as though frozen, staring up at the figure overhead with their mouths hanging down.

"It's been a long time, hasn't it, Titans?" said the figure in a deep, almost soothing voice that sent chills up Raven's spine. "A month? A year? A millennium? Far too long for my tastes anyway." The figure leaned forward slightly, the pale overhead light illuminating a brown facemask with a single dark eye. "I was beginning to think I'd never see your smiling faces again."

Raven floated a bare foot above the ground, motionless as if transfixed. Starfire floated next to her in something like the same state. The three boys stood like statues, staring up in disbelief and horror.

"You..." stammered Cyborg, all bravado extinguished like a flame doused in ice-water. "How did you survive?"

Beast Boy, no less shocked than the others, nevertheless managed to channel. "Terra took you down," he said, bitter anger bubbling up around the edge of his astonishment. "_Way_ down!"

Raven herself could not speak. She could not even move. Her eyes and mouth were wide open, her heart frozen in place inside her chest. It couldn't be. Not today, of all days. This just couldn't be happening...

"Slade..."

Robin, as always, had recovered faster than any of them, and was staring up at his old nemesis with his fists clenched tightly. "I don't know where you've been," he said, "but you shouldn't have come back. I'm still ready."

The figure on the catwalks simply chuckled darkly, and a red symbol appeared on his forehead, a capital 'S' written in flames, wound around a pair of smaller markings. "That's precious, Robin," he said, leaning forward over the catwalk to gaze down at them as he clenched both hands into fists, "but... I didn't come back for you."

And then there was fire.

**O-O-O**

Civilians were running in every direction as Terra walked slowly towards the pile of loose dirt and rock that had landed on David. She took no notice of them, of their screams and cries for police, her fists encased in a yellow sheath as she advanced. The freshly dug pile of stone and earth showed no signs of movement, no indication that anything living was buried within, at least not at first glance. It wasn't until she had gotten within ten paces of the mound that she felt the crystallization of the water mixed in with the wet dirt near the center of the pile, and she had only a bare instant to raise a protective sheath of dirt from the ground before the entire mound exploded.

Dirt and chips of stone flew in every direction, colliding with her earthen shield with a series of wet "thumps", and the swirling dust occluded all vision until it finally thinned enough to see through. David was on one knee in the center of what had been the pile of dirt and rock, staring up at Terra with the anger of a moment ago now tempered by what had to be the realization of what he had just walked into the middle of. His face and his red-orange uniform were splattered with mud and dirt, and his hair was matted both with earth and with a trickle of blood from where a rock had hit him in the head. Either he didn't notice or he didn't care, for he made no attempt to stop the bleeding, simply sitting there in something approximating shock.

For a second or so, neither one moved, until as if by mutual consent, both acted at once.

With a wave of her hand, Terra pulled a lunchbox-sized rock up off the ground to shoulder height, and shoved her fist forward, hurling it at David's head as though it were launched from a sling. At the very same instant, David snatched at the baton still helpfully clipped to his belt, igniting the red aura that sheathed it like a flaming sword, and brought it up as though to ward off a blow. The rock quivered in mid air a bare moment before it exploded in mid-air like a bomb, sending chips of stone flying in every direction, peppering David, Terra, and the ground around them with a rain of tiny pebbles. She brought her other hand up to match, and another rock leapt into the air, but this time David was ready, and it exploded before it had gone more than a foot, the blast angled backwards, showering Terra in more bits of rock, and knocking her back a step. Though the blast wasn't potent enough to do more than this, it gave David a chance to get back on his feet, and by the time she had steadied herself, he was standing in front of the pile of dirt she had lately buried him beneath, crouched slightly, with his baton in-hand, flaming like a torch.

"Carrie," he said, and there was real fear in his voice this time, an almost desperate fear as he perceived what was now nearly certain to happen. "Carrie no... no, please... we don't have to do this."

"My name isn't Carrie," she said as the yellow aura flowed over her like a second skin, and she drank in the sensation of the earth and stone piled beneath her coming to life, feeling the embrace of billions of tons of material that waited for her commands, and her nerve settled, and her breath steadied, and she opened her eyes once more, and knew that it was time.

But David did not. Grasping at straws, he flailed about with his red baton, gesturing at the terrified crowds of civilians now fleeing from the site of yet another Metahuman engagement to come. "We can't do this, _you_ can't do this! There's thousands of people around! We're kineticists! We'll destroy the entire park and everyone in it! You can't..."

"You think you're a kineticist?" she asked curtly, levitating a dozen rocks and clods of dirt with a thought which began orbiting her like planets around a star. The horrified look in David's eyes only became more pronounced as the stones began orbiting faster and faster. "You don't even know what's going on here, do you? Besides, what makes you think I can't do this?"

David didn't reply, indeed she doubted that he _could_ reply, she could see the hesitation in his eyes, in his expression, in the way his baton was held limply, drooping from its ready position, the same expression she had seen from him before that day on the waterfront...

"That's what I thought," she said, and without a moment's warning she threw all dozen rocks straight at his head, counting on his hesitation to guarantee the hit. Two months ago it would have worked.

This wasn't then.

He reacted late, but he did react, bringing his baton up and acting semi-consciously, freezing a section of a large underground pipe and detonating it with an upwards slash of his baton. The ground burst open like a volcano, venting steam and bits of metal into the air, scattering the barrage of rocks in every which way. Without hesitation, she waved one hand and gouged two enormous handfuls of earth from the ground like a steam shovel, hurling them at David like a catapult. She honestly expected at least one to hit, but David threw himself to one side, ducking under the first projectile, which instead crashed into a tree and smashed it to splinters. He fell to the ground in a clumsy roll, but managed to bring his baton up in time, and practically impaled the second projectile with it an instant before it exploded back towards her, splattering her and everything within thirty feet with mud and wet earth.

Evidently Robin hadn't been wasting the intervening time.

"This isn't happening," said David, a sentiment she could understand at least, but he was staring at her with far too direct an intensity to have succumbed to mere panic, as he scrambled back to his feet and held his baton out like a holy symbol, backing slowly away from her as she followed. "This doesn't make any sense! You could've killed me any time you wanted to! The night with Adonis, the day Cinderblock attacked us! You could have done it any time, hit me in the head with a rock or something! Why wait until now?! Why wait until I know who you are and know how to fight back!"

"Because plans change," said Terra. She didn't know if David was asking these questions because he legitimately wanted to know, or if he was simply trying to buy time to let the civilians clear the area and for re-enforcements to arrive, and to be honest she didn't care. "Cinderblock was supposed to kill you, but he failed. Now it's my turn."

"But _why_?! Even if you wanted to kill me, you could have just done it then! Why now?!"

She could see he was desperate to keep her talking rather than fighting. She could see his left hand slowly moving towards the communicator on his belt, sense the flickering looks as he glanced around to try to come up with a plan, feel the desperate calculation running in his head as he tried to determine if he could stop her. "This isn't a cartoon," she said simply, "the bad guy doesn't explain his whole plan whenever you feel like it."

"You're not the bad guy!" he shouted desperately. "I read the articles, the after-action reports! I know how you died! You saved the Titans, you saved the _entire_ _city_!"

"And believe it or not, David, that's exactly what I'm doing now."

He froze.

Perfect.

She let out a yell and shoved both hands forward, and a snake-like column of rock erupted from the ground beneath her feet and shot towards him like a missile. The last words she had spoken had stopped him short, and he reacted too late, the rock snake smashing into his chest and lifting him up into the air before reversing itself and driving him down on top of a picnic table, which shattered under the impact. She let the rock-snake fall, and crouching down, she raised both hands into the air as though carving something up from the earth itself. At her command, a boulder the size of a minivan dug itself loose from the ground and lifted into the air and floated over towards David as he coughed and clutched his chest and spat blood from his mouth and raised one hand in an automatic, paltry defense.

**O-O-O**

"Ever have one of those days where you just feel happy to be alive?"

Slade's mocking words filled Raven's ears as she desperately flew left and right and back left again, tongues of flame pursuing her every move. In and out of her shadow-raven soul form she shifted, feeling the flames at her back at all times as Slade flayed the very air with streams of fire. Somewhere below her, Beast Boy flew in the form of a hummingbird, dancing around the flames that Slade directed his way, falling back towards the others in a gesture she was only too happy to emulate. The flames sought to cut her off, but she simply vanished into a portal and re-appeared among the others at ground level, Beast Boy landing next to her in a crouch and re-assuming his human form.

"Dude..."

Not the most expressive of comments, but Beast Boy's wide eyes and stunned expression were enough to make his meaning clear with or without words, and right now Raven couldn't find the stomach to criticize him. "Since when can Slade do that?" asked Cyborg, speaking for all of them. Slade took no notice of the question, but confidently stepped onto the railing of the catwalk he was on and leapt off it like an acrobat, spinning in circles in mid-air and tracing trails of fire in a double-helix around him before making a perfect landing in a combat pose, and turning his head to stare Raven right in the eye. Such power was in his very gaze that Raven recoiled from it as if from a blow, though this time nobody noticed.

"Not sure," said Robin, who seemed as collected as ever, "but he won't be doing it for long. Titans, go!"

The familiar formula helped, and she took off into the air. Slade made no attempt to dodge or evade as Starfire and Cyborg opened fire with Starbolts and sonic cannons respectively, but before the shots could land, a swirling cloak of flames emerged from nothing, blocking them like a shield before lifting Slade into the air upon a column of fire. Robin did not hesitate, but pulled a half-dozen flash-freeze grenades from his utility belt and flung them into the fiery pillar, encasing it and Slade in ice. He landed, and Raven thought for a moment that he'd done it, but the pillar began to shake, and a second later, the ice around Slade shattered, and Slade leaped down from his frozen pedestal, back onto the floor.

A knot was growing in Raven's stomach, but she pushed it down and ignored it. Slade was always slippery, and although the fire was worrisome, it was conceivable that he'd developed some powers of his own in the intervening time. It need not have anything to do with her, or with the date. Accordingly she raised one hand and snatched up a dozen ice shards, flinging them at Slade like throwing knives, and tried to convince herself that Slade was just being his usual acrobatic self when he deftly evaded them all, leaping back up to the upper levels of the facility.

Beast Boy dove on him in the form of a gorilla, but his overhead smash was too little, too late, and Slade flipped out of the way as Beast Boy beat a six inch dent into the solid metal floor. Slade landed on his feet just in time to see Starfire unleashing a charged starbolt straight at him. Had he simply evaded it, Raven could have chalked it up to Slade's usual abilities, but he did not. As the bolt approached, Slade conjured a shield of fire in his hands and _caught_ the starbolt in his shield, and though the impact shoved him back a dozen paces, no sooner had he stopped than he launched the shield and the starbolt within it back at Starfire, who was quite naturally not expecting anything of the sort. The energy struck her dead center, and she was knocked spiraling out of the air and out of sight.

And then things got _very_ weird.

Cyborg, taking advantage of Slade's distraction, raced over to the side of the room and uprooted one of the enormous pistons that powered the machinery of the factory. With a swing that would make a baseball player proud, he brought the entire piston around to clobber Slade, swinging hard enough to bat the supervillain into the stratosphere.

He didn't even move.

A sheath of flame enveloped Slade at the last second, and the piston melted on contact like a stick of butter touching a blowtorch. The masked criminal barely twitched as the far half of the piston landed on the ground, its insides liquefied and melted to slag, leaving Cyborg holding the other end, staring in blank astonishment at what had just happened.

"... whoa," said Cyborg.

Slade turned his head. "Whoa?" he asked, looking almost disappointed. "That's it? No clever comment? I was looking forward to that..."

Undaunted, Cyborg threw down the useless remnants of the piston, and charged Slade directly, and Raven flew over to support him, but once again, Slade was too quick. Though Cyborg could punch through a bank vault door, Slade simply deflected his blow like it was that of an anemic child, and reached over to gently flick the half-metal Titan in the face. His finger hit Cyborg with the force of a cruise missile, and launched him into the air so fast that Raven didn't have time to get out of the way. Both Titans collided in mid-air, and plummeted to the ground, Cyborg landing on his back on the catwalks below, Raven crashing into the wall and sliding down it into a heap on the floor.

She rose back to her hands and knees, shaking her head to try and clear it. Somewhere overhead came the sounds of further fighting, catwalks shattering, metal striking metal of some sort, but for the moment, all she could do was try and see if Cyborg was okay. Scrambling to her feet, she wan over to Cyborg, who was laying flat on his back on the ground, eyes shut, unmoving. Quickly, she conjured up a healing spell, placing one hand on his chestplate as she commanded her powers to seek out the damage to his human parts and repair it, but all this would take time, and meanwhile Slade was continuing to rampage above her head, at least so her thundering sixth sense kept claiming.

It didn't help that it was also urging her to run.

She clutched her head with her free hand, trying to force herself to focus, and to come up with a plan, but the facts stared her in the face and refused to go away. Slade had returned, armed with powers unheard of, powers fifty times greater than what he had managed to display the last time they had met. He was immune, or essentially so, to everything they had thrown at him so far, and while this was the sort of thing that normally she would have taken in stride, the fact that it was Slade, and that it was happening today, of all days...

She closed her eyes and suppressed a scream. "I just want this day to _end_!"

"I think we both know this day is _far_ from over..."

Raven's eyes bolted open, and she turned around in time to see Slade landing behind her, calm and collected as ever, not moving, simply standing there, looming overhead, but his mere presence was like a dagger made of ice had been driven into her chest. "Hello, birthday girl," said Slade in his eternally mocking voice, and Raven froze like a statue, unable to so much as twitch, as she realized with a sudden flash of understanding that her worst apprehensions for this day were coming to life before her eyes.

"No..." she whispered.

Slade simply took a step forward. "Ready for your present?"

**O-O-O**

The most important part of having superpowers was learning how to control them. The most important part of _using_ superpowers was learning how to control them 'creatively'.

A given power, even one that was not particularly effective at first glance, could be transformed into the most potent weapon imaginable through a simple exercise in creativity. That was one of the lessons that both Slade and Robin had imparted to Terra during her respective times spent training under them. It was one thing to control earth and stone. It was another to control earth and stone creatively. Armed with a given superpower, a particularly inventive meta-human could defeat someone objectively stronger than they were, simply by applying their unique abilities in a creative and inventive manner.

It was a simple but important lesson, one that Terra had never forgotten, not even after she had betrayed Robin and Slade both in turn, and one that she had always sought to put to use, and yet, in the seconds following what she thought would be the coup-de-grace in this little engagement, she could not help but remark to herself that she hadn't been the only one to learn that little lesson.

What she had judged to be a paltry attempt to defend himself from an incoming boulder the size of a Buick had actually been aimed, not at the rock, not even at her, but at an innocuous object located behind her that David had spotted and decided to wield as a weapon. Her first indication that he had done so was also her last, as something exploded like a bomb behind her, too far away for the blast to do much of anything, save that what David had detonated was something very specific.

A parking meter, stuffed with coins.

The meter blew up like a hand grenade, and ten thousand coins flew in every direction like bullets. Three dozen of them hit Terra in the back and side hard enough to stagger her, two of them cutting shallow gashes across her cheek and ear, another one hitting edge-on, and slicing right through her sweatshirt's sleeve to embed itself in her upper arm. If David's intention was to distract her (and it probably was), then it worked, for she bit stifled a cry and nearly fell over, and the rock under her control shook and swerved and landed two feet to the left of where it should have, giving David a chance to shakily get back to his feet, and turn to face her once again.

Biting back the pain of the flying coins, Terra clutched one hand to the side of her face, feeling blood oozing through her fingers. Frowning, she wiped her hand on her sweatshirt before turning back to David, who had blood smeared on the front of his uniform as well, staining the front of his bright red jumpsuit with a deeper red color. His baton was still in-hand, but rather than raising it and returning to the fight, he instead reached down and pulled the communicator off of his belt. He held it up, still closed, facing her, so that she could see the red light gently blinking on it.

"You know what this is," he said sharply, and it was not a question. He knew that she had once had one of these. "That's the panic light. I don't know how good you think you are, but I'd like to see you try and take on all six of us at once! They're already on their way!"

"Really?" asked Terra, "And what are they gonna do when they get here, do you think?"

"Keep on talking," said David, fighting tears back from what she assumed were broken ribs, his voice quivering, but a core of steel resounding within it. "You're about to find out what they're gonna do."

"You think they're going to attack me?" said Terra as calmly as she could. "Are you so sure that they're not going to come here and put you down instead? Or maybe both of us?"

David plainly had no interest in such crude tactics. "Don't even try it. Don't even _try it_, Terra!"

"I don't have to try anything, David," said Terra. "They're not coming either way."

"Yeah, keep telling yourself that!"

"Seriously, they're not. If you don't believe me, why don't you call them yourself?"

David hesitated at this one, and then slowly flipped the communicator open, not removing his eyes from Terra for one second. "Devastator to Titans," he said urgently. "Code Red Emergency, Patriot Park! Need help _now_!"

Nothing but static issued in reply. David waited a few seconds before pressing the "transmit" button again. "Devastator to Titans!" he practically yelled, "is anybody there?"

"They can't hear you," said Terra. "We're blocking your signal."

David spared an instant to glance at the screen of the communicator, but black and white static was all he could see, and slowly he lowered the communicator again, and turned back to Terra, obviously badly shaken, but still unwilling to show it, not that it wasn't obvious.

"It doesn't matter," he said carefully. "They can see us from the common room of the Tower." He gestured with his flaming baton across the water to Titans Tower, plainly visible in the distance. "The police already know there's a fight going on, and they'll call them even if I can't!"

Terra shook her head slowly, but said nothing, until David couldn't take it any longer. "What?!" he shouted, "what is it?!"

"David... don't you see what this is?"

"What are you talking about? What _is_ this?!"

"The others aren't coming because they're not in the Tower. They're on the other side of the city, and they're under attack."

Terra could practically see David's heart stop for a moment, and while he hesitated again, this time she did not take advantage. She needed an opening greater than a moment's hesitation, and she knew how to get it.

"W... what are you... who's attacking them?"

"Someone very, very bad."

"Yeah?" he said, trying to bolster his own nerve, "Well good luck to him. The five of them can take on anything, you know that."

"Not this time," said Terra simply. "This time it's something else. In fact, they've probably been calling you for help for the last half hour, wondering where you are, why you're not picking up..."

"As soon as they see that you've been jamming the..."

"We're blocking _your_ signals, David, not theirs. They can still read everything just fine, everything except you. To them, it looks like you're not even bothering to pick up the line."

David was so confused by now that he had forgotten to appear at all menacing. "Why the _hell_ would you do that?"

She raised two more rocks from the ground with one hand, setting them to hover next to her shoulders. "Because I'm here to kill you, David. And because I wanted to make sure that even if I didn't, they would."

He needed a long moment to reply.

"You're insane..."

She simply smiled, an artfully-crafted smile, as sharp as a dagger. "Am I?"

Things exploded.

With a wide swipe, David brought his baton around and blasted both rocks out of the air, crying out with the effort or the pain as he did so, but Terra had anticipated it. She let the blasts push her backwards, rolling and springing back up to her feet before pulling a huge load of dirt out of the ground with one hand, crushing it into dense spikes with her mind, and hurling them at David. The Psychokinetic bounded forward, spires of rock and dirt crashing into the ground all around him, and he blotted two of the spires out of the air with a wave of his hand before Terra pulled a huge wall of rock up out of the ground like a curtain rising from the floor, blocking his path. A second later, a ten-foot-wide chunk of the curtain froze and exploded, and David rushed straight through, right at Terra, his baton brought back in preparation for a swing, but with a wave of her hand, she ripped open the ground in front of him and he had to slam on the breaks, barely skidding to a stop at the edge of a hundred-foot chasm.

"Come on, David," said Terra as the piece of ground she was standing on uprooted and floated into the air, "did you actually think it was gonna be that easy? Did you think you could just show up at the Tower one day and they'd take you in like an abandoned puppy? They'll never trust you, not after today. I've made sure of it."

"You don't know a _goddamn_ thing about them _or_ me," snarled back David, so livid now that the baton was trembling in his hand. "You _never _did!"

"Oh really? So Raven tried to kill you earlier today because she trusts you?"

"Raven doesn't trust anyone!"

"She trusts the others. She trusted me. Look where that got her. And now she and the others are gonna find out that after they saved your life, brought you into their home, and trained you for months, you decided to run off and hang out with one of their worst enemies instead of help them against the biggest threat they've ever faced when they needed your help the most. For all they know, you're ignoring them on purpose." She sighed and looked up at the sky for a moment, as though pondering some difficult question. "I wonder if they'll decide you were a traitor, or just an ungrateful coward? I guess it really doesn't matter..."

"_Shut up!_"

The hovering pedestal of ground under Terra's feet quivered and blew up, and she fell, snatching at a pair of fist-sized rocks that fell with her and using them to stop her fall. She hurled one at David and struck him in the shoulder just as he stabbed at the air with his baton, blasting the other one to dust, and flipping her into a free fall. Both teens crumpled to the ground, David clutching at his shoulder with his free hand, Terra shaking her head and climbing back to her feet, clearing her mind to raise yet another pedestal and resume the attack.

David recovered quicker than she had expected though, for as the new pedestal was rising from the ground, he lunged at it and managed to grab on, using the baton as a pick to jam into the soft dirt. The mass of earth shuddered with the extra weight, and before she could fully stabilize it, he had managed to scramble up on top, and eschewing his powers for the moment, swung the baton overhand, aiming to bring it down right on Terra's head. Terra jumped to the side in the nick of time, and he missed her, his swing carrying him forward onto his hands and knees, the head of the baton burying itself in the dirt. Before he could recover, before he could even get up, Terra pulled a fist-sized mass of earth into her waiting hand, fell to one knee, and _smashed_ it as hard as she could onto the back of David's head, shattering the clod of dirt on his skull and knocking him prone, before mentally tilting the earthen pedestal and letting him fall off. Still stunned by the blow, he fell limply down, landing like a rag doll on the ground below.

"Did you think this was one of those stories where the plucky little orphan just gets to join up with the heroes for no reason at all?" asked Terra, floating high above on her pedestal, as David shook his head and moaned and tried to get back to his feet. "You think that communicator makes you part of their family? Did you think that you could just walk into a place you know nothing about and be accepted like an old friend, when you never even bothered to find out who they actually were?"

"I didn't know who _you_ were!" cried David, to Terra or to someone else, it wasn't clear. He staggered back to his feet, retrieving the baton from the ground as he did so, as Terra lowered her pedestal to the ground and stepped off it.

"And when you _did_ find out," she shouted, accusingly, "did you go running to them like you _know_ you were supposed to? Did you tell them everything, and let them know that I was back, and probably a threat? Or were you so afraid of what they'd think if you told them that you'd been hanging out with me for _months_, that you panicked and ran out here all alone, and gave them no warning that there was _anything_ at all wrong today?"

David stood in his ready position, but she could see the fear trickling into his look, feel him freezing up as his concentration, already hammered by his injuries and pain, faltered before the realization that, this time at least, she was telling the truth.

"Because, David," said Terra, spreading her arms out and shaking her head, "if they'd known I was alive again... well... I really doubt they would have all walked into Slade's trap that easily."

David could barely manage a whisper "... S... Slade?"

"Don't worry," she said, "If any of them do survive, they'll probably be too busy mourning the others to spend too much time getting angry with you. That's all you really care about, after all..."

She saw the shift come over David's eyes, saw him tensing up, saw his jaw clench and his fists shake and the flames on his baton pulsating like a living thing, and even before he opened his mouth to scream, she knew she had just done it.

**O-O-O**

"_No!_"

Raven swung her hand around like a boxer delivering an uppercut, and a blast of black energy shaped like a bird's talon caught Slade square in the chest and drove him upwards into the factory's ceiling. It dragged him along the rafters, dislodging tiles and rivets, carving a furrow in the roof before slamming the resurrected supervillain into a darkened corner. Sheathing her fists in black energy, she flew into the air, ready to deliver yet more punishment at need, but when the smoke and dust died away, there was no sign of Slade to be seen.

For a second or two, she thought she'd done it.

"I have a message for you..."

Slade emerged from the smoke like a nightmare given form, floating towards her without so much as lifting a finger. There was no sign of damage on his armored form, not one speck of paint out of place on his helmet from where she had dragged it along the metal roof and smashed him into the wall, and what's worse, in noticing this, she had let Slade get too close.

There was no time to avoid him, and so she opted for the best defense. A sheath of dark energy materialized around her hand, and she swung it at Slade, intending to simply smash him through the wall like a wrecking ball, but Slade moved even faster than she could, and though her energy sheath should have been strong enough to flay the flesh off his bones, he ignored it completely, and grabbed her wrist with an iron grip.

Her mind exploded.

Fire, searing, raging fire, burning through her skull like a whirling inferno. She clenched her teeth and eyes shut and bit back a scream as she tried to pull away, but Slade's hand was like a steel trap, and she could sooner have torn her own arm off at the shoulder as break it. She felt her wristguard melt to vapor, felt her sleeve smolder like burning leaves, felt her skin peeling and bubbling as though a branding iron was being applied, and just as she felt she could take it no longer, and was drawing breath to scream aloud, Slade simply released her, and she fell.

She fell for only a second, though it felt like longer, and she landed with a cry on her back on top of a massive horizontal gear. She sat up, clutching at her wrist where Slade had grabbed her, and when she opened her eyes she saw that her sleeve had been burnt back from her forearm, and that prominently stenciled on it was the same S-rune that Slade himself bore on his head.

And then she heard the crackling of electricity.

She turned back to Slade, still hovering overhead, and there was lightning dancing all over him as he extended his arms like a cross. His head was raised towards the sky, as energy coursed through him from sources unknown, buzzing and snapping the nearby air like a live wire, like a forest of live wires. Slade hovered there, inviolate, invulnerable, utterly unharmed by anything they had thrown at him, and he gazed upon her, and he spoke three words.

"It. Has. Begun."

**O-O-O**

It began.

David screamed, screamed loud enough to wake the dead, and when he swung his baton towards Terra, the very earth quaked with the power of the blast he unleashed. She had no idea what he was detonating, a sewer pipe, an underground power line, perhaps the very bedrock itself, but as he swung, he carved a massive furrow through the dirt, and a snake-like series of explosions cut through the air like a volcanic channel bursting to life. She threw herself to one side, letting the blast pass to her left, and from the flying dust and dirt she formed a packed ball as large as a car and hurled it at him with a cry. He did not so much as flinch, but lashed out at it, swinging his baton overhand like it was an executioner's axe, and the dirt-ball cracked in half and flew apart, one half plunging into the bay, the other smashing a parked car on the road next to the park, overturning it and spilling shattered glass into the street. Terra fell back, raising a shield of rock to protect herself with, but no sooner had she done so than the rock itself froze, and she flung it away in just the nick of time before it too exploded.

She reached out and grabbed the ground under David's feet with her mind, hurtling it into the air and flinging him off balance, but no sooner did he hit the ground than an explosion to her right stole her attention. She gasped as a manhole cover made of solid iron was blown into the air by some underground explosion, flipping end over end as it rose to its apex, before part of the cover itself blew up, rocketing the rest of it straight towards her like a gigantic ninja star. She raised another shield, this time of packed earth, and the manhole cover embedded itself in it and stopped, only to detonate like a bomb a second later, blasting the shield to pieces, and knocking her off her feet, back onto the ground.

She scrambled over to a tree, grabbing one of its branches and using it to stand back up, but when she turned around to face David, she had to dive back to the side to avoid the baton he was already swinging at her face. Once again, he missed by inches, and the baton hit the tree with a hollow "thud". Terra landed on one hand, and lashed out with her foot, hitting David in the back of his knee and knocking his legs out from under him. He landed on his hands and knees, but before he could rise anew, Terra mentally seized a shovelful of dirt from the ground and shot it upwards, slamming it into David's throat, and encasing it in a collar made of stone and soil. Staggering back to her feet, she loomed over him, both arms glowing bright yellow as she pantomimed crushing something between her hands. The earth obeyed her commands, squeezing David's throat like a vice, as he gurgled and choked and desperately clawed at the dirt.

"You're in way over your head, David," she said as she bared her teeth, shoving as hard as she could. "It's like you told me when we first met. You're not a superhero."

David didn't reply. He couldn't reply. He couldn't speak or even breathe, and Terra remorselessly poured on the power, intending to crush his windpipe like a grape, and yet before she could, David gave a half-lunge forward with his baton, and with a flash, the entire oak tree behind her burst like an over-inflated balloon and exploded to matchsticks. Bits of wood as small as a splinter and as large as an oar pelted her, knocking her over, shattering her concentration, and the dirt choker crumbled to dust, leaving David gasping for air. She felt like her back was on fire, and blood ran down the back of her shoulder from where the flying wood shrapnel had drawn it, and yet she could not stop any more than he could, and both of them shakily managed to get back to their feet and turn to one another again, their respective powers swirling around them as...

**O-O-O**

... lightning flew from Slade's hand, and struck one of the pistons at its base, amputating it instantly and toppling it onto the other pistons, which immediately misfired and began to disintegrate. Raven covered her ears as explosions rocked the entire factory while Slade calmly turned a complete circle, sending bolts of eldritch energy arcing out at everything in sight. Valves burst, pipes shattered, gears derailed and spun out of control as the delicate machinery that regulated them was torn to bits. Cyborg had by now woken up, and only barely managed to get back to his feet before he had to leap back to avoid the massive rocks that...

**O-O-O**

... neatly decapitated the parked car David was crouching behind and bounced down the street before smashing into a storefront window display. Neither David nor Terra watched it go, for Terra was already tearing another stone out of the ground, but before she could release this one, David blew a nearby mailbox to ribbons, sending the rivets that held it together flying out at Terra like bullets. Most weren't anywhere near her, but one at least was on target and hit her in the side before she could so much as move a muscle. She _heard_ her rib crack as the rivet bounced off of her, felt the stabbing pain like a knife in her lungs, and clutched her side with a hiss as she instinctively threw the stone she had carved up at David. This one...

**O-O-O**

... would have crushed Beast Boy like an egg, save that Starfire grabbed him by one hand and pulled him out of the way of the falling debris in just the nick of time. The entire facility was flying to pieces before Raven's eyes, but there was nothing she could do to stop it, nothing she could even think of to halt the trail of destruction that enveloped them. Robin fired his grappling gun just in the nick of time, as the nook he was standing in moments ago was torn apart by repeated explosions. With a groan, the casings that kept the pistons in place on either side of the room gave way, and the enormous cylinders toppled onto the factory floor, utterly crushing everything in their path like enormous...

**O-O-O**

... craters gouged in the street from the flying boulders, from the segments of ground she had torn up to hurl at him, and from the explosions he had conjured in his own defense. She could no longer see the sky, for the pall of dust and smoke that occluded everything blocked her vision. She had no difficulty seeing David however, nor him her, as the fiery orange flames encircling his battered and dented baton served her as good a reference point just as the yellow sheath encasing her did for him. This time she raised three narrow columns of solid bedrock and shot them at David like spears. One missed right, another was snapped in half by a conjured blast, but the last one caught him right in the sternum, hard enough to lift him off the ground and shove him back into the wall of the convenience store he was standing in front of. He doubled over, his face contorted in pain, his free hand clutching his stomach barely able to lift his baton anymore, yet she did not press her attack but readied what defenses she could to receive the counterattack she knew he would unleash, as he raised his baton...

**O-O-O**

... and tore the largest gear in the factory from its mounting, tilting and spilling it over onto the catwalk where Robin and Cyborg were trying to run away. It landed on its edge like a coin rolling across a tabletop, and bent the catwalk double. Cyborg made a running leap and managed to reach safer ground, but Robin was further back, and hadn't seen the blow landing. The catwalk buckled under his feet, and he fell, sliding back down towards the gear as it rolled towards him. He scrambled to find a footing, a leverage point, any kind of purchase on the collapsing catwalk, but it was being crushed under the enormous weight of the solid metal gear, and nothing of the sort was to be found. Raven's heart caught and her throat seized as Robin rolled over onto his back and raised one arm as one of the gear's teeth plunged down towards him and...

**O-O-O**

... then, all of a sudden, it was over.

One instant, David had been lashing out yet again with his baton, preparing to detonate a car door or a park bench or an entire tree, or the very ground she was standing upon. The next instant, before her very eyes, David's shout turned into a scream of unmistakable pain, and he aborted his slash in mid-strike and seized his head with both hands and stumbled backwards blindly, as though he was expecting his very head to explode a moment later. Terra hesitated, not wishing to leave herself open should this prove to be a momentary lapse, but the cry of pain was too haunting to be anything but genuine, and when he finally opened his eyes, and half-heartedly stabbed at the air with the baton, nothing happened, save for a fresh jolt of pain that staggered him anew, forcing tears from his clenched eyelids.

She did not act immediately, watching for a time, letting her own pain die down, and her energy re-collect, taking a few deep breaths as she prepared herself for what had to happen now. But by the time he had finally managed to suppress the migraine to a manageable level, and snuck a glance at her out of the corner of his eye, she had a mass of earth as large as a medicine ball floating over one hand, and was gazing at him evenly.

"T... Terra..." he managed to stammer between sharp breaths. "Terra... please..."

Terra raised her other hand, and two dozen more masses of earth rose from the broken ground. David's eyes filled with fear as she slowly closed her fist and shook her head.

"I'm sorry, David"

With one mental shove, all twenty-five packed clumps of earth, ranging in size from a lunchbox to a mailbox, flew towards David at once. He had just enough time to throw his arms up in front of his face before they all hit, shattering on impact, instantly occluding everything behind a cloud of dust and dirt. Terra was taking no chances. Once all the clumps were expended, she uprooted more, ripping rocks and fill from the ground and hurling them blindly into the cloud of dust, until she was absolutely certain. Still she raised several more rocks, holding them ready as the dust and smoke blew away in the ocean breeze.

She needn't have bothered.

The dust parted, and revealed David, standing in front of a wall that had been scoured and plastered over with dirt and small bits of rock. He stood motionless, his arms at his side, his face and uniform covered in dirt and blood and grime, his eyes staring directly at Terra, his face wearing an expression of simple shock, for any number of possible reasons. The baton was still in his hand, held loosely at his side, but no flame or aura encased it, and as Terra watched, his grip slackened, and it slid from his hand and clattered to the pavement. His lips trembled, as though he was trying to say something, but couldn't quite remember how, and then, as if he had all the time in the world, he tipped forward slightly, fell to his knees on the sidewalk, teetered for a second, and pitched over onto the ground, landing face-down on the pavement, twitched several times, and then was still.

Carefully, Terra approached David, keeping the rocks she had raised on-hand in case this should prove ephemeral, and when she reached where he was laying, she tilted the ground beneath him, rolling him over onto his back. Up close, it was clear that this was no clever ruse. Blood leaked from the corners of David's eyes, from the deep gash on his forehead, from his mouth. His eyes were unfocused, staring upwards, as he breathed shallowly and with great difficulty. His hand quivered, as though seeking something, perhaps his baton, and she kicked it aside, down the street, even as she lowered all but the largest rock, a solid piece of limestone the size of a computer monitor, heavy enough to stave in David's ribs or skull with but one gesture.

Perhaps he recognized the danger, perhaps he was already too far gone to recognize anything, but he blinked several times and apparently tried to speak again, but succeeded only in weakly coughing blood up onto the ground next to his head. He could not raise a hand in his own defense, could not so much as move, and Terra extended her own hand, letting the rock float into position above David's head and chest, then paused for a second. There was no more need for play-acting or incitement. It was over. When she spoke, her words held bitterness, reserve, even sadness, but no more anger.

It was no longer necessary.

"For what it's worth, David," she said, not sure if he could hear her or not, "I'm... sorry that it had to be like this."

David mouthed several words, none of which she could make out, and he appeared to be crying, or at least there were tears mixed with the blood running down his face. There was no point in delaying it any further. "I wish there was another way," she said, as she raised her hand, lifting the rock overhead as she did so. It hovered there, waiting for her command, for only a second.

"Goodbye."

She swung her hand down, and the rock plunged to earth like a meteor.

**O-O-O**

And at that same instant, miles away, on the other side of town, Raven sat atop a perch near the roof of the factory, and watched an enormous gear descending to crush Robin like an insect and smear his body all over the catwalk he was trapped upon. Had she been thinking clearly, she might have snatched him aside with her powers, or thrown the catwalk away from the oncoming gear, or even sought to halt the gear itself, for heavy as it was, her powers were mighty, and she could have brought it down or thrown it aside. She did neither. Her mind was not clear, it was fraying at the edges, the symbol on her wrist burning like the brand it was, and fear driving her to act recklessly and impulsively, the exact opposite of what she should have been doing. She felt her powers surging within her, beating at the walls of her control, raging to be let out, and for once she could not remember how to contain them Seeing her friend about to be crushed to jam was the final straw, and she clenched both fists and her eyes and teeth together and tried to suppress the primal scream that boiled up from within her unbidden, nothing coherent, just a cry, a plea for mercy, a command to the very powers of the universe to let this accursed, hellish, thrice-damned day come to an end.

Or... failing that...

_"STOP!!"_

* * *

**Author's Note**: Just one final request for any who have read this far to please leave me a review, such that I might know what did and did not work in the above chapter. I hope to see you all for Chapter 23, a chapter I will make every effort to ensure arrives as promptly as it can.


	23. Ex Cathedra

**Disclaimer:** I do not own the Teen Titans, or my own soul.

**Author's Note:** Short note this time, for I am posting this while at the end of my physical tether. I have killed myself in writing this chapter, but I don't begrudge it, as it is always an excitement to get a new one done. As always, I hope and pray you will enjoy it, and beg you, one way or another, to leave me a review that I may profit by it. Thank you all for reading

* * *

**Chapter 23: Ex Cathedra  
**

_"Fear... and panic in the air.  
I want to be free, from Desolation and Despair,  
And I feel... like everything I sow,  
Has been swept away,  
Well I refuse to let you go..."_

- Muse, Map of the Problematique

**O-O-O**

"Arise,"

Figures flitted through the shadows and the clouds, emerging and receding like waves on the shore. Glimpses, a second, half a second, less, no time to examine, no time to consider. A young woman standing on a balcony, a blazing scepter held in one hand as she gazed down upon a city of gleaming crystal and polished stone. An old man in blackened armor, drinking blood from a chalice of carved ruby, seated on an obsidian throne atop a mound of piled corpses. An amorphous creature of tentacles and numberless mouths, all screaming silently in the midst of a lightless pit. A girl of eight, bound to a tree and crying out in a language that made no sense as men and women danced in a circle about her, and the world shook and twisted in agony. A hooded monk, serene and content, sitting cross-legged in a chamber filled with light. A giant man with a red beard, mechanically painting a landscape onto a canvas, striving to derive feeling from it. A cowering woman, huddled with her children on the dirt floor of a tiny hovel, as armed men with cruel faces surrounded her, leering and gesturing salaciously in preparation for worse acts to come.

Stars wheeled overhead, mountains and oceans spilled like paint over an infinite easel. Image after image, context-free, urgent and unimportant, meaningless and evocative, all at once. Fire danced and spun in the air, like a puppet attached to a mad puppeteer. Great rivers flowed through inky voids, some of gold, some of starlight, some of boiling blood. Seven-pointed stars seared themselves into nonexistent ground like branding irons wielded by gods. And as the images began to coalesce into something only slightly more coherent, their intensity seemed only to increase, like a volume control dialed up and up and yet further up. Cities on fire, mountains of corpses, screams in tongues too alien to comprehend. And above all, a citadel of ivory and pearl, like a spike penetrating the very heavens, atop which sat an open chamber, thin air whistling through it as beings in robes stood in circles and chanted hymns to unknown gods.

"Arise,"

Seven there were, at points of a star, green-scaled figures like dinosaurs writ as men, and in the center of them all, a dias onto which a bright light was shining, but from what source? The figures moaned and chanted and swayed as the sounds of anguish crept through the chamber from the burning city below, and as they did, the white light in the center split, as though broken by a prism, and all the colors of the rainbow arrayed themselves around the chamber, spinning like a carousel before slowing, and coming to a halt, one beam of colored light resting upon each of the robed saurians. Violet there was, and indigo, and blue and green and yellow and orange too and even red, a rainbow of light dazzling to behold, drowning the vision of all else, and one by one the figures stood stock still as if transfixed, and some cried, and some were silent, and some raised their hands in joy and ecstasy, and others sagged as though burdened by a great weight. One by one the figures stood and reacted, enraptured, through all the colors of the rainbow down to the very last, who stood within the red light that engulfed him and said nothing, and moved not. And the others gazed upon him for a long time, as though awaiting pronouncement or reaction, until at the last he suddenly threw back his hood, revealing his reptillian head and features, and shouted aloud a cry of joy or pain or fear or triumph or perhaps all of the above, a cry that had more in common with the keening of a hawk than it did the vocalizations of a man.

And then everything went black.

And then everything went white again...

"Arise..."

**O-O-O**

Everything hurt.

David had no idea how long he had been awake, or even aware of where he was. There was no discrete moment of waking, only a vague realization that gradually crawled over him that he was in fact alive, and that he was in fact in pain. Terrible pain.

He could not move. He was absolutely certain of that. The pain of merely lying on the ground was enough to overshadow everything else, and to move was to invite certain death. He could not tell what his injuries were, only that they were legion, nor where the pain was localized, for it was everywhere at once. How long he lay there was impossible to tell. He had no future, no past, no sense of the passage of time, only that he was hurt, that he was dying.

That he wasn't yet dead.

Why wasn't he dead?

It was the first thought he'd had in a million years that wasn't related to the pain he was in, and he pursued it like a drowning man pursuing a distant lifeboat. He knew that he was supposed to be dead, that that was the reason he was in such pain, but he could not remember the reason why he wasn't. He tried to focus on that question, that mystery, as flashes of everything that had happened came back. He remembered being in the Tower. He remembered being in the park. He remembered fighting, and being angry, so terribly angry that he had destroyed things without question or hesitation or worry about what anyone would think, and that it had not been enough. He remembered pain, pain of a different sort, stabbing him through the head like an icepick, and he remembered falling as a barrage of rocks struck home, and his last view of the world as Terra drove a boulder towards his head so as to stave it in.

"Terra..."

His own voice brought him partly around, though it was too quiet for anyone to hear besides him, and he remembered, all in a rush, that he had fallen in the street, that Terra had thrown a rock at his head, and was trying to kill him. She had said so. She was part of the conspiracy, part of the plot to get him and kill him and destroy him and his friends who were all...

His breath caught.

He twitched, and bit back the pain that caused, and slowly, agonizingly-so almost, he opened his eyes to admit the light, and found that he was still laying on the street, and staring at a boulder.

A floating boulder.

The incongruous sight was enough to banish the pain and the fear of death to the back of his mind and just force him to stare, for a boulder the size of a motorcycle was floating in mid-air bare inches in front of him, as perfectly still as if it had been a painting hung on a wall somewhere. A bright yellow aura enveloped the boulder, but rather than flicker, it too sat stock still, waiting for some unknown signal to propel the rock on its way and crush him to pulp. David's heart began thundering in his ears again, loud enough to block out all other sounds, and though he knew that he should be doing something, anything, moving or screaming or trying to fight back, he also knew equally well that such a thing was well beyond him at this stage, but he couldn't just sit here and wait to be crushed, could he?

Could he?

Apparently he could.

He lay on the ground in a puddle of his own blood, and stared up at the hovering rock, expecting any instant for it to come crashing down on his head. Seconds ticked by, each one as long as a lifetime, and yet the rock did not move, and the aura did not flicker, and the only sound David could hear was that of his own shallow breathing and ragged heartbeat. Only after many such breaths, and many such beats, his only means of measuring the passing of time, did he finally muster the will and the strength to move. Gradually, with infinite pain and care, he managed to slide himself over, across the rough asphalt he was laying upon, sliding himself out from under the path of the boulder, lest it should spontaneously begin to move again. It did not, and after a minute's work, David finally collapsed against the curb of the sidewalk, where he lay motionless for a few minutes, like a boned fish.

And then he noticed something very wrong.

At the very end of his fight with Terra, years ago or bare moments, he could no longer tell, the geokinetic had summoned a swarm of boulders to fling into him, only to cast most of them away when she realized that he was beaten and that only one would be needed. These cast-off rocks had been flung to the side, and hit the ground, and shattered, flinging bits of rock shrapnel into in every direction. This would not have been anything worth noticing normally, for the entire area was completely covered in bits of rock and discarded debris, yet another war zone to add to his ever-growing repertoire, except that from where he was laying now, he could see the shattered fragments.

They were still in the air, and they weren't moving.

It took his broken, addled mind a second to process that. Hundreds of fragments of rock were hovering sedately in the air, some high, some low, some frozen in the process of skittering over the ground. One had crashed into a plate glass window and shattered it, but the glass fragments still held in mid-air, as motionless as if glued into place. His gaze slowly panned across the scene of ruin that he and Terra had wrought, the pain of his injuries beginning to fade, replaced with a cold fear as he realized that something _else_ was horribly wrong. A severed fire hydrant's waterspout hung in the air like an ice sculpture, every drop glistening in the sun, neither falling back to earth, nor shooting into the air, fixed like the stars overhead. Smoke hovered above burning cars, neither wafting on the wind, nor billowing into the sky, a shroud as solid and permanent as a store awning, cloaking fires whose flames neither flickered nor burned, but stood stock still like wax sculptures, emitting neither heat, nor sound, nor smoke beyond that which already hung. Birds flying through the hazy air were likewise frozen in place in mid-wingbeat, as were insects and even a police helicopter, its rotors motionless, yet sufficing somehow to support the machine aloft. From where David was laying, he could see one of the policemen leaning out the window to watch the ground below, a pair of binoculars frozen to his head in mute salute.

And then there was Terra herself.

The geokinetic was standing in the middle of the street where he had last seen her, and like everything else, she was as motionless as a statue. Her arm was extended palm outwards, a yellow sheath enveloping it and her, her other hand pressed tightly against her side, as though holding in some sort of injury, which given everything, wasn't too unlikely. Her head was lowered, turned slightly away from where he had been laying, her gaze averted as if unwilling to witness the fruits of her own handiwork.

Gradually, David pushed himself up onto the curb of the sidewalk, trying to move as little as possible as he did so, for his shattered ribs, broken arm, and other injuries, less obvious but no less painful, tortured him at every turn, forcing tears from his eyes and reducing his breathing to sharp, pained whimpers and gasps. He had no idea what was going on, no idea if he was alive or dead, hallucinating some fantasy in the moments before his brain stopped working, or transported into a shadow realm beyond the living world. All he knew is that everything, everyone, every object in sight had frozen solid. Everything except him.

He pulled himself into a sitting position, each breath stabbing him like a knife between his ribs. The air was cold, bitingly cold, in a way he didn't remember it having been, and he shivered, and shivering made his entire body ache and scream in protest. Blood was smeared all over his uniform, darkening the fabric from red-orange to crimson. It ran from cuts on his forehead, getting into his eyes, running down his arms, dripping from his fingers. He had no idea what to do, where to run to, how to escape what was happening. The pain in his stomach was growing worse and worse, the chill in the air becoming more and more pronounced. His head swam with the effort required to take every breath, barely able to stay seated, let alone stand, and yet somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew that he needed to stand, needed to walk, needed to crawl if necessary, but needed to get out of here, back to the tower, back to the others, back anywhere really. He needed to get out of this surrealist nightmare and back to the others, or he was dead.

Merely standing up took five tries, for his arm was broken, and every bit of weight he applied to it to try and get on his hands and knees or stabilize himself sent a white-hot jolt of pain through him strong enough to blur his vision and make him scream aloud. When finally he shakily reached his feet, he tottered there for a while, then managed to take a step, paused, catching his breath, then took another, and another, and another, like a climber ascending Mt. Everest, with every pace an excruciating ordeal. In such a manner, one arm hanging limp, the other clutched over his stomach as though holding his guts inside, David slowly limped forwards. He could not run, he could barely even walk, staggering like a drunk into each successive street sight, lamp post, or railing, grabbing onto them as though they represented life itself, steadying himself and coughing up enough blood to fill his lungs with air again, and then moving onto the next, on and on until he finally disappeared into the inky stillness of the frozen city.

**O-O-O**

The silence was worse than the sound.

Raven stood amidst a factory devoid of noise, devoid of motion, devoid of life, and stared at her friends, all of whom were arrayed before her like still images on a matte painting, frozen like the rest of the exploding factory. Broken machinery heavy enough to sink an ocean liner was hovering in mid-air without the slightest support, as the air chilled to a frosty sheen and the flames themselves about her seemed to flash-freeze. Her heart beat mercilessly within her chest, thundering like an avalanche, and she rubbed her upper arms unconsciously as she looked around the factory in fear and wonder.

"How did I...?"

"You might be able to stop time, birthday girl," came the haunting reply in Slade's ever-calm voice, "but you can't stop me. You can't stop any of it, really."

Raven whirled about and looked up into the air, where Slade had been hanging moments before. There he hung now, but unlike everything else about her, he was neither frozen nor motionless, having turned back to face her, sheathed in a red aura as if all the fires of Hell were burning within him.

It reminded her of...

"I have to say, Raven," said Slade, floating down towards her as she backed away slowly, as if from a dangerous predator, "when I found out the truth, I was _very_ impressed." He shoved bits of debris out of his way as he advanced, strolling along through the air without a care in the world, not in the least bit placed out of sorts by the fact that Raven had apparently just halted the physical laws of the universe in their tracks around him. "All this time," he remarked, his voice as smooth as silk and deadly as a rattlesnake's hiss, "I had no idea. The power lurking inside you. The glorious destiny that awaits." He paused and seemed to smirk. "It's always the quiet ones, isn't it?"

This could not be happening. It was bad enough that Slade was immune to everything they had thrown a him, she had just _frozen time_ and still he pursued her! What _was_ he? What had he been turned into?! Her heart beat inside her chest so hard that she could feel it hammering away at the inside of her skull, and she clutched both hands to her head to try and block it out, backing up a fallen girder to keep away from him.

Slade followed at his even pace. "But honestly, Raven," he said, "did you actually think you could just blow out the candles and wish it all away?" He folded his arms across his chest, like a schoolmaster scolding a truant girl, moving up the girder after her, and leaning forward to ensure she caught every single word. "Today is the day it begins," he explained darkly. "You've known it all your life. It is going to happen. And no matter what you wish, no matter where you go, no matter how you _squirm_, there is _nothing_ you can do to stop it."

She phased through the wall.

She did it without even thinking, panic clawing at her throat as she did so, and before she knew what was happening, she had plunged herself into shadow and emerged from the other side of the wall in the form of a space-black raven. She had no idea where she was going or what she was going to do when she got there, but in the back of her mind loomed a half-formed plan, to grab the others somehow, dispel the effect of her semi-intentional magic on them, and then to get out as quickly as she could and find somewhere to hide or to go to escape from Slade. Her mind raced with fragments of ideas as to where that might be, and so it was that she was not paying any attention to where she was going until she finally landed next to Robin.

... or... wait a minute.

She had _meant_ to land next to Robin. Robin was the closest to where she was after all, and moreover there was a gear the size of a small house looming over him, ready to crush him to paste the instant she aborted her temporal spell. Besides, whatever the circumstance, no matter how bad it was, Robin had a plan for it, as he had a plan for everything. She had intended, or semi-intended, to pull him out from under the gear, and then take off, freeing the others on the way out. But as she blinked back into reality, she realized she had not landed next to Robin, nor anywhere near Robin. In her panic, her subconscious had been at the wheel, and rather than do what she had intended, she had put down next to Beast Boy instead.

For a second she hesitated, unsure of if she should go back and grab Robin as she had previously meant to, confused as to why she had wound up here of all places, and looking about to locate Slade again. When she found him however, she knew that it was too late, for Slade was hovering above Robin's position, casually walking through the air towards her as he spoke with an air of weary annoyance. "Running won't save you, birthday girl," he said, "nothing will."

It was too late to ponder her subconscious' motives, too late to do anything but run as quickly as she could. She turned to Beast Boy, who had been frozen mid-transformation, and laid a hand on his side, letting the temporal energy she had stolen from him and everything flow back into him. Moments later, his pallor returned, and he fell out of the air where he had been leaping, landing on the ground in the form of a very confused leopard. For a second he seemed to not know where he was, blinking silently as he looked around at his frozen surroundings. And then, as he figured out slowly that he was still both alive and located within the factory, the green changeling reverted to his human form, and slowly stood up, scratching the back of his head with one gloved hand, his eyes wide as he beheld the frozen machinery and flames, as well as the motionless forms of the other Titans.

"What..."

He did not have a chance to finish his sentence, for Raven had no sooner freed him than she turned back and raised both arms. Tendrils of pure darkness emerged from the ground before her, and they wrapped themselves around the enormous gear that was threatening to crush Robin to mulch. The gear was solid iron, machine-forged and face-hardened, but Raven's tendrils tore it apart like clay, shattering the enormous gear and casting its fragments left and right, with several of the larger chunks flung at Slade for good measure. And then without another instant's hesitation, she turned back to Beast Boy, seized him with one hand by the shoulder, and conjured up a black portal that enveloped them both, then morphed into another bird of purified shadow, which took to the air and phased straight through the ceiling, leaving nothing behind.

The bird soared out into the silent city, down the streets and around the corners, propelled by act of pure will, passing over frozen cars, people, and animals, before finally coming to a stop in the middle of a large and empty street. There the bird hesitated for a moment, raising its wings and head up like an eagle on a flag or seal, and ejecting Beast Boy unceremoniously onto the street below it. Moments later the bird seemed to dissolve, the shadows collapsing inwards, resolving finally onto Raven, who landed as lightly as a feather on the ground, lowering her arms as her cloak fluttered down around her in the windless chill of the timeless air.

Beast Boy picked himself up off the street slowly, brushing the dirt and gravel off of his uniform unconsciously as he stared in wide-eyed astonishment at everything nearby, the birds like paintings in a false sky, the pedestrians halted in mid-step like mannequins, before slowly turning his eyes back to Raven in a mixture of wordless wonder and fear.

"Raven?"

Raven shut her eyes as wave of reproach washed through her. She should have brought Robin out, and she knew it. Robin, whose head she had already been inside. Robin, who understood her better than anyone else in the Tower. Robin, who she could imagine herself conceivably explaining all of this to, not Beast Boy, who didn't even have the sense to leave her alone whenever she was...

She practically had to slap herself out of the unworthy flash of anger that brought up. She had not brought Robin out, but Beast Boy, and even if she didn't know why, there was no going back now, and so she took a deep breath, and opened her eyes once again, to find Beast Boy still staring at her, saying nothing, but clearly seeking for answers of some kind.

"What _happened_?" asked Beast Boy, his voice raspy and subdued. "Did... did you do all this?"

"I..." stammered Raven. Where could she even begin? She had precious few answers here. "I'm not sure," she said, raising her torn sleeve and staring at the rune imprinted on her wrist, which in the obscure frozen twilight overhead was beginning to fade out. "I... I never wanted this day to come. And when it did, I just wanted it to stop." She stepped past him, surveying the petrified city, a chill running up and down her spine that could not be entirely due to the cold of the air. "I... guess I got my wish..." she commented lamely.

She expected him to ask what she was talking about. It was what Robin would have done, tried to identify the problem as quickly as he could, and then solve it. It was how Robin worked, but it was not what Beast Boy did. Though he could not have been anything less than completely perplexed, he did not explode or beg her for more information, and his soft footsteps behind her were followed by the soft touch of his gloved hand resting on her shoulder. "It's okay," he said as gently as he could, and while she caught the fear in his words, she caught something else there too, something she couldn't place. "We're gonna be okay. We'll... figure something out."

She wanted to ask him what in the hell they were gonna figure out, wanted to round on him angrily for being naive and ignorant about what was actually happening, but instead she just lowered her head and cursed herself silently for having dragged him and all the others into this terrible situation. "I don't think so," she said.

"Raven, you just _stopped time_," said Beast Boy in a voice that was surprisingly confident, given everything, and even contained the barest hint of a smile. "If you can do that, then you can totally crush Slade, especially with my help."

His logic was so ridiculous as to be absurd, and yet it made a depraved sort of sense. Moreover it was so perfectly... _Beast Boy_ that her train of thought derailed on the spot and she turned her head around to face him, and saw that he was smiling.

How the _hell_ did he do that?

She shook her head slowly. "Beast Boy," she said, "I -"

She froze.

Behind Beast Boy, down at the intersection of the next cross-street, something had stumbled around the corner, something that made her eyes fly open as the blood froze in her veins. Her breath caught, her fists clenched, the aura of darkness that was her semi-constant companion flared back to life around her, and even as Beast Boy noticed in her eyes that something was wrong, she opened her mouth and croaked out a strangled cry.

" - Great Azar... no!"

And then before Beast Boy could so much as move, she shoved him aside with one hand, even as she stepped forward and raised the other one, fist closed like a cannon. Her magic words spilled from her lips in a panic as the black energy around her swelled up before forming into a beam of coherent void, and flying down the road towards her target.

**O-O-O**

Everything hurt.

Seriously, _everything_ hurt.

David staggered down the street away from where he had left the motionless form of Terra, along with what had to be more than a quart of his own blood. More of it was dripping along a trail from there to here, these few city blocks that he had traversed in the agonizing minutes since he had awoken on the ground in the middle of what was either a near-death hallucination or another dimension.

No matter how far he stumbled, no matter how far he tried to flee, nothing was alive, nothing was moving. People, birds, dogs, everything was in some kind of stasis. The air itself was chilled as though preparing to freeze, the sun hung motionless in the sky, and he had to actually brush the smoke out of his face like cobwebs as he gradually, painfully made his way down the street.

Where was he going? He had no idea. The world had taken a sharp turn for the surreal, and while he had no idea if it was the product of his injuries or some new aspect of reality he had never been briefed on, he simply had no idea of what else to do. His entire body was on fire, but the pain in his stomach was growing worse and worse with each passing minute. He was bleeding inside, his head swimming more and more with each step, to the point where all he wanted to do was lie down and go to sleep. He retained enough lucidity to know that this was a trap, but only barely, and so he made he way along, staggering, crawling, dragging himself along with parked cars and street signs, moving in the vague direction of the Tower and the presupposed sanctuary that it offered, though had he been thinking clearly, he would have realized that with the world itself frozen, likely all he would be able to do would be to die there, rather than here.

He had to stop every couple steps to wheeze and force air into his lungs, and rub the mixture of blood and tears from his eyes. It was far too much for him to think over, everything that had happened. He could not even commence questioning how it was that Terra had come back to life for the purposes of meeting him and killing him, how the entire world had come to a halt save for himself, how all of these terrible things had happened without explanation or reason. All he could do was stop, and then stumble forward again, and then stop, pushed on by nothing more than force of habit, and the desire not to die in the middle of a frozen world in an abandoned street.

And those things could only keep him going so long.

He slipped, he tumbled, he fell, and in falling he reached out with his broken arm to arrest his fall, and his arm gave way and he hit the ground hard, and would have screamed if he had possessed the strength. Instead he could do nothing but lay on the ground and sob weakly, his body racked with pain and spasm, his blood soaking into the asphalt below. He knew he should get up, move, that to stay here was to die, but he simply could not. Terra had bludgeoned him like a formless sack of potatoes, and his body was broken and spent. He made one more lunge forward, and then lay still, semi-conscious, barely able to keep his eyes open.

Sounds flitted around his head like insects, like buzzards preparing to feast on a fresh kill. Voices, those of people he hadn't seen in years, of people he'd seen only weeks before, all of them recognizable if only vaguely, speaking nonsense, gibberish, words that held no meaning, but he listened to them anyway. Above all of the cacophony though, there were five specific voices, five voices that orbited his mind like planets around a dying star. A fog was descending over everything, thick and impermeable, and all the other voices faded to nothingness, but the five remained, reciting snatches of conversations from months before, their meanings abandoned, their mere presence something of a comfort. The pain was nearly gone now, the chill in the air forgotten, the blood ebbing from his body beginning to thin, and he could no longer keep his eyes open, but slowly slid them closed, listening to the sound of the five voices around him as one by one they slowly faded away.

Save two.

Two voices, mere whispers in the dark remained, and he listened to them, for it was all he could still do. He listened without understanding, and he waited for them to vanish, and to leave him alone, as the others had done. And yet they did not, continuing for reasons unknown, speaking on and on for what seemed like hours. He was puzzled as to why. Why were they still there, soft and yet intelligible in the oppressive silence of the frozen city, still speaking in terms that if he had only possessed the mental wherewithal, he might have been able to interpret. There was some element to this that he was missing, and he knew it, and it bothered him that he couldn't understand, and he tried to focus on the words, to figure out their meaning and who was speaking.

"Raven, you just _stopped time_,"

His breath caught. The voice was raspy and instantly recognizable, even in his broken state, as was the name it had uttered. And it occurred to him all of a sudden, like a flash of insight, that the reason the other voices hadn't vanished was because they weren't in his head.

They were nearby.

The realization galvanized what little force was still left in his broken frame, and he forced his eyes open again, and lifted his head like it weighed a hundred pounds. The sound was definitely coming from somewhere nearby, not from some vague place within his head. It was Beast Boy, and from his words it was also Raven, and they were near, and they were alive.

It took effort, _real_ effort, to convince himself to move, and yet deep inside, some burning core of his being refused to die here in the gutter if he had any other option available to him. If Beast Boy and Raven were somehow still active in the midst of all this, he knew he had to find them, even if nothing then could be done. Even if they were in worse shape than he was, in fact _especially_ if they were in worse shape than he was. There was nothing else for it. No other option was acceptable. He moved.

The pain came back with a vengeance as he moved, rising unsteadily to his hands and knees and crawling down the street until he reached a telephone pole that he could use to slowly, painfully get back to his feet. The pain this time was a help more than a hindrance though, for it banished the remaining shreds of unconsciousness that still dragged at his mind, and forced him to act, somehow, to alleviate it. For this reason and a hundred others, all related, he dragged himself to the corner of the nearest intersection, around which the sounds were coming. He paused, and breathed in and out and in and out and finally shuffled around the corner. Ahead, no more than fifty paces away, a few seconds' run at any other time, Beast Boy and Raven stood with their backs to him, their breaths puffing in the chilly air. Beast Boy's hand was on Raven's shoulder, and Raven's head was drooping. They spoke still, but now he could not overhear them, for his own wheezing was too loud to hear whispers at distance over. He could not cry out, could not so much as scream, but he did cough as he shuffled towards them, and Raven's head came around and she saw him.

And she went white

Her eyes nearly burst from her head and her entire body went rigid as she mouthed an exclamation to herself, and then thrusting Beast Boy aside and stepping forward, she raised one hand, which glowed with black energy and suddenly burst forth as a river of violent death, streaking across the intervening space in a heartbeat. It was no act of his that saved him, but a what little restraint Raven had left in her, for the beam of blackness struck the ground two feet in front of him and scoured it to bedrock in seconds. Stone chips flew in every direction, and David reflexively brought his hand up to his face to shield it, and stopped in his tracks, which appeared to have been Raven's goal.

"No..." she said, and there was horror in her voice, like she was staring at some kind of monster raised from the pits of damnation to devour her very soul. "No," she repeated, "no... stay back! Don't come any closer or..."

"Raven!" shouted Beast Boy, who had been momentarily stunned by all the goings on, but now recovered his powers of speach. "What are you _doing_?" he turned back to face David and his eyes widened. "_Dude!_" he exclaimed in his own inimitable style. "What _happened_?! Are you okay?!" The changeling took several steps towards David, who looked no doubt like he was about to pitch over dead onto the ground, but Raven grabbed his arm and pulled him back.

"No," she said deadpan, her other hand still cloaked in black energy, her voice as dry and deadly as the growl of a leopard, "don't go near him. He's with Slade."

David's mouth dropped, as did Beast Boy's, and the changeling turned back to Raven, blinking incredulously. "... what?" asked Beast Boy, faster than David could cough it out, but Raven's gaze didn't deviate, nor did she give any indication that they had mis-heard her. "Raven..." said Beast Boy carefully, almost gingerly, "... this... this is David. He's not with Slade, he's our friend. He's... he's hurt, we need to help him..."

"He's not our friend," said Raven urgently, her eyes fixed on David like guided missiles. "He never was. He's been part of this whole thing since the beginning!"

David wasn't sure if this was a nightmare or if he was actually dead, and this was the torture he was being made to undergo in Hell. Neither would have surprised him at this point. "I..." he managed to cough up weakly, "I'm not... I never..."

"I froze _time_," snapped Raven, her tone angry beyond words, angrier than David had ever heard it before, angry enough that even Beast Boy backed away from her. "I froze the _flow of time itself_. It worked on everything in the _universe_, except it didn't work on Slade, and it didn't work on you." She raised her other hand, encasing it too in black energy, even as she steadied herself to unleash it at a moment's notice. "So either you're some kind of _god_, or you're exactly like Slade."

David blinked, unable to process what was happening, unwilling to believe his own eyes. After everything that had occurred on this horrible day, this nightmare brought to life and enacted before his eyes was like the overture of a symphony of pain and shock that he had been listening to all night. He had been beaten nearly to death by someone he had thought was his friend, dragged himself back from the brink out of sheer stubornness, only to face _this_?

Thoughtlessly, he took a halting step forward, raising his empty hands, trying to come up with some kind of explanation. Raven wasn't having it. "I said stay _back_!" she yelled, and released a blast of eldritch energy from her hand. This one was aimed true, and slammed into David's chest and throat like a wrecking ball as he cringed and cried out and raised his hands in a useless defense against her magic.

And the magic failed.

The blast struck David full force, and blinked out of existence the very instant it did so, leaving not a trace of it behind. David, who had clenched his eyes shut and turned away, slowly cracked them open as he realized that he was not hurt (further), and blinking in confusion for a moment, looked up at Raven, who was staring at him as though unable to believe what she had just seen. Beast Boy too was staring, at both of them, as wonder followed upon wonder, and he did not know what to do. David did not know what to do either, and nor apparently did Raven, and they stood there and stared at one another, until finally David made another attempt to walk over to them, to explain somehow, to...

"_No!_" shouted Raven and there was genuine fear in her voice. Before Beast Boy or David could do anything, she backed up a pace and let fly her powers, the same way David had seen her unleash them on a hundred villains and criminals over the course of his months at the Tower. A barrage of black energy flew at him like a hailstorm turned sideways, and he cried out as the blasts struck him by the dozens, and yet when the smoke cleared, and her shots spent, not one single blast of hers had done so much as singe his uniform. Every single shot had dissolved to vapor the very instant it touched his shirt.

Slowly, David looked down at his blood-smeared uniform, and with his good hand, gently felt the wet fabric. No sign of injury or damage could he detect, at least none other than the ones that had previously been there. His addled mind was still trying to process what had just happened, refusing to accept that Raven, no matter how angry or scared she might be, no matter what evidence she might have thought she had found, could possibly have done what she appeared to have just done. She... she had...

He looked back up at her, standing forty paces away, her gaze blank and empty, like she was staring right through him at some monster behind, and a roiling, bitter anger boiled up from within him like a bilious poison. His face turned red, his _vision_ turned red, and with one swift movement he grabbed the baton still hanging from his belt and tore it from its connector, feeling it flare to life as the red flames encased it. He stepped forward, brandishing the baton like a flaming sword of vengeance, intending to bring it down and detonate the very ground beneath Raven's feet, to detonate _anything_, to retaliate somehow against yet another person he had thought a friend who had turned against him for no reason and sought to kill him as part of this hellacious day's events. Formless destruction he sought, out of pain and fear and rage and betrayal, and already he was forming the molecular patterns in his mind, as he stepped forward, and brought the baton down...

... and buckled.

A spear of white-hot pain impaled him, and his movement was cut off in mid-lash by a stifled cry, and his grip went limp, and the baton fell from his hand like a severed branch on a tree. He staggered forward a step or two, and fell to his knees, clutching his stomach, his face contorted in pain, and then pitched over onto his side, landing in a fetal position, unable to move so much as another foot.

And now Beast Boy acted. The changeling rushed forward even as Raven shouted for him not to, and by the time David had landed, Beast Boy was right there, bent over him on one knee, gently rolling him over onto his back on the street as he moaned softly. "Dude..." he said softly, in a tone of almost wonder, at the terrible sight before him, and it took him several moments to snap back out of it. "You're... you're gonna be okay," he said, "don't worry about it. We're gonna get you back to the Tower and get you fixed up, okay? It's no big deal."

Beast Boy was a terrible liar, as always. Even in his semi-delirious state, David knew that Beast Boy had no idea what to do, and was just saying that to make it all sound better. The changeling did not dwell however on the lies he had told, and turned his head back to Raven. "Raven, hurry up, he needs help."

Raven approached cautiously, her hands still sheathed in darkness, and she knelt down opposite Beast Boy as though preparing to handle a poisonous snake. "Keep the baton away from him," she instructed Beast Boy as she tried to determine what to do now.

Beast Boy might have laughed had the situation not been so serious. "Raven, stop worrying about what he's gonna do! He needs help!"

"He's Slade's partner," said Raven, even as a blue glow began to replace the blackness around her hands, "and he can hurt us. Keep the baton _away_ from him." Beast Boy grabbed the baton and hooked it to his own belt, even as Raven lightly put her hand on David's chest, and tried to calm her powers enough to start the healing process. "This is crazy," she said. "Slade will be after us soon, and he's immune to my magic, we already proved that."

"But... I mean you've healed him before, haven't you?" protested Beast Boy. "He wasn't immune then, was he? Just try it. He could die..."

"I _am_ trying, shut up!"

David moaned softly as Raven pumped the energy from her healing spell into his body, seeking out the most dangerous damage and repairing it as best she could. To her magical eye, David looked like he'd been pulverized by a rock crusher, his ribs shattered, his organs punctured, blood pooling within his abdominal and chest cavities. She dared not try to envision what could possibly have happened to him. She didn't have time.

Even had she wanted to, she could not possibly have repaired all of this damage in a minute, nor in an hour, nor even in a week. She did instead the best she could, staunching the bleeding and forcing the pooled blood back into his arteries, repairing the most obvious damage to his lungs and spine, and re-aligning the bones in his fractured arm. The psychokinetic or whatever the hell he was shuddered several times, and then relaxed as his breathing became more regular and less congested, and he slowly opened his eyes back up, pain still written on his face, but not as overtly as before.

"Dude," said Beast Boy, a note of relief in his voice. "What happened to you?"

"Did Slade get mad that you hadn't killed us all yet?" asked Raven with venom in her voice. "Or was this from some other convenient accident?"

"Raven, c'mon!" said Beast Boy. "If he was Slade's apprentice, why would Slade beat him up like this?" asked Beast Boy.

"He was hurting Terra while she was working for him, remember?!" snapped Raven back.

"Terra..." whispered David semi-coherently.

"Yes, _Terra_," said Raven savagely, and the ground beneath them quivered with the force of her anger. "I told you that if I found out you were lying to us, it would be the last thing you ever did."

"I... I _never_ lied..." objected David weakly.

"You lied about _everything_!" shouted Raven. "You lied to us and tried to kill us, and now you're working with Slade!"

"Raven!" yelled Beast Boy desperately, afraid she was about to pronounce some kind of summary judgment here and now. "This is crazy, even if he _was_ working for Slade, why would Slade send David here like this? Is he supposed to bleed on us or something?"

"Actually, he's just here to slow you down, and give me a chance to catch up and deliver my message."

Raven and Beast Boy stared at one another for a moment, their faces fading to horror, before turning their heads to look down the street.

Slade stood in the intersection, where moments ago no person had been. His arms were crossed as he surveyed the three teens with equanimity.

"Slade..." said Beast Boy as he stood back up. Raven remained crouched, and David lifted his head weakly to see who was talking, but Slade reacted to none of them, slowly walking towards the three of them, as though he was on a mere afternoon stroll.

"I hope I'm not interrupting anything," said Slade. "You were saying something about the last thing he does?"

"It's gonna be the last thing _you_ do, if you come any closer!" insisted Beast Boy.

"Changeling, you have no conception of what you are dealing with here. I would advise you to run, and leave Raven and I alone with my new apprentice."

Raven's eyes widened. "Apprentice?"

"Isn't it obvious?" said Slade. "Young Mr. Foster here has been working with me for many months in preparation for this. Keeping tabs on all of you, making sure that everything was ready. But now the hour has arrived, and I'm afraid I have no more use for him."

David could barely believe what he was hearing. "You..." he managed to stammer, "you're a... a liar!"

"You've been smoked out, Devastator," said Slade in a preternaturally-calm tone. "Have the dignity to admit it and take your punishment like an adult, rather than a foolish child. I must say, I'm rather disappointed with you. I would have liked to see you maintain your cover all the way through to the end."

"That's _enough_!" shouted Beast Boy in a passable imitation of Robin. "I dunno how Terra didn't kill you, but you leave Raven and the rest of us alone, and get out of here, or I'll finish what she started!"

Slade merely chuckled, and resumed walking towards Raven, and Beast Boy clenched his fists and shifted into the form of a Rhinoceros. With a loud roar, he charged full-speed towards Slade, who made no attempt to evade the coming impact, walking on without a care in the world, moments before Beast Boy hit him at thirty five miles per hour with three tons of solid mass. A blink-of-an-eye later, Beast Boy was laying on his side next to an overturned car, having bounced off of Slade like a rubber ball and crashed into the vehicle. He groaned softly as though hung-over, and Slade ignored him.

Raven now stood up as Slade advanced towards her, and with a wave of her hand she tore parking meters and mailboxes from the ground and flung them at him like grenades. The void-shrouded objects all hit home, but none of them made the slightest impact, not even when Raven threw a parked car at the approaching supervillain.

"Skies will burn," said Slade as Raven tore a sewer pipe from the ground and wrapped it around him, only to have him shatter it with a mere flick of his arm. "Flesh will become stone. The sun will set on your world, never to rise again." The unstoppable supervillain advanced further, and David could do no more than watch, barely able to lift his head. Raven too seemed to not know what to do, and she hesitated as he advanced, letting him get too close, when suddenly he shot forward and grabbed her upper arms with both hands. Raven cringed and writhed as though being electrocuted, and an instant later, Slade let her go, and she fell back onto the ground, the fabric over her upper arms having been incinerated, revealing two red brands on her upper arms, which she immediately clutched, as though they burned her.

"Time won't wait forever," said Slade, staring down at Raven, now barely five feet from David, "You can't run away from who you are."

Raven turned her head back to Slade, sneering at him as she spat the words at him like a challenge.

"I can try."

The ground heaved, and a pair of enormous chunks of asphalt folded up around Slade like the petals of a flower, smashing him to (apparent) jelly between two slabs of road and rock. Instantly she was back on her feet, racing over to Beast Boy, who was only now starting to get back up to his feet, having resumed human form. "I'm okay..." he said as Raven quickly helped him up. "Is he..."

"No," she said quickly. "We have to get out of here."

For a second, David thought that they were about to leave him here on the street, but no sooner had Beast Boy nodded to Raven than he ran over to David and grabbed his good arm, helping him weakly to his feet, and this time at least, Raven made no move to hinder him. "Can you walk?" asked Beast Boy, and David had to reply that he didn't know, but Beast Boy took most of the weight, and Raven hurried along on his other side in case he slipped, though her furtive glances were filled with the same malice and anger she had been displaying when she shot him with her powers moments ago. He guessed that he had received only a temporary reprieve, as they made their way towards a large church or cathedral that was sitting at the end of the street ahead.

And so it proved.

They had no sooner entered the church, and Beast Boy had barred the entrance, than Raven shoved David roughly down into one of the pews, towering over him like a monster from some fairy tale. Her question was a demand, quick, to the point, and held only barely in check.

"Are you working for Slade?"

David coughed several times, propping himself up on his elbow as he gazed up at Raven. "No..." he croaked. "I've... I've never seen... seen him before..."

Raven was unsatisfied.

Like a diving falcon, she reached down and grabbed David by his collar, practically hoisting him out of the pew she had just moments ago shoved him into. Shoving him up against a pillar, she pinned him against the wall with one hand as her other hand drew back, flaring with energy.

"Are you _working for Slade_?!"

"I... I _told_ you already, a hundred times! I'm not... not... working for Slade or anyone else!" There were tears in his eyes as he insisted on this, but Raven did not release him.

"Why should I believe you?!" she demanded. "_Why?!_ Everything you do, everything you _are_, points to you being a traitor! _Everything!_"

"That's why you should believe him."

Beast Boy's remark was calm, a complete 180 from everything else being said, and the contrast was such that both David and Raven turned to look at him. The changeling was standing by the door, watching Raven with worry in his eyes, his gloved hands cupped together nervously.

"Everything's all weird, and doesn't make any sense, right?" asked Beast Boy. "So if he was a traitor, wouldn't Slade want to make it look like he wasn't? How come he'd let there be all this stuff that makes us think he's a traitor?"

Raven was so astonished at the fact that Beast Boy was not reacting to this by shouting or waving his hands, but by trying to be calm, that she completely forgot to remind him that his skill at strategy and riddle-solving was barely that of a house plant's. She turned slowly back to David, whom she still had pinned to the column, and her look was filled with indecision and fear. "He wasn't frozen in time, and my powers don't work on him, just like Slade. His powers don't work like anything else in the world..."

"But..." interjected Beast Boy, "but I thought... you said that you..."

"I _know_ what I said. They don't! You don't know what I've seen, okay, they _don't_. Nobody else in the world has powers like his. Not _ever_. And sometimes the bad guys seem to want to kill him, and sometimes they seem to want to keep him with the rest of us! He was the only one who knew that we were gonna stop in Yosemete that time we got attacked except the five of us, he's got no records, nothing to corroborate his story with, and today he shows up by surprise with the same powers that Slade has, at the same time that Slade does, and Slade _himself_ tells us he's his apprentice! Can you explain any of that?! _Any_ of it?!"

Tears of fear and pain and other things besides ran down David's face, but he forced his voice to remain as calm as it could. "You... know I can't..." he said carefully. "You know I can't explain... any of it."

"So _why should I believe you?!_" screamed Raven, and the windows of the church rattled and cracked with the power of her unbridled emotions. "Why should I believe you're not working for Slade?!"

David forced himself to stare her in the eyes. "Because I'm _not._"

For a few seconds, none of the three of them moved, and then slowly, carefully, with rigid control of every muscle lest she allow some explosion to happen, Raven withdrew her hand, and David slid down the column onto the floor, and seemed to deflate. Raven stepped back, and collapsed into one of the pews, looking drained of all energy, and moments later, Beast Boy was at her side, sitting down next to her without a word, staring at her with worry in his eyes. She did not protest. She barely even noticed.

"... Raven?"

"Why can't this day just be over...?"

"What... what is today?" asked Beast Boy. "It can't just be your birthday. This didn't happen last year."

"It's not," said Raven in a hollow voice drained of feeling. "It's... a special birthday. It's the day the prophecy starts to come true."

"Prophecy?" Beast Boy glanced quizzically at David, who could only shake his head in ignorance, as ever.

Raven nodded slowly. "The prophecy of my birth. This was all foretold. It's all written down, what's going to happen."

The question was begged, and Beast Boy asked it. "What's going to happen?"

Raven lowered her head. "Something bad. Something very bad."

There was a hollow knock at the door.

Instantly, Raven was on her feet, and so was Beast Boy, both turned around to face the entrance to the church. Something hit the wooden doors and they shook despite the bar Beast Boy had laid across it. David tried to emulate the others, but succeeded only in getting partway up before his strength gave out, and he fell back to the ground. Beast Boy and Raven looked at one another fearfully, and Beast Boy asked the question foremost on everyone's mind.

"What do we do now?"

"I... I don't know..." said Raven, and it was obvious that she did not, for she kept glancing back at David, who had made another attempt to rise, with the same result as the first.

"We... we can't just leave him here," said Beast Boy, apparently worried that Raven was considering doing just that, "even if we think he _is_ working for Slade, which he's not."

Raven simply nodded slowly. "No," she said, "we cant. And we can't take him with us. He'd slow us down too much, and Slade would catch us."

There was something altogether unsettling about the way Raven had said that, but as another blow struck the church's doors, Raven crouched down in front of David, who watched her apprehensively, perceiving a threat here, but not seeing it.

"Raven..." he said, with a note of desperation to his voice, "I'm... I'm not... I'm not working for Slade."

"Maybe you're not, and maybe you are," she said. "But we have to do something."

"What... what are you gonna do?" asked Beast Boy, now looking very worried himself.

Raven's hand encased itself in magical energy once more. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, and though David couldn't be at all sure, he was fairly certain he saw her lips moving, almost as though she was whispering a prayer.

"This,"

She reached out all of a sudden as quick as a mongoose, and grabbed David by the wrist, releasing all the energy of one of her most powerful spells into him at once, and as Beast Boy watched in mixed astonishment and horror, David threw his head back and opened his mouth and screamed...

**O-O-O  
**

The door shattered, flying off its hinges and into a million pieces that were all swiftly consumed by the tongues of flame that coursed about the entrance to the church, and then, with a gait like a conquering hero, Slade strode in. Beast Boy and Raven stood in the aisles of the church, halfway between him and the altar, facing him down, fear clouding their gazes, but holding their ground like western gunfighters. Slade allowed himself a smirk as he stepped into the church proper. "An odd venue, don't you think?" he commented as he walked in. "It's not like either of you are particularly welcome in one of these, now is it?"

Neither teen responded, and he shrugged. "I see you decided to dispose of my latest apprentice though." He sighed theatrically. "And here I thought Titans didn't kill..."

The reply did not come from either Beast Boy or Raven. It came from behind, from the tiny alcove in the wall that was completely invisible from the doorway, but that out of the corner of Slade's eye, could now be seen to hold a flickering red light.

"Guess again..."

And then the floor exploded.

The stone floor of the church blew up like a land mine had been planted, strong enough to toss Slade into the air like a rag doll, and the instant it did, Raven thew back her cloak and raised her arms. "Azarath, Metrion _Zinthos!_" she shouted, and at her command, the entire altar was ripped from its moorings and hurled into Slade in mid-air, the stone shattering like glass against his body and flinging him into the back wall. Beast Boy, instantly assuming the form of a snorting bull, charged after Slade, slamming into him at top speed as he landed with both horns.

It did not work.

Slade roared as he grabbed the bull by the horns, literally, and threw Beast Boy to the side with as little force as he would use to throw a frisbee. He rounded on Raven and lunged towards her, but one of the columns next to him was snapped in half by a shaped charge blast, and fell, breaking over his head as it did so, and while it did not stop Slade, he did come to a halt as he turned to face the agent of that blast.

David stood at the entrance to the alcove, his baton held in hand, blood soaking his clothes and daubed all over his face, and yet he was standing, and wielding his baton, and made no show of being broken and half-dead. He stared at Slade like he was staring at the devil himself, and both his fists were clenched as tightly as they could be, one over the baton's handle, one over nothing at all.

"That was very stupid," said Slade.

"Nobody asked you," replied David.

Slade threw both hands out at David, who dove to the side just in time to avoid being incinerated by the snakelike flames that he emitted from both palms. As David hit the ground and rolled, he brought his baton around and sliced the air with it, firing several bricks out of the wall behind him at Slade like miniature cannonballs. The bricks shattered against his armored hide, but they distracted him long enough for Raven to raise a candlestick from the ground and stab it into Slade's back like a spear, hard enough to crush it flat, and yet no mark was left on Slade's person, and he batted the crushed candlestick aside with a contemptuous slap.

"You're making this _far_ harder than it has to be."

"That's what we do," came the reply from Beast Boy.

Beast Boy smashed into Slade from the side in the form of a Tyrannosaur, but Slade, as before, failed to budge, and turned around with a roundhouse kick that send the massive dinosaur flying into and through the wall of the church. Raven tried to envelop him in her black tendrils, but he shredded them as though they were paper, and replied by sending a blast of fire too large to dodge straight at her, flinging her like a toy back into the place where the altar had once stood. David tried to knock a piece of the roof down onto Slade's head, but Slade simply spun about and parried the falling debris by kicking it straight at David like a soccer player. The debris hit him right in the solar plexus, and he went down, gasping for air.

"This sort of thing never gets old."

Beast Boy had by now crawled his way back into the church, and Raven and David slowly got back to their feet, but Slade made no move, merely smirking as they regrouped at the back of the church as best they could.

"I assure you," said Slade, "there is nothing you or any of your little friends can do to stop this message. It would be much simpler to give up."

"We're _never_ giving up to you!" replied Beast Boy defiantly, but all it produced from Slade was a cold smile.

"I was rather hoping you'd say that."

With a shout that transformed into a roar, Beast Boy shifted into an Ankylosaurus, spinning around as the other two ducked and swinging his club-tail into Slade as hard as he could. This blow had an effect, knocking Slade back into the wall next to the door. No sooner had that happened than Raven tore up a section of the floor the size of a safe with her powers, and hurled it into Slade, before ripping up another section and hurling that as well. Beast Boy meanwhile shifted from dinosaur to gorilla, and began snatching up everything within reach to throw alongside Raven. David, for his part, threw nothing, but stood beside them both with his baton flaring, and as each object landed, he blew it to pieces directly on top of Slade, hitting him again and again and again and again, dozens of blows and blasts, raining down upon Slade in an unending hail. And then finally, after there was nothing left to throw at Slade, and after Raven had torn up all of the floor she could, David finished by bisecting two more column, and bringing an entire corner of the building crashing down on top of Slade's motionless form.

All three Titans, exhausted and beaten, watched as the dust began to clear, revealing a mountain of loose debris and shrapnel laying atop the place Slade had stood moments ago. All three held their breath, afraid that saying a word or even exhaling would be rewarded with Slade returning to life once more.

They were wrong. It took nothing to do that.

The mountain of debris exploded on its own accord, knocking all three of them down, and by the time they stood back up, coughing and peering through the smoke, Slade was visible, standing with his arms crossed, his frame and figure completely unscathed by any of the blasts or assaults he had been subjected to. He twisted his neck around a bit, causing the sounds of vertebrae cracking to resonate throughout the church, and the he raised his hands, and the entire church exploded into fire.

Dvid felt himself being knocked off his feel, and saw the others vanish behind curtains of flame. He landed hard on the floor of the church, and felt flames all around him, though he did not burn. He staggered back up, and saw Slade advancing towards something unseen, and he raised his baton once more to blow the ground out from under him, but suddenly Slade melted into orange smoke, and as David stood there blinking, reappeared right behind David, and grabbed him, spun him around, and lifted him with one hand into the air by his throat.

"You _complete fool_" snarled Slade, his voice seething in anger all of a sudden, a total contrast to his calm, almost bored tone of before. "You have _no_ idea what you've done."

David hit at Slade's arm with his baton to no avail, as Slade slammed him into the wall hard enough to knock the breath out of him.

"You had the chance to spare them all such grief. All you needed to do was to die. But you refused, and now you've doomed them all."

So unexpected was this that David could do little more than gawk up at Slade. "What are... what are you talking about?"

Slade seemed disinclined to explain. Instead he raised his hands and fire danced through the air, and a moment later, a massive pile of burning timbers and smashed rubble fell out of the ceiling and landed on top of David, instantly burying him beneath half a ton of material. Crushed, broken anew, and unable to breathe, David could do nothing but watch as Slade bent down and stared him in the eye.

"You will live to regret living..." he said, "... Devastator."

Carefully, Slade brushed the most extraneous debris away from David's head and shoulders, and then stood back up, turned and walked away, leaving David still pinned to the ground, but very much alive. And before he had a chance to figure out why Slade had done _that_, the spell Raven had applied began to wear off, and he passed out.

**O-O-O**

Beast Boy groaned and rubbed his head as he sat up in front of the pile of debris Slade had nearly crushed him with. "Dude..." he said carefully, "how long was I out?"

Nobody answered him.

His memory flashed back to what had happened just before Slade had knocked him out. He remembered Raven shouting his name, and being unable to answer, and then a wall of fire cutting him off from everything else, and then... blackness.

He had woken up about five or six minutes before, and found himself pinned to the ground by a pile of debris. Shifting into an earthworm had enabled him to work his way free, and now he was sitting on the floor of the crushed and ruined church. He carefully got up, looking around, trying to find where Raven and David and Slade had gone to.

The gigantic hole melted in the back of the church seemed like a good indication.

He was about to storm out of the church when a soft moan crossed his ears, and he turned, and moved around a fallen column, and saw...

"David!". He raced over to the pile of detritus that David was buried beneath. By some miracle, only David's head and shoulders had not been crushed under the pile, and a quick check revealed that the teen was still alive, though not by a vast amount. He shifted into a gorilla and threw the debris off of David by the armful, and then back into a human so as to pull David out of the debris field as gently as he could. He was unconscious, which was probably a mercy, but in his sleep he was muttering words to himself, over and over again.

"I didn't know..."

Beast Boy didn't know what to make of that, and so made nothing of it, and reached instead for his communicator, and then remembered that not only had it gotten smashed during the fight with Slade, but the others were probably still frozen in time. He reminded himself to remind himself to get...

There was a scream.

Beast Boy's head shot up as he heard the scream, for though he had barely ever heard that voice screaming before, he knew whose it was, and he was halfway to his feet before he remembered that he had to look after David, who was _very_ badly injured. That at least was what Robin would have said. He couldn't after all just leave David lying there, not when there was a risk of...

Another scream, just as bloodchilling as the first, and twice as intense. Beast Boy stared out at the slagged hole in the church, and looked back down at David, and knew instantly that he was about to do exactly the wrong thing, and knew also that he had no choice.

"I'm... sorry dude. I'll... I'll be back as soon as I can. Don't... don't go anywhere."

And with that, Beast Boy jumped to his feet, transformed into a hawk, and flew out of the hole towards the direction of the scream, leaving David lying unconscious on the ground, whispering some anguished confession over and over to himself.

"I didn't know..." he said, "... I didn't know it was her..."

**O-O-O**

Beast Boy however did not hear this, for he was racing as fast as his wings could carry him towards a large tower near the center of town, atop which was a revolving restaurant, which he gauged, based on the sound, to be the source of the screams. He did not need to get too close before he realized he was right, and his heart nearly froze.

Raven and Slade were there, standing atop the restaurant near the very edge of its roof, and Beast Boy could scarcely believe his eyes. Raven's leotard had practically disintegrated as if by some terrible force, the remaining scraps of cloth hanging off her body like rags. Her eyes were closed, and her body limp, and Slade was holding her up by her shoulders, leaning over and whispering something to her. She made no move to shake him off or escape or otherwise to move at all, asleep or drugged or unconscious, he could not tell. Red runes covered her exposed skin from her feet to her forehead and down both arms, and her violet hair was suddenly waist-length, rather than her usual shoulder-length. How all this had come to pass, Beast Boy did not know, but he flew towards her with every ounce of speed he could muster, unsure of what at all he would do when he got there, turn into an elephant perhaps and throw Slade off the roof, but he knew he had to do _something_, right now, or else...

Slade looked up with one eye, and he might or might not have seen Beast Boy, but whatever his cause, he released Raven from his grasp, and Beast Boy's heart froze as the sorceress fall limply off the restaurant's roof and plummeted towards the ground below.

Beast Boy dove.

He dove like a missile in re-entry, his wings beating at the air to push himself faster than gravity would allow, paying no heed to the looming ground below him. His size expanded tenfold, transforming into a giant-sized eagle, and even as he dove at more than 130 feet per second, he reached out with both talons, and very very lightly grabbed Raven's limp body by her shoulders, before pulling up as hard as he could. With absolutely no room to spare, he managed to arrest his dive and drop Raven lightly onto a nearby roof, setting down himself right next to her, and resuming human form.

He scrambled over to Raven, afraid for a moment that he'd been too late, and that Slade had dropped a dead body off the roof, but when he reached her, he saw that she was breathing at least, and he grabbed her and pulled her towards him, laying her head and shoulders in his lap, and trying to think of what he should do now. "Raven?" he asked, almost breathlessly. "Raven, can you hear me? It's... me. C'mon Rae, please... wake up... Raven?"

He shook her gently, and to his surprise, she woke.

She took a sharp breath, and her eyes slowly cracked open and she moaned softly blinked a few times, trying to resolve the image before her. "B... Beast... Boy?" she asked weakly, and just hearing her say his name was enough to take a thousand-pound load off of his chest, and he smiled.

"Hey," he said gently. "It's okay. Slade's... gone." He glanced up at the roof to confirm this, and there was indeed no sign of invulnerable supervillain to be seen. He looked back down at her with relief. "He's gone. You're okay now... sort of." Raven was in a state of what might be termed "mild undress", but there was nothing for that, and she seemed to be disinclined, for once, from blasting him to ash for the presumption of touching her. Indeed, she slowly sat up, still groggy from whatever in the world Slade had done to her (he refused to consider the possibilities), and shook her head, and looked around, and only then seemed to really notice he was there. "Beast Boy?" she asked, as though surprised to see him, and he rubbed the back of his head and smiled, and was about to make up some kind of explanation when she hugged him.

She actually hugged him. Out of the blue, out of nowhere, she wrapped her arms around his neck and buried her face in his shoulder and she cried, cried like there were tears pent up from five years of sorrow inside her, which might well have been the case. They were both still sitting on the rooftop, and she was shaking, shaking like a leaf in the wind, like she was scared and frightened and other terms which meant the same thing, and didn't know what else to do. And surprised as he was, he wasn't so surprised that he didn't remember to hug her back, gently as he could of course, because she was in a bad state, and he knew it, and knew that she would get over it if given time because she was _Raven_ after all. And right then he was torn between an intense desire to find Slade and claw his guts out, and one no less intense to just sit here and gently hold Raven. And with a choice like that, there really was no choice.

It was only a few minutes before Raven ran dry, and slowly sat back up, wiping her face with the back of her hand, and trying as much as she could to appear once more collected and calm, and impermeable. He didn't say anything, mostly because he knew that opening his stupid mouth was probably the exact worst thing to do, and yet finally as he stood up and helped her to her feet, he did manage just one small phrase.

"Let's all go home."

**O-O-O**

Everything hurt.

The pain was muted and dulled, but it was still there, waiting for the painkillers to wear off so as to lay claim to him once more. For the moment though, David didn't much care. The novel feelings of _not_ being covered in blood, _not_ feeling his organs leaking into one another, _not_ bleeding to death internally, all these were fascinating and new, and he was very much enjoying them as he lay there, half asleep and half awake, with the soft sound of heart rate monitors and breath machines humming about. It was getting to be almost normal.

"You missed the party."

David opened his eyes, slowly, and found that one of them was nearly swollen shut. He turned his head weakly, and found, rather to his surprise, that his ears had not deceived him, and that Raven had spoken just a moment ago, floating in cross-legged position fairly near to his bed, a crisp new uniform on, and her shoulder-length hair falling behind her ears.

"Party?" he whispered.

"Beast Boy saved my life," she said, as though this were a perfectly normal thing (which it might have been). "I thought the least I could do was let him have his party."

David coughed softly and raised his head a bit. "I thought... it was... your... party..."

"I don't have parties."

He nodded quietly, and then changed the subject with a certain degree of abruptness.

"What.. happened?"

"I'm not sure yet," said Raven, "a lot of things, I think." There was a tone behind her voice that was not at all calm, but merely a tone. She did not let it disturb her appearance, as ever.

"So... when were you going to tell us that Terra was the one that nearly beat you to death?" asked Raven.

David's eyes flew open, and he turned his head sharply enough for his neck to ache. Raven shook her head. "Relax. It's all right."

"How... how did you..."

"I've seen injuries like these before," she said simply. "And you've spent the last two hours muttering over and over how you 'didn't know it was her'. I put two and two together."

David took a long slow breath and released it. "I... I didn't know..."

"I know," said Raven.

"I couldn't..." he stirred slightly and bit back the pain it caused. "I couldn't... I couldn't beat... she was too powerful..."

"She beat me too once. I know. Don't worry about it. You're pretty badly hurt, but I think you'll be okay."

He said nothing for a moment or two, and when he did speak, it was with a soft sigh.

"I'm sorry... about everything that happened."

"No," she said, and he cracked an eye back open and looked over at her. "No, _I_'m sorry. I was... afraid... of everything that was happening. I shouldn't... I shouldn't have done what I did. I'm sorry, David. I'm... actually really sorry."

Her tone was calm, but there was a sincerity to those words apparent to any listener, and certainly to him, and he smiled. "Well... you can just... make it... make it up to me by.. saving my life again, I guess."

She smirked. "I already owe you one of those from what you did in the church."

He shook his head and sighed. "I couldn't stop Slade either," he said. "I couldn't stop any of it."

"You tried," she replied. "Even though I'd called you a traitor and threatened to kill you, you still tried. That was more than I deserved right then."

Another smile crossed his face. "Less than I owe you though. All of you. But... hang on. Does... that mean you... you don't think I'm part of this whole plot?"

"No," she replied, "you're definitely part of this plot. But I don't think you're a traitor, and I don't think you're working for Slade."

"But then... how am I..."

"You're a part of it just like I am. Everything points to it. Your powers, your immunities, the fact that you didn't get frozen in time. You say you don't know anything about it all, and I believe you, but there's _something_ causing it, and it has something to do with me, and with Slade, and with whoever's trying to kill you, if it isn't Slade.

He nodded slowly. "So you don't think I'm a traitor?"

"I just said I didn't."

"But... you did, before, right?

She did not answer immediately.

"What... made you change your mind?" he asked carefully.

"Nothing did," came the reply. "Nothing specific at least."

"But... you gave me... that... that spell. The one that healed me for a little while..."

Raven sighed. "It might have been more dangerous, but... I had to make a choice if you were for real or not. And I decided I'd rather be wrong about you being our friend, than decide you weren't one, and then find out you had been."

David didn't reply with words, but gradually drew his hand out from under the covers. "So then... you think... friends?"

She smirked, and lightly took his hand, and shook it. "Friends."

David laid back again, feeling a bit more relaxed at least. Still there was something else apparently on Raven's mind.

"Um... David..."

"Yeah?"

"About Terra..."

"What about her?"

"... this is... gonna sound strange..."

"What?"

"I'm the only one who knows so far. You're gonna have to tell Robin, he needs to know these things."

"... but?"

"But... I was hoping you'd consider... not telling Beast Boy."

David blinked. "... what?"

"I know... I know... but..." Raven sighed. "You... you don't know what this is gonna do to him, to know that she's back. You weren't here for the first time."

"Raven, I... I can't... _not_ tell Beast Boy."

"You... can, actually. He doesn't watch the news if we don't shove it in his face, he wouldn't find out by himself. Look... I know... it doesn't sound like a good plan, but... you have no idea what it's gonna be like. You have no idea what she did to him."

"And... if they use it to sneak up on him or something? Or to trap him?"

"How would they do that?"

"I didn't know who Terra was, and they did it to me, didn't they?"

Raven sighed, and shook her head. "He'll tear the city apart looking for her."

"Well," replied David, "for... for her sake, she'd better hope he finds her... before I do."

There was something in his tone that pricked her. "What do you mean?"

David's voice was perfectly calm, albeit weak. "I mean... if I see her again... I'm... I'm gonna kill her."

She stared at him for a few moments.

"You know we don't do that, right?"

Slowly he turned his head back to face her. "Is... that why you tried to crush Slade between two halves of the street?"

She did not reply.

"Still... I... I'd like you to..."

"I'll think about it."

It would have to do.

There was the sound of footsteps approaching, and a few seconds later, Beast Boy entered the medical bay. "Hey uh, Raven?" he said, "Rob said I should come down and... oh sweet! He's awake!" Beast Boy bounded over to the side of the bed. "Hey dude! How you feelin'?"

David smiled and suppressed a laugh. It hurt too much. "I've been better... I think."

Raven shook her head. "I'm going to bed. Wake me up if you need me down here." She did not include her usual caveats for what constituted a 'need'. It had been a long night.

David watched her disappear off into the darkness and heard her soft footsteps as she left, and only after she was out of earshot, that he stopped Beast Boy in the middle of his round of questions as to whether or not David needed anything whatsoever.

"Beast Boy..." he said, and Beast Boy caught the tone of the words, and stopped talking.

"Yeah?"

David took a deep breath and let it out slowly, nervously. "There's... something I've gotta tell you..."

And in the stairwell next to the garage/medical bay, Raven lowered her head, and pulled her knees up to her chin as she sat, and listened quietly as David told Beast Boy a story about a girl named 'Carrie', and as she was listening very, very intently, she was fairly certain she could hear the exact moment when Beast Boy's heart froze.

Only she didn't know that this was the second time tonight that it had done so.

* * *


	24. The Ties that Bind

**Disclaimer:** I do not, as always, own the Teen Titans. I'm interested in buying them though.

**Author's Note:** I love (read: hate) how my schedule for finishing a chapter never bears any resemblance to when the chapter actually gets finished. I've stopped marveling on this fact, and have simply decided to do what I can for each chapter in turn. My apologies for all those whom I made to wait, once again. I will try to do better next time.

This chapter is a bit of a dichotomy. There are some elements of it I am not happy with at all. There are other elements that (for a change) I quite like. I would imagine which elements are which will become abundantly clear as you read the chapter itself. I must say that this type of chapter is... not my forte, to say the least, but one improves in skill only through practice, and so I have given it the best try I can manage. With luck, some at least of the result will be to your liking, though either way, I beg and plead and _pray_ that you will leave me a review. I cannot improve the quality of this story without feedback, and every word is as valuable as the Hope Diamond in this endeavor. I sincerely hope you overlook what shortcomings I have presented in this chapter, and that you will enjoy the finished product, and if you do not, well, I shall try to do better for Chapter 25.

Thank you all once again, and may you find success, as always, in every endeavor.

* * *

**Chapter 24: The Ties that Bind**

_  
"The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices  
Make instruments to plague us:  
The dark and vicious place where thee he got  
Cost him his eyes.  
Thou hast spoken right, 'tis true;  
The wheel is come full circle: I am here."_

- William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act V, Scene 3

**O-O-O**

Raven was certain of one thing. The tower shouldn't have been this quiet.

The Tower was oppressively silent, like a living organism not daring to breathe, the very machines that surrounded her idling or going about their business with the barest minimum of noise. The digital clock on the wall even denied her the rhythm of its ticking, and the double-paned, shatter-proof glass of the common room windows blocked out the barest peep of the sounds from outside. She had a book with her, and a mug of tea, but she did not even pretend to be interested in either, the book laying unopened on the table in front of her, the tea cold and ignored. All too familiar.

Two weeks had passed since Slade and Terra had made their dramatic joint return-from-the-dead, setting to their usual business of beating the Titans half to death as though making up for lost time. Once again, the Titans had gotten off lucky, in a sense. Despite Slade and Terra's best efforts, all of them were still alive, though the margins had been more uncomfortably close for some than for others, and despite wild speculations by the media to the contrary, neither Slade nor Terra had shown so much as a hair of themselves since the event.

It should have been something of a relief that they had faded back into the darkness from whence they had come, a weight off Raven's mind, a sense that perhaps there had been a reprieve. It was not.

"This will come to pass. I will make sure of it."

The voice haunted her dreams, resonating down the corridors of her memory night after endless night. Meditation, mental exercise, even the prayers to Azar she had learned as a child did no good, for every evening he was waiting for her, unblemished, unstoppable, unrelenting in his pursuit. Every night she fought Slade anew in her dreams, and every night she lost, borne down by the weight of prophecy and damnation, until inevitably Slade's cold and iron-clad hands would grab her by the shoulders, and his emotionless mask of a face would stare her in the eye, and he would whisper to her the same words yet again.

"You're going to destroy the world. It's written all over your face."

Every night she woke up screaming.

Raven didn't sleep much to begin with. A hybrid of demon and human, only half of her even required it. For the other half, meditation was just as good. Often enough she would be up before any of the others, even Robin, whose nocturnal habits were as deeply ingrained as his mentor's. Still, there was only so much she could do with meditation alone, and no matter what she tried, every night Slade was waiting for her again, waiting to win and announce his message and bring her one more day closer to the end of the world. Small wonder that she had started to dread going to sleep, like a small child frightened of monsters under the bed. The only difference was where her monsters were located... and what they wanted.

For the fifth time this afternoon, Raven tried to pick up her book where she had left it off. For the fifth time this afternoon, she failed. The words would not sink in, for her mind was elsewhere, and the terrible stillness of the air around her only made it worse. For all the time she spent begging and praying and practically _screaming_ for a bit of quiet around the Tower, the few rare times she ever received it were worse than the most annoying noise. In her current state, she just couldn't concentrate, not on the book, not on meditation, not on anything.

Not even on Slade.

A soft 'thud' shook through the tower from deep below her, barely discernible even in the midst of the silence. Five or six seconds passed, and then another one made the tea in her mug quiver, like a construction equipment being operated far away. Briefly she hesitated, wondering if this might be yet another emergency to respond to, but as the impacts (or whatever they were) settled down into a more regular rhythm, she simply sighed softly in mild annoyance, and stood up from the couch, leaving her mug and book where they sat. There were three other people in the Tower at present, and she certainly didn't have to go running off to investigate every weird noise, but right now she needed _something_ to do, if only to clear her head. If only to stop her from thinking about...

She walked down the hall towards the elevator, feeling the near-silent tremors of whatever was making the sound through the metal floor beneath her feet. Already she was fairly sure she knew what was their cause, and who, but instead of taking her communicator and calling the person in question, she rode the elevator down to the training level near the base of the Tower, the sounds growing stronger as she approached them. She exited the elevator, and moved straight ahead towards the training room, punching in a keypad combination to override the seal on the door, and letting it slide open.

The training room was largely empty, the extraneous equipment that the various Titans used to test themselves against withdrawn into the walls or the floor. The only objects in the room were a series of large stone blocks, sitting lined against the far wall, and a single small computer terminal and chair extended against the wall. The floor was covered in gravel and bits of rock, scattered around randomly like a handful of sand cast over a table. And in the center of all of it stood a small figure in a bright red-orange suit, holding a metal baton that was presently on fire, or at least appeared to be. He stood still, like a conductor preparing to lead an orchestra, and then with a sudden movement, he swung the baton around as though swinging a polo mallet, and one of the rocks burst like a firecracker, showering bits of debris all over the room, rattling and rolling like a rainmaker until they finally lay still.

"Shouldn't you be in bed?"

David jumped, and turned around rapidly enough that he nearly lost his balance on the debris-covered floor, staggering and tripping over the rubble until Raven peremptorily swept it all aside with a wave of her hand. Once he had caught both his balance and his breath, the psychokinetic raised his eyes, or rather his eye, to face Raven. There were bandages wrapped around his head, covering his right eye, with a white eyepatch strapped over it to protect against the light. His left arm was in a cast from the forearm to the wrist, and held in a sling around his neck. A steel cane lay on the ground next to David's feet, and he slowly clipped his baton back onto his belt and picked it up before taking a few uneasy limping steps towards the computer terminal on the wall.

Raven entered the room, casting a quick glance over the carpet of stone fragments. "You shouldn't be down here," she said evenly.

David reached the computer and paused, rubbing his side with his good arm and wincing as he massaged the broken ribs that were still stitching themselves together. "I know," he said, and he pressed a button on the computer, causing the remaining intact rocks to withdraw into the walls and the floor. "I just..." He trailed off, not bothering to actually explain why he had felt the need to make his way down to the training room and start detonating a series of rocks. The choice of targets alone made it clear enough.

"Robin gave all of us the week off," said Raven, crossing her arms. "Besides, you're in no shape to be playing with rocks."

David didn't respond immediately, taking a deep breath and lowering his head. "Yeah," he said finally, "I know. That's kind of the point."

Raven resisted the urge to groan as she rolled her eyes. "Don't tell me you're thinking of - "

"I'm not suicidal," snapped David, glancing back at the sorceress, before returning his gaze to the computer screen. "If I couldn't beat her when I was 100, what kind of a chance would I have now? She'd tear me apart, even if I could find her."

Given what had happened, that seemed logical enough to Raven, but the talk of 'finding' Terra only served to remind her of what she was trying to avoid thinking about by coming down here, and her breath caught involuntarily. She tried to pass it off as nothing, but evidently David either noticed, or his own thoughts took him to the same place. "Have you heard from Beast Boy?" he asked suddenly, and she closed her eyes a moment before replying

"Not today," she said, and she opened her eyes and fixed them on the back of David's head, trying to maintain her facade of detached control. "Cyborg said he was still looking."

David didn't reply immediately. When he did, his voice was quieter than it had been before, and his head had lowered to the point where he was clearly no longer looking at the screen.

"I had to tell him," he said quietly. "You know that."

"No, you didn't," replied Raven, equally quietly, but with considerably more force behind the words. "You could have trusted me when I _told_ you not to tell him. You could have decided to wait like I asked you to, instead of - "

"Instead of telling him that someone that tried to kill him and me and all the rest of you guys was back from the dead?" David turned around slowly, leaning on the cane as he did so, looking at Raven semi-incredulously. "You _actually_ wanted me to hide that from him?"

"Look what it did to him," hissed Raven. "Look at what happened."

David lowered his head again, rubbing at his face with his hand, as if trying to scratch off the eyepatch strapped to his head. "Beast Boy's my friend," he said, almost lamely. "I'm wasn't gonna _lie_ to him, not about something like this. What was I supposed to - "

"You were supposed to think about what was best for _him_, not what made you feel safer," said Raven. She barely knew what she was saying, but the words poured out of her mouth unbidden, and she did not stop them. "He's not some playground schoolteacher that you run off and tell everything to. Terra _destroyed_ him, and it was a _month_ before he pulled out of it. You weren't there, you don't know what happened, and you have _no idea_ what he's going through now, thanks to you."

She did not get a chance to consider if perhaps she had gone too far, for David didn't react by wilting and falling silent, nor by becoming angry and screaming or denouncing her. Instead he raised his head slowly, his one intact eye returning Raven's stare unblinkingly. "Thanks to me?"

"You know what I mean," replied Raven, her voice unwavering.

"No, I don't." said David, and his voice did not waver either, a far rarer occurrence in his case. "Are you actually saying that I told Beast Boy that Terra was back because I was trying to hide behind him or something?"

"I don't know _what_ you were trying to do," said Raven more savagely than she had intended, "but you wouldn't listen to me, and you obviously didn't care if he got hurt."

David recoiled as if he'd been slapped in the face, and there was such a look of shock in his eye that he didn't even have to reply. Raven said nothing, indeed she hadn't even meant to say that much, and the two of them watched one another for a bit, letting silence dampen down the emotions that Raven could feel coursing through the room like pyroclastic clouds.

"What if it had been you?" asked David suddenly, breaking the silence. "What if I'd run into some villain or monster from _your_ past, someone you'd cared about or who'd tried to kill you? I'm sure there's somebody. What would you have done, Raven, if I decided not to tell you that someone you knew was back from the dead?" David's one-eyed stare was more intense than anything he'd fixed on her before, and while he wasn't shouting, his voice was dead serious. He did not even give her a chance to answer before continuing. "You'd have nailed me to the wall if I lied to you about something like that, and you'd probably be right to do it. And don't try to tell me you wouldn't."

Raven hesitated, unsure of what to say, and as her brain debated what reply to give, her mouth replied on its own accord. "He _didn't_ need to know," she said horsely, her voice lowered to a raspy whisper.

"Since when do _you_ get to make that call?" asked David. "Since when do any of us? I owe Beast Boy more than I can ever repay him, just like I owe you, and all the others. Do you actually think I'm about to turn around and lie to him after everything? After you told me how many times what would happen if I lied to any of you?"

"So you put him through all _this _again instead? That's real gratitude there..."

Her sarcasm fell on deaf ears. "You think I _wanted_ that?" he replied. "You think I wanted to come back and tell him that Terra'd come back to life and was trying to kill me and had vanished? I read the reports, Raven, I know what happened between him and her..."

"You don't know _anything_ about what happened."

"Maybe not, but I'm not stupid. I knew they were..." he hesitated and shook his head. "I knew he'd want to know she was alive."

"And what if it's a trap?" asked Raven, folding her arms. "They trapped you, it's happened before. What if they were counting on you to tell him that she was back so that they could get their hands on him? What then?"

There was only the slightest pause before David replied.

"Then you'll probably kill me."

Raven half-sighed, half-groaned, and lowered her head and shut her eyes. She needed a few moments to steady herself once again, and when she raised her head, David had slumped down into the chair in front of the computer terminal, and was rubbing his eyepatch with his good hand, the baton on his belt tapping quietly against the side of the chair, cold and lifeless.

"I'm not going to kill you," she said. "So stop it."

Another pause. "I know," said David quietly.

Neither David nor Raven said anything for a moment, and the terrible stillness that Raven had been trying to get away from embraced her once more. She shook her head irritatedly to drive it away, and finally resorted to asking another question. "Why did you even tell him?"

David didn't look up. "Because I had to."

She pressed on. "Why did you _have _to tell him?"

"Because I _did_, okay?" exclaimed David, leaning forward and raising his head once more. "Because whatever you say, he was _going_ to find out eventually, and even if he wasn't, because I owe him - "

"Oh for the love of..." interrupted Raven, throwing her hands up and groaning. "Will you give this 'owing us' thing a rest already? It's just stupid."

David froze in mid-word, looking almost surprised, and when he replied, his voice was raised and angry. "I don't care if _you _think it's stupid, it's got nothing to do with _you_! And if you don't want the answer, don't ask the goddamn _question_!"

The two superheroes stared daggers at one another for several seconds, before David broke his gaze and groaned softly, lowering his head again and shaking it. Raven remained unmoved, her arms crossed in front of her chest, and she said nothing, waiting instead for David to finish.

"I told him because he's my friend, okay?" he said finally, chancing a glance back up at Raven. "I never had many of those, at the centers, and never any like you guys, and I... _won't_ lie to him, or to you, or to any of the others just because you think I should. I know it hurt him, and I'm sorry, and I wish it hadn't or that I could have done something about it," she opened her mouth to cut him off but he cut her off first, raising his hand in protest, "and I _know _you're gonna say that I could have just not told him, but I _couldn't_ do that, Raven, all right? He's my friend, and I'm not gonna keep things like this from him, not for you, not for anybody. Period."

David shut his eye for a second and breathed raggedly, his fists clenched shut on the armrests of the chair, and Raven could _feel_ the anger and the bewilderment and most of all the frustration pouring off him empathically like the smoke from a candle, mingling with her own. At a loss for what to do, she settled for simply taking a deep breath and pushing the empathic cloud away from her as David clammed up again for a few moments, before blurting out an addendum.

"I just... I don't know what's going on, or what all this... this stuff is that keeps happening, and I know that... I'm... a part of it somehow, but not why... and I don't know if you know, or not, or if you'd tell me if you did know, or..." he trailed off, groaning and clutching his good arm lightly over his stomach as he grimaced. "I'm just... _tired _of getting attacked and ambushed and all of these plots and mysteries and I won't..." he paused once again, and gathered his breath, and exhaled, and steadied his voice, "I won't _add _to it all by hiding things from Beast Boy... or from you."

Raven tried to think of something to say in reply, some kind of demand that David be more circumspect in what he say in the future, but she simply did not have the stomach for it any longer. David's fear and frustration was bleeding over into hers, feeding the parts of her psyche she was desperately trying to keep contained, and so instead she simply nodded and turned away slowly. "I really wish you hadn't told him," she said after a moment, and left it at that.

"I wish I hadn't needed to," was his reply, and she said nothing to it, but simply walked towards the door. She was barely three paces from it when David's voice stopped her.

"Raven?"

She paused and sighed, and turned around, suddenly very eager to be anywhere but here, and when she did, she saw that he was leaning forward in his chair, his elbows on his knees, his face in one hand. "What is it?" she asked, and he did not look up as he answered.

"If I hadn't told Beast Boy, you weren't going to, right?"

"No, I wasn't," she said, unsure how he could possibly have had a doubt in his mind on that account.

As it turned out, he didn't. "Why not?" he asked.

"What do you mean 'why not?'"

"Why weren't you gonna tell him?"

Raven hesitated for a moment, unsure if this was some kind of trick. "Because I knew what it would do to him," she said. "I knew what Terra did to him back before she turned to stone, and what she'd do to him now. I knew he'd go looking for her and that he might get himself killed, and even if he didn't that he was going to be hurt all over again and I didn't want that. Okay? I know you don't think he is, but he's a friend of mine, and unlike you, I don't let my friends get hurt when I have the choice."

David didn't say anything, but slowly sat up and back, and crossed his good arm with his injured one, and stared quietly at her with his one good eye in a fashion that was most unsettling for no reason that she could discern. Restlessly, she tapped her foot on the ground. "What?" she asked.

David took a deep breath and let it out slowly, and his voice was calm and quiet as he responded with words that froze her blood.

"Is that why you didn't tell me that you found something in my mind?"

Raven did not, could not reply for several seconds, frozen still like a statue, the hairs on the back of her neck sticking up straight as she returned David's stare. She knew that the look on her face was enough to confirm every suspicion he'd ever had, but he did not scream or shout or get angry again, but just sat there and slowly explained.

"I've only ever heard you scream twice," he said carefully, slowly. "Once when Adonis tried to eat you, and once when you woke up from that trip into my mind. You screamed and you practically ran out the door, and you nearly gave Beast Boy a heart attack. You tried to say after that it was just... feedback or something, and that I was a normal kinetic, and you showed me how to use this baton... but back there in the church when... when you thought I might be working for Slade, you said that you had no idea how my powers worked or where they came from." He uncrossed his arms and sat up a bit straighter. "If I was a normal kinetic, like you said I was, you'd know exactly how they worked. You said you found out how they worked when you went into my head."

He paused only for an instant as he leaned forward towards her, long enough for all of this to sink in, but not long enough for her to reply. His voice remained calm, albeit a bit afraid, as if he wasn't certain if she was about to blast him to ash.

"Ever since you went in my mind, there's been something about me that scares the hell out of you, and I don't know what it is, but that night you woke up you were more scared than I've ever seen you get, except once. And I don't have the first clue what it would take to scare you, I'm not sure I _want _to know what that takes, but I think you found something inside me that scared you half to death." He paused and let his breath go slowly. "And... you didn't tell me about it."

Raven's voice had failed her, but she managed to pull it together long enough to cough out a reply. "You... you _knew_?" she stammered, not even realizing that it was a confession.

David, to her surprise, actually chuckled, and then grimaced as his ribs began to ache again. "I know you think I'm oblivious," he said, "but you're not anywhere near as hard to read as you think you are. I knew you'd found something the moment you woke up. Why do you think I was hiding up on the roof when you and Cyborg came to give me that baton? I don't know what you found, or why you didn't tell me about it, but I know it scared you to death, and I know you decided to hide it from me.

Raven didn't say a word, didn't move a muscle, didn't even twitch as David slowly and painfully stood up from his chair, picking the cane up as he did so and steadying himself before facing Raven again.

"And... you know what?" he said calmly, looking her in the eye. "That's okay."

She blinked.

"You don't have to tell me what it was," said David, slowly limping forward. "I don't know if I'd even understand it if you did, or if it would just scare the living hell out of me too. If you've got some reason for not wanting to tell me... then that's all right, because you don't owe me an explanation, and you don't owe me a bunch of secrets, in fact you don't owe me anything at all. Even if I wanted to, I couldn't make you tell me, but I don't want to, because despite what you think, I actually do trust your judgment." He shook his head slowly and lowered it. "More than mine at least." He sighed and lifted his head and trudged over to her. "If you don't want to tell me, you don't have to, and you don't even have to tell me why. I trust your judgment, and I trust you."

He stopped right in front of her, leaning on the cane and obviously trying to pretend like he wasn't in several kinds of pain.

"But don't ever ask me to hide something from Beast Boy or any of the others, Raven, because I won't do it, and I don't care if it's bad for the team or not, or if you think it would hurt them or not. You guys are the only ones who have any idea what's going on here, at least compared to me, and I _can't_ make the decision of what is and isn't important for you guys to know. And even if all that wasn't true, I won't hide something from Beast Boy for your sake, or for anybody else's."

He stepped to the side, and walked past her towards the door, his cane tapping on the ground as he went. "Not even for mine."

The door slid open and Raven heard David walking out of it, but before it closed, it was her turn to stop him.

"David?"

She did not turn her head, but she heard him pause, and then turn around carefully.

"What was the other time?"

There was a hesitation. "... what other time?"

"The other time you saw me get that afraid?"

The hesitation was more pronounced, lasting several seconds, before David replied simply.

"Ever since I told him about Terra."

She said nothing to that, and after a few more moments, David turned away and the door closed being him, leaving Raven standing in the empty training room, listening to the soft sound of his footsteps and the tapping of his cane as he made his way down the hall, until finally the sound vanished into more silence. This time however, she did not notice it, and neither moved nor spoke nor raised her eyes, her mind adrift within itself, like meditation but unfocused and unbidden. And when finally a minute or an hour had passed, she didn't know which, Raven closed her eyes tight and shook like she was in a snowstorm and wrapped her cloak around her. And as she whispered to herself a simple word in a dead language, a black sheath enveloped her entire body, and she suddenly vanished into nothing.

**O-O-O**

The stone quarry was as quiet and dark, long abandoned for the night by the workers who operated it. A huge terraced pit delved into the side of a mountain of granite and marble, the place was as barren as the surface of an alien world, indeed it could well have been mistaken for such a thing, save for the heavy machinery, the pile drivers and steam shovels, the rock crushers and bulldozers, the debris trucks, water cannons, and pneumatic drills that all lay silent now, left where they were for the morning when the quarry workers would return and bring the place to life once more. For now there was nothing but the occasional insect or molerat to disturb the rattling of pebbles pushed about by the wind.

And none of the critters in question noticed an addition to their numbers, not even a green one.

A single small rodent, a rat perhaps or a mole or miniature badger, striped evergreen over emerald with pale eyes that blinked in the night sky crept from its perch beneath an earth-mover, and cautiously moved forward into the floor of the rock pit. The rodent made no noise, looking left and right before moving a bit further, sniffing at the ground every few steps, paying no mind to the owls that circled overhead, who were occasionally darting down to snatch a field mouse for their evening meal. None of them would target a discolored rodent, nor one that smelled and moved as strangely as this one, and the rodent appeared to know it, for it moved heedlessly into the center of the broad quarry floor before suddenly increasing in volume a hundredfold, and standing up as a green-skinned, pointy-eared, purple-clad human.

Beast Boy looked around the empty rock quarry with his once-more human eyes and sighed softly, kicking a few pebbles across the quarry as he crouched down again and examined the dirt for signs of disturbance, fissures in the rocks, anything, everything, a single sign of what he was looking for.

Nothing.

Quarries and caves, crevices and riverbeds, slag heaps and rock gardens, and nothing, not a trace or indication that Terra had visited any of them. He had tried everything he could, returning to every place he had ever been with Terra, every secret hideaway she had ever told him about, and half a dozen others she hadn't told anyone, but that he had known about through Robin's surveillance or Cyborg's tracers or simply through guesswork of his own. Robin might have done it methodically, patiently, with techniques of search and detection honed over years, but Beast Boy neither knew any such things nor cared to. He had spent days roaming the city nearly at random, then the suburbs, then the rural areas outside Jump. He had traveled to places that Terra had only mentioned in passing, places she had commented always wanting to go, places that had no connection at all to her save for rock and stone. The Grand Canyon, hundreds of miles away a thousand miles long, he had surveyed over three days from the air, not because of clues or indications or evidence, but because of the day that they had sat up on the roof of the tower and she had told him about how amazing the river valley was, and how much she had loved floating down the canyon and feeling the rocks and the earth surrounding her. He had laughed then, and said that one day they'd have to go back, her on her rock and him as a swallow. This time he had gone as a swallow, but there was no floating rock with her perched on it waiting for him, nor anything but the sun and the wind and the occasional carload of tourists trying to identify a forest-green bird in their guidebooks.

Nothing.

For three days now, he had gone back to basics, borrowing Robin's files on Terra from before she had tried to murder them all, files so comprehensive that they contained information even Beast Boy had never known, about sightings of Terra prior to her arrival in Jump, reconnaissance reports from national park rangers and the Bureau of Land Management. He had not asked Robin for the files, but had simply taken them. Robin had not stopped him. Nobody had.

One by one he had gone to every place mentioned in those reports within five hundred miles of Jump City, a cave in Joshua Tree Forest, an artificial hill in Golden Gate Park, a small castle near the edge of Death Valley, an abandoned Borax mine outside Tehachapi, place after place, sighting after sighting, and yet all that was waiting for him in each successive place was stillness, and quiet, and lifeless stone.

And so it was again.

Terra had been seen near Aesir Construction's rock quarry some time in the distant past, but she was not here now, or rather if she was, he could find no hint of it. In previous searches, he had shifted into a mole or earthworm to explore the very ground beneath the sites in question, but he could not do so here, not with solid rock beneath his feet. Eight places he had been today, and at all eight, like the eighty before, there was nothing. He indulged his frustrations in a savage kick at the side of a five-ton forklift and was rewarded with a minute or two of hopping on one leg, grabbing at his hurt foot. When the pain finally subsided, he growled to himself and made another round of the quarry, level by level, not sure at all what he was looking for, but knowing he wasn't finding it, not here at least. Top to bottom and bottom to top again he went, before shifting back into a bird and flying back down into the center of the quarry. Another pang of the pain of loss that had been shooting through him ever since David had told him of Terra's return struck him as he landed, and he shouted out to the empty quarry, heedless of whether or not it was a good idea.

"_Terra!_"

Nothing.

The echoes of his own voice died down and he slumped down onto the ground, leaning against the forklift he had previously struck, and caught his breath slowly, his eyes clenched shut, his gloved hands holding his face. Several minutes passed before he could raise his head again, and reached down to the PDA on his belt that he had downloaded Robin's files to, and brought up the next reference, a cliff overlooking a vineyard near the coast north of Jump. Terra had mentioned to a reporter for a newspaper as having passed by there once, eight and a half months ago.

It was his best remaining lead.

He sighed softly and pulled his knees up against his chest, working up the will to overcome how tired he was and fly off to the north, and trying to figure out what he was going to say to Cyborg or Robin when he checked in later tonight. He was at the point of getting up and flying off when he suddenly heard a loud 'POP', like a paper bag overfilled with air being struck by a golf club, and a rush of wind and small pebbles rolled over the forklift. A second later, Beast Boy was on his feet, racing around the heavy machinery. "Terra?!" he asked breathlessly, not even pausing to think of how it was that Terra would have suddenly appeared, but a second later he ground to a halt, blinked several times, and raised an eyebrow.

"... Raven?"

Raven was standing where nobody had been an instant ago, having apparently appeared out of nowhere (as she often did). She was looking around at her surroundings, and seemed almost surprised as to see Beast Boy appear as he had been to see her show up. Indeed, such was their mutual astonishment that Beast Boy was the first to speak.

"What are you doing here?"

The question seemed to galvanize Raven's capacity to speak. "I... wanted to see how it was going."

Beast Boy blinked several times, utterly unprepared to answer that question, at least from Raven. Robin and Cyborg had been asking him that daily of course, but Raven had been, as usual, avoiding him in the brief times when he was back at the tower, usually whenever he had run out of places to look. As such, he stammered for a few moments before answering. "Um... it's uh... it's going okay..." he said. "I mean... I haven't found her yet but..."

Raven glanced around the empty quarry. "You thought she might be here?"

Beast Boy breathed a soft sigh of relief that he had not had to finish the previous sentence. "Robin's stuff said that there was some kinda earthquake around here a few weeks ago, and I thought... you know..."

"Yeah," said Raven, though she certainly didn't sound convinced. "So... was she..."

"Um..." said Beast Boy almost nervously, like he was admitting to some kind of indiscretion, "... no. I mean... it doesn't look like it..."

Raven only nodded. "So what are you gonna do now?"

Still wondering what was behind her sudden interest in all of this, Beast Boy scratched the back of his head with one hand. "Well... there's this place up north where she said once that she went to, so I thought I'd go check that out."

Raven seemed less than overwhelmed with the brilliance of this plan, but she refrained, at least for the moment, from disparaging it openly. In fact, she seemed rather reluctant to speak at all, which only made this all the weirder.

"Where is it?"

"Like I said, it's up north. A place called 'San Simon' I think, next to a - "

"San _Simeon?_" asked Raven all of a sudden, and she sounded surprised, of all things

Beast Boy hesitated before replying. "Uh, yeah... I think..."

"Beast Boy, that's three hundred miles away, at least."

The number landed on his head like a weight. He had not imagined it was anything like that far off. "Oh," he said, expressive as always. "Um... well... I guess I'll have to check it out tomorrow then. I can get halfway there tonight and then make the rest of... the trip... in... Raven?"

He hadn't noticed before, a product of his own surprise and the bad light, but Raven looked... different than she normally did. It was nothing physical, her hood and cloak and belt and uniform and everything else was just as it had been before on a hundred different days, but there was something in her expression, her look, that was off. There was something in her eyes that was not normally present, and he couldn't tell what. It wasn't an intensity exactly, or anything else specific that he knew how to describe, but he had seen it before, once or twice. He just wished he could remember where...

All this took a fraction of a second, as Raven replied in normal time. "... what?"

"Are... is everything okay?"

"I'm fine," she said, though she sounded just the slightest bit unsure. "But... San Simeon?"

Beast Boy shrugged. "It's... kinda the next place on the list, you know? I mean she's gotta be somewhere, right?" He tried to laugh, and managed only a nervous grin, one which he could tell had not fooled Raven, in fact if anything whatever the indescribable _something_ was that was surrounding her only seemed to deepen. Was it worry?

"You're going to San Simeon because Terra passed by it once, months ago?"

The question could easily have been phrased with Raven's signature dry wit, calculated to make everyone around her (and particularly Beast Boy) sound like an idiot, but it was not. Indeed, it sounded like a real question, and there was an ever-so-soft note of... _surprise_ in her voice? That couldn't be right.

Still, when she put it like that, it didn't sound all that promising, and he frowned. "Well unless you've got a better idea, yeah. I've already looked everywhere near Jump. Maybe she's hiding somewhere further out?" It sounded more likely the way he put it. He preferred that.

"Beast Boy..." said Raven, and this time he was sure that something was wrong. Her voice sounded thin and weak, like it had that night many months ago after the incident with Malchior, though why it should sound that way was beyond him. "... she's... Terra's _not_ in San Simeon."

He shrugged. "I won't know unless I look," he said, trying to pass it off as a joke. As before, he failed, the empty feeling in the pit of his stomach robbing him of all mirth, and even of the capacity to fake it.

"She's not there," said Raven with all the certainty of someone predicting the sunrise, a hint of desperation to her voice. "She's not in any of those places."

Beast Boy's fake smile vanished, replaced with a cold stare. "I don't _even_ wanna hear it, Raven. She's somewhere, and I'm gonna find her. If you're here to try to talk me out of it, you're wasting your time. Cyborg already tried, okay?"

"You _can't_ find her, nobody can now. She's with Slade."

"I found her before when she was with Slade," retorted the Changeling, "remember? Right before she sacrificed herself to save the whole city?"

"But this time she's not just going to be sitting around waiting to be found," insisted Raven. "She tried to kill David in broad daylight and then vanished. Even Robin hasn't been able to find a trace of her since then. Wherever she is now, you're not gonna find her running around quarries and mountainsides three hundred miles from home."

"How do _you _know that?!" shouted Beast Boy angrily. "How do you know what she's gonna do? Maybe she wants to be found, huh? Maybe Slade's making her do this stuff again and she doesn't have a choice and she's waiting for one of us to come and help her! Maybe it was all a misunderstanding!"

"Maybe," said Raven, and her voice did not rise, though the look in her eyes that he still couldn't identify did, "but even if she is, do you really think you're gonna find her doing this?"

"Well at least I'm trying!" yelled Beast Boy back at Raven, his blood running hot and clouding over what little judgment he had. "At least I'm still trying to find her instead of forgetting about her as soon as she's out of sight!"

"I _never_ forgot about Terra!" retorted Raven, shouting this time, not so much angrily as desperately. "But you're running around trying to find something that isn't there! You... you _have _to stop this."

"Oh yeah? Why?"

Despite the fact that it was the obvious response to her demand that he stop, Raven appeared to not be expecting that question, and she hesitated before answering. "Because..." she said, clearly scrambling for an answer. "Because you're not gonna find her."

"I'll find her," said Beast Boy as solemnly as he could. "I don't care what it takes, I'll find her."

"The rest of us _do_ care what it takes, Beast Boy. We need you in Jump City, not in San Simeon or wherever else you're gonna run off to once you find out she's not there!"

He scoffed. "I've got my communicator. If anything happens, Robin's gonna call me."

"That's not what I mean," said Raven. "We don't need your help, we need _you_." He did not even get the chance to consider what she might mean by that before she had abruptly moved on. "What happens if you don't find Terra tomorrow, or this week, or next? How long are you gonna look for her?"

Beast Boy had refused to even consider the answer to that question, and so he ducked it. "Until I find her!" he declared defiantly, as though an expression of determination was enough to summon Terra to his presence.

"And if you do find her? What if she _is_ working for Slade? What if she tries to kill you?"

"She's _not_ working for Slade!" shouted Beast Boy. "She _killed_ Slade, she saved the entire city by sacrificing herself! Whatever happened with David was... I don't _know_ what it was, but she's _not_ working for Slade!"

"How do you know that?"

"Because I know Terra! I know her better than any of you, and I know she's not _like_ that. None of you would believe me before, when I told you that she wasn't evil, and now it's happening again!"

There was actual desperation in Raven's voice as she replied. "Beast Boy, she tried to _murder_ David!"

Beast Boy didn't even blink. "So did _you_!"

His words hit Raven like a shovel to the face, and she lost whatever train of thought she had previously been running with. Beast Boy by now was beyond upset, and he stepped forward and pointed a gloved finger at her like a dagger.

"You know what I think, Raven?" he yelled, spitting the words out of his mouth like bitter venom. "I think you're afraid I _will_ find her, and that we're all gonna see just how wrong you were about her! You never liked her! You were always trying to talk about how she was a coward or a traitor - "

"She _was_ a traitor!"

"Not at the end!" shouted Beast Boy, feeling hot tears forming up in his eyes, and he stabbed at the air with his finger like a fire poker. "You said so yourself, she was more than just a traitor! She was our friend, she was _my_ friend, and I won't give up on her just because you think I should!" Some part of Beast Boy wanted to stop himself and stem the words that were flowing unbidden from his mouth, but he had as much chance of that as he did of bailing out the tide with a bucket, and he continued unabated. "You don't trust anyone! Not Terra, not David, not me, nobody! You always hated her and now you want me to just forget about her, like she's just some other criminal again!"

"That's _not_ what I - "

"Then what _do_ you want, Raven?!" continued Beast Boy, "Why do you care if I go looking for her? It's not like I made any of you guys come help me! You don't even like having me around, so what gives?"

Of all the things he had said, this was the one that plainly caught Raven off balance. Her gaze faltered, and she stammered for a second and then fell silent, her expression a mixture of surprise and what might have been fear in anyone but Raven. He looked her in the eyes, and waited for her to reply to his question with some talk of duty or danger or the risk he was taking, but instead she said none of those things, indeed she said nothing at all, and slowly the expression that could have been fear in anyone else and that in Raven was just inexplicable grew until it was all that was there. And before Beast Boy could ask what was the matter, or even process that there was something the matter, Raven looked away, closing her eyes and lowering her head, and saying nothing at all.

Beast Boy had no idea how to respond to Raven's non-reply, but he was still angry enough to come up with _something_ at least. "I don't care if the rest of you guys have given up on her, she needs our help, and I'm gonna find her and help her, even if you won't." He turned away, more for effect than for any other reason. "So you go do whatever you want, Raven," he said back to her bitterly. "I won't be bugging you or messing with you or getting in your hair at all until I find her, so if you're right and she's somewhere I can't find, then you should be happy."

Silence greeted his last remarks, and he let it sit for some time, before finally walking away from Raven towards the other end of the quarry. He was about to shift into a bird and fly off, when all of a sudden, Raven spoke up.

"She doesn't want to be found."

The words were practically whisper-quiet, to the point where even Beast Boy's hearing could barely detect them, yet unmistakably she had meant for him to hear. The tone was as un-Raven as it could have been without being filled with mirth, soft and hollow and hurt, but by what, he could not tell. It was sufficiently out of the ordinary for him to stop, and turn back, and see that Raven's head was lowered and her eyes shut.

"What?"

"She doesn't want to be found, or else you would have found her."

His blood rose again. "You don't know that," he hissed through his clenched fangs. "You _can't_ know that!"

"Yes I do," said Raven, and she opened her eyes and lifted them slightly, peering at Beast Boy from under her eyelashes, almost furtively, as though she dreaded what was about to happen. "And so do you."

"That's _not true_!" said Beast Boy. "She's scared and confused and she's made some terrible - "

"She's been back for four months."

The comment was unexpected enough to stop Beast Boy short. "... what?" he asked, not seeing the implication Raven was trying to make. "Wait a minute... you... you _knew_ she was back?!"

"Of course not," said Raven, though her voice remained quiet. "But David said that the first time he met her was the night Adonis attacked us, when he left to go looking for us by himself. That was four and a half months ago."

Something in what Raven was saying very much did not sit well. "... so... so what?" he said. "So she's been back for a while, what's that got to do with anything?"

"She's been watching the Tower for four months, watching what all of us do."

"How do _you_ know what she's been up to?!"

"David left the Tower that night without telling anybody. He didn't have a communicator, didn't even know he was going to leave until a second before he did, and she still managed to run into him. She or Slade had to have been watching the Tower, waiting for him to show his face, right?"

"M... maybe...?" stammered Beast Boy, afraid of what Raven's conclusion might be, even though he couldn't see it himself just yet.

"So in all that time watching the Tower and waiting for David to show his face" said Raven, as her voice weakened even further, "if she wanted our help, or wanted to talk to any of us, don't you think she could have found a way to contact us?" Raven raised her head slowly, looking Beast Boy in the eye as she continued. "One little earthquake would have been enough."

"W.. what are you saying?"

"She watched us for four months, watched us close enough to know whenever one of us left the Tower," said Raven, "and she never tried to contact us or let us know she was alive."

"Raven..."

"She could have left you a sign that she was still alive whenever you went down to visit her."

"Raven... stop it..."

"She could have passed us a message through David, even a coded one."

"_Stop_ it!"

"She _didn't_!" Raven sounded and looked teary-eyed as well now, and her voice picked up strength as she went along. "She let you... all of us... think she was dead for months. She only showed up long enough to try to kill David while the rest of us weren't there. Any time she wanted, she could have let us know she was back, and you'd have come running, but she didn't do it!"

"That doesn't mean she's - "

"It _means_ she doesn't want to be found, Beast Boy!" exclaimed Raven, with far more emotion behind the words than anything Beast Boy ever remembered hearing. "She doesn't want to talk to us, or want our help, and she doesn't want you to find her, or you would have already! And if she doesn't want to be found, then you're _never_ going to find her, and you know it. She could be a hundred miles underground or six thousand miles away or at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean."

"That's not true!"

"It _is_ true. She tried to kill David right in the middle of everyone. She _had_ to know you'd go looking for her as soon as you found out she was alive. David told you the first chance he got, and you've been looking ever since." She gestured around at the quarry. "Did you find anything? Did she leave you any trace?"

"Slade could be forcing her to work for him!" insisted Beast Boy, desperately grasping at anything that sounded plausible. "Like he did with Robin before!"

"Robin found a way to break free, or at least give us a sign." said Raven. "In four months... Terra didn't?"

The words landed on Beast Boy like a load of concrete, and he clenched his teeth and squeezed his eyes shut hard enough to make his head quiver. "Why are you _doing_ this?!" he demanded of Raven. "Why are you even _here_?! What do you care if I go looking for Terra?" With his eyes closed, he could not see the hesitation creep back into Raven's face, nor could he see her open and shut her mouth several times, as though trying to come up with an answer for a question that had none, or at least none that she was willing to commit to speech.

She might have answered, given time, she might not. In the end, she was not given it, for before Raven could come up with an appropriate answer, Beast Boy practically exploded. "I don't wanna hear it!" he shouted suddenly, not indicating exactly what it was he didn't want to hear. "I don't wanna hear any more! She's... she wouldn't... she _can't_ be..."

Raven's voice had a pleading sound to it. "Beast Boy..."

"Leave me alone!" he yelled at her, opening his eyes and stepping back away from his teammate. "Just... just leave me _alone_!" And without another word, Beast Boy shifted into a hawk, and took off into the air, spiraling up out of the quarry, before turning away and flying off, out of sight, leaving Raven to watch him disappear over the lip of the enormous pit.

**O-O-O**

The cavern's floor was uneven, a product of its creation no doubt, and the sound of dripping condensation from stalactites overhead formed a chorus around Raven, but she kept her feet steady and her eyes forward, and slowly made her way through. She could of course have floated or flown or phased right through the rock, but she did none of those things. Clambering over the rocks gave her something to think about, and she desperately needed something to think about right now.

Moreso than ever, in fact.

She had gone to the quarry to... Great Azar, she had no idea _why_ she had gone to the quarry at all. She had not gotten further in her reasoning than trying to help Beast Boy somehow before she was suddenly there, and trying to make up a reason to have come. How she could have imagined that he would listen to her telling him that Terra wasn't coming back this time was beyond her, but she had tried, and predictably enough, he had rejected it out of hand. His pained expression, tears running down his emerald face as he tried to assure himself that Terra wasn't actually trying to kill them all, that this was all some kind of mis-understanding, danced before her eyes hours after the fact. She had teleported back to the Tower, tried to meditate, tried to do anything to forget what had just happened, and she had failed. The spike of pain, of distress, of hurt and anguish and betrayal that had emanated from Beast Boy when he had finally turned and run away had been strong enough to nearly knock her over, and it was only hours after the fact that she had realized that as Beast Boy had left her there, he hadn't been flying North, towards San Simeon, but South-West, back towards Jump City.

It was then that she had realized where he was going.

She had not been back to this place in more than seven months, and it had not improved in her absence. The igneous stone had covered most of the evidence of what had taken place here, save for the occasional bit of metal or piece of rusted equipment still sticking up from the rock like a spike. She avoided these carefully, moving slowly so as not to trip, and periodically feeling ahead with her empathic sense, looking for a small spark of life within this dead cave.

Every time it was up ahead, and every time it hadn't moved.

She came around the final corner at last, and ahead there was light. A flashlight, to be precise, held by a figure cloaked in shadows, who was standing before a large dais. Atop the pedestal was mounted an incredibly lifelike statue, beneath which sat a metal plaque, engraved with words that Raven remembered all too well:

_Terra  
A Teen Titan  
A True Friend_

The cavern was cloaked in utter silence, save for the distant sounds of water drops echoing through it. The figure staring forlornly at the statue made no noise at all, indeed, he scarcely seemed to be breathing. The flashlight held lightly in his hand drooped, forgotten, its light aimed at nothing, casting the statue into inky shadow. No word or movement or gesture did its holder make, yet to Raven, the empathic noise was as loud as a brass band.

She stepped forward.

Her footsteps made no appreciable noise, and yet Beast Boy's ears perked up, and he turned his head slowly to see her entering the cave. Confusion was written on his tear-streaked face, but he said nothing, and asked no questions, and did not seem either as surprised or as angry as she had assumed he would be. Indeed, for some reason, the waves of mental pain flowing off of him seemed to lessen as he saw her, even as he turned slowly back to face the statue.

She finally reached the flatter part of the cave on which the dais and statue was mounted, and softly she walked up alongside Beast Boy, looking up at the frozen still-image of Terra, arms spread wide, legs braced, hair forming a wavy halo around her head as she looked up into the air with unblinking stone eyes. Raven wasn't sure what had expected to find down here, perhaps an empty dais now that Terra was apparently back, but then Beast Boy still frequented this place every so often, and if Terra had truly not wanted her return to be known, she would have had to replace the statue with another, perfect copy. Raven had no trouble imagining that such a feat was well within the Geokinetic's powers.

"D'you remember that time... Mumbo tried to rob the federal bank?"

There was a soft, wistful quality to Beast Boy's voice, so out of tune with the waves of empathic pain that Raven could feel emanating from him. She had planned on saying something, what she wasn't sure, but something, anything to try and help him, but the intervening hours had not produced anything specific, and she was thus content to simply play along.

"I think so," she said. Mumbo had tried to rob the federal bank several times, but she was fairly sure she knew which occasion he was talking about.

"Mumbo thought he'd got away," said Beast Boy, and there was even a hint of a smile on his face. "He'd busted by Rob, and I tried to stop him but he hit me with some kinda glue from his flower squirter. I remember chasing him out the door, and he sorta turned back to laugh at us or something, and... _right_ then Terra hit him right in the face with a big dirt fist from outta the ground." He shook his head and definitely smiled this time, though the waves did not stop. "Mumbo _still_ doesn't know what hit him."

The changeling lapsed back into silence, still looking up at Terra, and after a few moments' silence, Raven tried her best to reciprocate.

"I remember one time," she said, "Starfire got her hands on some fashion magazine with a bunch of advice columns in it, and decided to get Terra and me to have a 'girl talk' with her." Raven smirked despite herself at the memory. "It wasn't designed for aliens or people who lived in caves, so it turned into an hour of Terra trying to explain to Starfire what everything in the magazine meant... after Starfire ate the perfume ads."

The recollection elicited a soft chuckle from Beast Boy. "Hehe, yeah... that was priceless."

Raven raised an eyebrow. "You weren't there."

"Oh," said Beast Boy. "Um... I er... sorta was listening in. Fly on the wall?" He laughed nervously and glanced at Raven, who, for the moment refrained from smacking him upside the head as she normally would.

Silence fell over both of them again, and Raven heard Beast Boy taking several deep breaths, as her empathy registered every swell of deep-seated pain that coursed through him. "You... you think maybe... maybe she didn't really come back?" he asked her tentatively. "Maybe this... this is really her, and whoever attacked David was somebody else, pretending to be her? Like a... a clone or... or a robot of Slade's... or something?"

Raven found the idea completely preposterous, but she did not say so. "Maybe," was the best she would do, not wishing to provide false hope, but neither wishing to antagonize him any further tonight. Not after everything.

He seemed to sense what she meant, and his breath caught as he tried to hold the tears back in his eyes. "I can't... I just can't believe she'd... come back and..." his throat caught, "and..."

It was the strangest thing...

The various people living in Titans' Tower affected her empathic abilities in different ways. Robin, closed off as he usually was, was a blank to her, save on the rare occasions when he was exceptionally upset or forced to open up. Cyborg's level-headed stability, anger issues aside, was always a reassuring, calming force in the Tower, one she had come to depend on. Starfire wore her emotions on her sleeve, figuratively and otherwise, but her spirits were irrepressible and her alien mind reacted very differently to Raven's powers than did the others. David, though externally shy and quiet, often gave off spikes of emotion, usually fear or awe. Among them all however, Beast Boy was by far the most prolific, showering the air around him with empathic feelings, be they feral rage, child-like glee, or deep sorrow, to the point where she usually had to actively suppress her own powers around him constantly to avoid being inundated, which was part of the reason he so easily frustrated her.

But this was different.

In the silence of the cave, alone with Beast Boy, she could actually feel it as he began to cry, and it was then that she realized that for all Beast Boy's emotional immaturity, and capacity to get upset over the stupidest thing (alphabetized music CDs for instance), she had never before seen him do so. Not even when Terra had betrayed them. Not even when Terra had died. She knew he was crying before he made a sound, before he even knew it himself, felt his sorrow and pain wrapping around her like a shroud, and without really even thinking about it or about how foolish it would look or how he might make fun of her for it the next day, she slowly stepped over to him, wrapped her arms around him, and held him in a tight embrace.

On another day, he might have died of shock. On this day, he simply melted.

She felt him go limp as he began to cry into her shoulder, his legs giving out beneath him, and she held him up, as he had done for her once. His entire body was shaking and shivering as the tears rolled down his face unhindered, staining the dark fabric of her uniform an even darker shade, and he reached around and held onto her with both hands, clinging to her as she had more than once clung to him, pouring out his grief and sorrow and regret and the bitter pain of this fresh betrayal, that Terra was alive, and returned, and yet was not here. She felt his emotions wafting off of him like steam from a pot of boiling water, clouding her own thoughts and feelings, and in that instant she cursed herself for being unable to think of anything to do besides this, for being unable to help or offer succor as Beast Boy, the joker, the goofy changeling, the albatross around her neck that never would go away, wept like a small child in her arms.

Slowly, Raven guided Beast Boy over to the side of the cavern, to where the walls were worn smooth by some geological force acting upon them. She sat down slowly against the wall, carrying Beast Boy with her as she did, sliding down until they were seated side by side, with her arms around his shoulders, and his weight leaning against her. She had expected him to go on crying for quite some time, for she could feel everything fueling it, and yet slowly the waterworks began to sputter to a stop, replaced by, of all things, a soul-crushing fatigue that Raven recognized like she would an old friend, the product of countless sleepless nights that she had been having, and that obviously he had too. The both of them were clearly worn out, him by his tireless search for Terra, and her by...

... well... to be honest with herself... by the same, exact, literal thing.

And... somehow... admitting that much to herself galvanized her enough to make the suggestion she did.

"If you want," she said softly, trying not to let Beast Boy's pain leach into her own words, "I'll... go with you... to San Simeon, or... wherever you want to look." The very prospect of spending any time searching for Terra after everything that had happened filled her mouth with bile and caused her emotions to boil with rage and protest, yet effortlessly she swallowed her bile, and stifled her raging emotions, for the sudden silence from Beast Boy, and the slow decline of the pain flowing off him was worth every sacrifice she could make, and she did not have the slightest idea why.

Slowly Beast Boy looked up at her, and his eyes were red from the tears. "You... you will?" he asked, his voice more scratchy than usual. He sniffed back more tears. "I... I'd like that..." he said, fatigue becoming more apparent on his voice with every word he spoke. "Maybe... maybe tomorrow?" He didn't say it, but she knew, as certainly as she knew that the Earth was turning, that right now he did not want to stir from where he was, just as she knew, with absolute equal certainty, that she did not wish to stir either.

She made an effort to convince herself that it was just the fatigue.

She failed.

No more tears emerged to follow the ones he had already shed, but Beast Boy did not sit up, did not move, did not suggest they go home to the Tower. Bit by bit, his eyelids began to droop, and his breathing became more regular, and less choked on his own quiet sobs. He still held onto her with tenacity and force though, shifting very slightly to get closer and closer to her, his head laying on her shoulder, his gloved hands clasped around her chest. Perhaps it was spillover from Beast Boy, or perhaps it was her own stored-up fatigue, but Raven felt her owneyelids becoming heavier with each passing moment, and her head slowly fell over onto its side, resting against Beast Boy's. Her arms were wrapped around his shoulders, and he made no effort to dislodge them, nor she his, until soon enough both of them had their eyes closed, and Beast Boy's sobs had fallen to the softest and most gentle of shudders.

"I miss her," he whispered, half-asleep already.

Her reply was the only thing it could be. "Me too,"

And so it was that on that night, in a cavern far beneath the streets of Jump City, Raven lay propped against a smooth rock wall, with Beast Boy held in her arms, and she held in his, fast asleep.

And for the first time in weeks, she did not dream...

...

... at least, not of Slade.

* * *

**Author's Note:** Thank you once more to all those who read this far, and I beg you again to please leave me a review (or 'R&R' in the parlance of our times), so that I may (hopefully) make the next chapter better than the one you have just finished.


	25. The Clockwork Butterfly

**Disclaimer:** I've actually forgotten if I own the Teen Titans or not. I think not.

**Author's Note:** Hello once more, and yet again I have to apologize for an unconscionable delay in my posting this chapter. Part of the problem is that this chapter (fair warning!) is _enormous_. And when I say a chapter is enormous, those of you who know this story will know that I very much mean it. The other part has to do with real life issues, jury duty, work difficulties, and illness all combining to make it very difficult to proceed on this story. I have finally vanquished them all however, and present this gargantuan chapter for your reading pleasure, in the hopes of course that you will find it an enjoyable read. I shall begin work tomorrow on Chapter 26, and hopefully better it with what reviews I receive for this chapter, as that is the way one improves. So if you want to see this story get better, please just leave me some idea of how. Thank you once again.

* * *

**Chapter 25: The Clockwork Butterfly**

_"I shall be telling this with a sigh  
Somewhere ages and ages hence  
two roads converged in a wood, and I -  
I took the one less traveled by  
And that has made all the difference_

- Robert Frost, Road Not Taken

**O-O-O**

A hundred yards wide and a quarter mile long, the primary cavern of the Los Palmas diamond mining complex was large enough to house a small warship, yet at present it was dark and nearly empty, save for the distant glow of the strung lights hanging above the cavern floor. Mine carts and laser drills lay scattered about the rock enclosure, some on their sides, some with smoking rents torn in them. Figures in black armor, energy rifles still in hand, lay crumpled alongside the mining equipment, soft moans, or the lack thereof, indicating which ones were still semi-conscious, and which ones were out cold.

The three dozen figures striding through the middle of the cavern did not pay the fallen soldiers the slightest attention, and what few sounds the troops made were masked by mechanical whirings, heavy footfalls, and, of course, witty banter.

... well... banter at least.

"See, what'd ah tell y'all?!" remarked the red-suited figure in the lead to an identical red-suited figure walking alongside him. "Nobody ever beats Billy Numerous!"

A chorus of enthusiastic replies from the dozens of exact replicas of the speaker only added to the surreality of the situation, but the four people walking along who _weren't_ clones of the crimson-clad southerner took it all in stride, for while Billy was congratulating himself for having made such a mess of the security guards who had tried to stop them, Gizmo and Mammoth were engaged in what was apparently a much more important pass-time: Whining.

"Are we there yet?"

"Yeah, how much further we goin'?"

"Shut up, both of you," said Jinx, glancing left and right through the forest of Billys as she tried to pick out the appropriate path.

"We've been down here forever!" said Gizmo, "I need to recharge my batteries!"

"I told you to bring extra, didn't I? And what are you complaining about? You're not even walking!"

Gizmo crossed his arms and muttered something under his breath, as the two jets emerging from his backpack harness floated him over fallen guards and debris. Jinx chose to pretend she hadn't heard what he'd said as she consulted the map in her hands.

"Should be around... somewhere..."

A grin crossed her face a moment later as she spotted a small tunnel branching out from the main cavern and running deeper into the mine. Without a word, she walked quickly towards it, leaving the others to follow. The line of electric lights hung overhead led directly into the corridor, as did a rail cart line, marking it out as a location of some importance within the underground maze.

"Yo, Jinx?"

Jinx glanced back absentmindedly as See-More caught up to her, leaving Mammoth and Gizmo to bring up the rear along with Billy Numerous, once more re-united with all of his selves.

"What is it?" Jinx asked, inflecting her voice with fatigue to signal how little she wanted to hear any more complaints.

"Relax," said See-More, "I was just wonderin' what we're doin' down here. You said we were gonna take Billy for a test, but why here?"

"We're in a diamond mine, genius," said Jinx deadpan. "What do you think we're here for?"

"Yeah," replied See-More, still confused, "but I don't see any diamonds. Are we s'possed to be diggin' em out of the wall or somethin'?"

Jinx sighed and growled to herself. "When they dig the diamonds out of the ground, they store them in a secure place inside the mine before they ship them to the jewelcutters. We're gonna raid it."

See-More let a smile cross his face. "Sounds good. So where is it?"

"If this map is worth anything, then it should be right about... there."

Ahead, the tunnel divided into two different shafts, the lights splitting and proceeding in both directions. The rail tracks however led left only, and from the fork in the tunnel, Jinx could see that the leftmost branch came to an abrupt halt ten yards further down, where the way was blocked by a solid steel door. Jinx turned and waved up the other Hivers, and stood back to watch as See-More confirmed that there was a vault of some sort behind the barrier, Gizmo went to work trying to open it, and Mammoth and Billy watched for any further interference from whatever guards might still be poking around.

Gizmo reported that the door was "trivial" to hack, and would be open in a couple minutes, and Jinx allowed herself to think about the real purpose of this heist for a moment. She glanced back at Billy Numerous, who was, she was displeased to note, blabbering with Mammoth over the proper way to deep fry a whole turkey. No genius, that one, but he'd managed to hold his own pretty well with the guards on the way in, and he didn't seem _too_ annoying. Of the six or seven replacements the Hive Five had tested out to replace Private Hive (who had up and left after the disaster with Mother May-Eye), Billy seemed to be the best prospect.

That said more about the others than it did about Billy himself, but Jinx supposed she was lucky not to have attracted another Superhero on deep cover...

"Ha! Got it!"

As usual, all she needed to do was give Gizmo a computer to hack, and all complaints vanished. She adopted a feral grin as Gizmo pushed the door open and flew into the vault. Jinx and the others followed him in, finding themselves inside a metal cube twenty feet to a side, the walls covered in locked metal boxes, like the safety deposit boxes in a bank. On the opposite wall was a special box, three times larger than the others, fitted with a combination lock, clearly holding something important, and she walked straight over to it as the others began to burn, cut, tear, or pry their way into the various smaller boxes to get at the valuables inside. With a wave of her hand, she smashed the lock on the front of the larger box, and opened the door.

Jackpot.

Inside the metal box sat a single diamond the size of a small peach. Oblong and flat, like an enormous beetle, it positively glowed a pale blue in the fluorescent light of the vault. Carefully, she plucked it out of the small safe, and held it up to the light, letting it sparkle as she turned it slowly this way and that. The others all stopped what they were doing as they saw the enormous gemstone, and whistled, chuckled or simply gazed on appreciatively.

"Whoa!"

"Look at _that_!"

"Hot damn..."

"That's gotta be worth a lot!"

The last comment engendered a smirk from Jinx. "We're not fencing this one," she said, clearly uninterested in hearing objections. "This one's mine."

Puzzled looks were exchanged. "What?" asked Gizmo. "Why? That thing's gotta be worth millions!"

"Yeah," asked See-More, more confused than upset. "What do you want with that?"

"None of your business, okay?" she snapped, clasping the diamond in her fist. "Finish up here and let's get going."

Her orders did not quite carry the note of command she might have hoped for, as all four of the others rolled their eyes (or eye), and chuckled. See-More even nudged Mammoth with his elbow. "I guess diamonds really _are_ a girl's - "

Jinx whirled around, shooting See-More a look of pure venom. "Finish that sentence and watch what happens. I dare you."

See-More took one look at his team leader and elected to refrain from further comment, and Jinx did not stick around to hear the rest, stepping out of the bank vault to wait for the others to finish with their rounds of theft. In no time at all, all five of them (more if you counted Billy's doubles) were walking back the way they had come, all but Jinx loaded down with diamonds of all shapes and colors, bragging to one another about the amazing stuff they were to buy with their shares. Jinx alone remained silent and unburdened, the brilliant gemstone held safely in her pocket as she let Mammoth and Gizmo take the lead, and tried to trace the shortest route back to the surface on her map.

"Yo, Jinx?" asked See-More. "How're we gettin' outta here?"

"In handcuffs."

Jinx had only a bare second to register that someone else had answered before she walked straight into Mammoth, who had come to an abrupt halt in front of her. Bouncing off of him, she stopped as well as she saw the one thing she had hoped most of all not to see tonight.

Or rather the six things.

All six of the Teen Titans were standing in the middle of the enormous cavern the Hivers had been traversing only five minutes before. Robin stood out in front, his staff held like a flagpole, his perpetual smirk of smug superiority written on his face. To his left and right were arrayed the other Titans in a line. Raven, cloaked in shadow like a living nightmare, floating several inches above the ground with dark energy sheathing her hands. Starfire, her eyes and fists blazing a radioactive green, poised on the balls of her feet to launch either into the air or directly into one of the Hivers. Cyborg, looming larger even than Mammoth, arms crossed, feet planted wide, scowling at them as if the Hive were less than dirt beneath his metal feet, a gross inconvenience to his time. Beast Boy, crouched down like a coiled spring, a wicked grin on his face, standing far enough from his teammates that Jinx knew he was already planning on assuming some gargantuan form and ripping into them. Last of all, nearest to Robin, a boy she didn't recognize in person but knew to be Devastator, the newest Titan, decked out in red and orange and holding at his side a baton made of flaming steel like a branding iron hot off the coals, whose gaze was darting from one Hiver to the next too quickly for her to read.

Robin, as always, commanded all the attention, stepping forward with just the slightest swagger and flipping his staff around into a ready position. "Give it up, Jinx," he said in the tough-guy voice he _had_ to have learned from Batman. "You're outmatched this time."

They were, Jinx knew, but Mammoth took a step forward himself and clenched his fists. "You guys can't stop us!" he thundered back at the Boy Wonder. "Go crawl back to your tower before we break your legs!"

"Yeah," chimed in See-More, sliding his visor's adjustment knob over to a combat setting. "This stuff's ours now. You want it, you're gonna have to come and take it from us!"

Despite her best attempts, Jinx couldn't help but smile a bit. No matter that the last five times they had faced the Titans had all turned into disasters, her friends were all ready for round six at the drop of a hat.

Cyborg scoffed at the other Hivers, par for the course for him as his human and robotic eyes both fell on Billy. "Doin' some recruiting?" he asked.

Jinx stepped past Mammoth and See-More as Gizmo and Billy stepped out to form a line on either side of her. "If you can," she said, giving Devastator her most disparaging look, and grinning as she saw him flinch, "so can we."

"Always one step behind," said Robin, and the smug satisfaction written on his face as he said it gave Jinx the urge to cave his it in. "We've got you six on five. Give up the goods and come quietly."

She didn't even have to glance over at Billy, for he took his own cue, stepping forward with a grin. "Now you listen here, stop-light. _Nobody_ outnumbers Billy Numerous..."

Three seconds later, a small army of clones stood all about the cavern, encircling both Titans and Hivers, the former blinking in disbelief, the latter cackling to themselves as they faced down their nemeses. This had not been what Jinx had had in mind when she had decided to take Billy on a field test, but given the circumstances, it would do.

"What was that about us leaving in handcuffs?" asked Jinx, relishing the look of undisguised astonishment on Cyborg's face more than she had imagined humanly possible. She snapped her fingers, more for effect than anything else. That would come later.

"Take 'em down."

Her teammates obliged.

As always in these sorts of fights, complete anarchy ensued. She knew the Titans usually tried to coordinate, but coordinating the Hive was like herding cats... deaf cats. Accordingly, she let the others pick their targets and go to work while she chose one for herself. With no time to sit back and formulate even a personal plan, she simply conjured a hex and flung it into the midst of the Titans to scatter them. The sea of Billy Numerouses (Numeri?) enveloped her a second later, blocking off her view of what was going on, and she lightly flipped up into the air to try and get a better picture. A starbolt nearly took her head off, and she aborted her jump, landing hard atop an overturned forklift, and whirled about to fire back, but Starfire was already gone, flipping through the air like a gnat, trying to avoid See-More's laser beam as it carved random patterns into the cavern wall in pursuit of her.

A blueish glow lit up the immediate area and half a dozen of Billy's doubles went flying about like bowling pins as Cyborg's sonic cannon cut a swathe through the sea of red around him. Cyborg himself, standing out as always ('_not_ as always, actually', she thought with a grimace), had his back to her, a perfect target almost as large as the proverbial broadside of a barn. She summoned another hex and another and another, and hurled them down at Cyborg like a vengeful goddess hurling thunderbolts, pelting the ground around him and upsetting his balance, sending him toppling over. Allowing herself a triumphant cackle, she gathered up the entropic energy she wielded for yet another strike, and was preparing to unleash it when the forklift blew up.

Had something _hit_ the forklift, she could have dealt with it, but instead the entire machine went off like a bomb with no warning whatsoever, and the next thing she knew she was flying through the air before slamming into the rock wall of the cavern and sliding to the ground. The surprise was worse than the impact itself, and she sat up and looked around for the culprit even as she gathered her energy about her. For a second she thought Robin had tossed an explosive birdarang her way, but Robin was on the other side of the cavern dealing with Mammoth and a half dozen Billies. So who could...

... oh right... _him._

Devastator was standing a good fifty paces away, keeping near to Cyborg, but while Cyborg was facing away from her, trying to fight off part of Billy's one-man army, Devastator was looking straight at her, his baton still smoldering red and pieces of the detonated forklift laying all around him. She scrambled back to her feet, thankful that the newest Titan hadn't had the presence of mind to follow up his attack, and flipped open her Hive communicator. Devastator was small potatoes.

"Gizmo," she said, "deal with the newbie. I want Cyborg."

For _once_, Gizmo didn't respond with a smart remark. "Got it," he said, "he's toast," and Jinx saw Gizmo fire a barrage of rockets at Raven to keep her occupied while he disengaged and turned around to actually follow orders. Miracles never ceased.

Then again, it was hardly miraculous for Gizmo to want to show off, and show off he proceeded to do, screaming his own brand of garbled insults and launching another hail of micro-missiles out of his harness at Devastator, who prudently sought shelter behind a massive stalagmite, the front half of which disintegrated beneath Gizmo's assault. Jinx shook the rock fragments off of her shoulders and sprinted towards Cyborg, who spotted her as he was turning to support Devastator, and opened fire with his sonic cannon. Too little, too late. Jinx easily sidestepped the blue beam and flung a hex at the ceiling above Cyborg, which crumbled like stale bread. Cyborg had no choice but to fall back or be crushed, and selected the former option, diving backwards as a piece of rock the size of a car shattered against the spot he had just been standing. Jinx laughed again, and prepared to follow up her attack when she heard a series of blasts from her left, and turned to see something she had not expected.

Gizmo was laying on the ground on his back, screaming nonsensical epithets at Devastator, who, confronted with Gizmo's rocket assault, had apparently targeted the pair of jet boosters the pre-teen gear-head was using to fly with, and blown both of them to bits. A small carpet of debris rained down around Gizmo as he tried to struggle back to his feet, held down by the unaided weight of his own harness. He pressed a button, and four mechanical spider legs emerged from his backpack, hoisting him back into the air with a flourish, but before Gizmo could so much as gloat over this accomplishment, Devastator stepped forward and swung his baton like an orchestra conductor, up, down, left and right, and blew all four limbs off at the roots, dumping Gizmo unceremoniously back onto the ground.

Gizmo, understandably enough, was livid. "_You snot-guzzling, crud-munching..._"

"Next time, don't use pure titanium," said Devastator as he moved forward, presumably to finish the job. Though smallest of the Titans, Devastator was still much bigger than Gizmo, and had a flaming metal baton to boot, while Gizmo was laying on his back like an overturned turtle. Much as Jinx wanted to to get some payback from Cyborg, this decision was open and shut.

Devastator never knew what hit him as Jinx blindsided him with a wave of entropy, tossing him back away from Gizmo into the mouth of the tunnel that led to the vault they had just ransacked. In retrospect, she realized with a frown, sending Gizmo after Devastator was a mistake. She should have handled him herself before dealing with Cyborg. Fortunately, there was time enough to rectify that little error...

Devastator stood back up with a groan as Jinx moved past Gizmo to face him down. He froze as he saw who was advancing towards him, an understandable reaction maybe, but one that would cost him, as she instantly took the opportunity to blast him again. The pink wave of energy hit him square in the chest and threw him fifteen feet down the tunnel, near to where the tunnel forked into two branches. Rapidly, he scrambled back to his feet, narrowly evading a third energy wave and snapping his baton like a tennis player. Jinx had no idea what he was targeting, but she did not wait around to find out, and rolled forward, narrowly avoiding the chorus of explosions that erupted from the ground behind her, and coming up with yet another entropic blast, which caught Devastator in the stomach and slammed him back into the wall, hard enough to shake dust loose from the light fixtures above.

"Should'a stayed home, newbie," said Jinx with a grin as Devastator moaned softly, holding his stomach with one hand as he lifted his baton and swung it around again. Jinx heard the wall behind Devastator's head creak as a lunchbox-sized chunk of it was blasted towards her like a cannonball. The rock would have clocked her right in the nose, but with a flick of her wrist, her entropic powers shattered it to pebbles. Brushing them out of her face, she raised her other hand and blasted Devastator's baton from his grip, instantly extinguishing its flames as she tossed it down one of the two tunnel branches.

The rest of the fight still raged behind her, and thus there was no time for the customary bragging that normally would have gone on. Shorn of his weapon, Devastator had a bit of a deer-in-headlights look to him as he stared at Jinx, unsure of what he ought to do.

"Who taught you how to fight?" she asked, "your grandmother?" She knew the real answer of course. Devastator's stance, his mannerisms, everything smacked of Robin's tutelage, but this kid was no Robin, and to prove the point, she conjured forth another hex in one hand and casually pitched it right at Devastator, planning to knock him unconscious in a single solid blow.

The plan was working perfectly right up until the point where the floor exploded under her feet.

What with the flames and all, Jinx had rather assumed that the baton was integral to Devastator's powers. It appeared however that this assumption had been in error, for no sooner had she reached forward to blast him than he aimed his hand out at the ground beneath her and the rail car tracks she was standing on blew apart, throwing her into the air like a rag doll. Her hex, already in mid-launch, flew upwards and back as she flipped end over end, slamming not into Devastator, but into the tunnel ceiling behind her, which shattered like a pane of glass, weakened already by the repeated impacts and shocks of the raging battle. With a roar like a raging waterfall, the tunnel supports gave way, and the entire ceiling came crashing down in an avalanche of rock and dirt. Jinx managed to hit the ground rolling, narrowly avoiding being crushed under thirty tons of rubble, and blindly scrambled ahead as the entire tunnel section imploded. Desperately lunging forward to get out of the way of the cascading debris, she hit the ground just as a fist-sized rock smashed into the back of her head, and everything went black.

**O-O-O**

Jinx woke up with a splitting headache.

She was laying on the bare ground up against the side of the mining tunnel, completely covered in dirt, the black shawl around her shoulders torn and flecked with bits of crystal. Her hair was matted with what she hoped wasn't blood, and her entire right side was on fire from where she had slid across the uneven rock floor. With one hand to her head, she carefully picked herself up off the dirt. Her sleeve was torn, her arm scraped raw, but nothing seemed to be broken, and though scuffed and bruised, she didn't appear to be bleeding. Still, her arm throbbed mercilessly, and she grimaced as she rubbed it with her other hand, blinking in the dim light cast by what few overhead bulbs were still working as she tried to figure out what the hell had happened.

By the look of things, the broad tunnel between the main cavern and the fork that led to the diamond vault had completely collapsed, a massive wall of dirt and rock blocking the passage from end to end. The fork itself was still clear, the supports having held, but the way back to her teammates was sealed by tons and tons of debris. She was standing on one side of the tunnel fork, staring at what could well have been fifty solid yards of imploded debris, so thick that she could hear nothing of what was happening on the other side of it. Around the corner to her right lay the diamond vault they had just robbed, but already she knew that was a dead end, while behind her, the tunnel stretched on deeper into the dark reaches of the mining complex.

"David, come in! Can you hear me?"

Jinx' eyes shot open, for though the voice that had just spoken was soft and distorted and cross-cut with static, she recognized it instantly as Cyborg's, and she froze as still as a statue and did nothing but listen and try to pinpoint where it was coming from. There was a shuffling sound from around the corner, from the other fork of the tunnel that led to the diamond vault, and Jinx heard someone stand up with a groan and the soft click of a communicator flipping on.

"Cyborg? Hello? Is anyone there?"

The reply from Cyborg's tinned voice was almost instantaneous, and the relief in his tone was obvious even through the static. "God_damn_," he said, "are you all right, man?"

There was a soft groan and a rattling of small pebbles as whoever was speaking shook himself off. "I think so," came the reply, followed by a moment's silence. "The... the tunnel's blocked off."

"Yeah," said Cyborg, "Jinx brought the whole thing down when you blasted her. Where are you?"

"I'm... I'm not sure, lemme look around." Jinx heard the sound of shuffling and footsteps turning in place, and very, very carefully, she made her way towards the corner of the fork in the tunnel. Even had she not recognized the voice from before, Jinx already knew who it was that would be waiting for her around the corner. Her suspicion was confirmed a moment later when she peered around into the tunnel that led to the vault, and saw a red and orange-suited figure standing with her back mostly to her. Quickly she ducked down behind the corner, barely peeking around it so as not to be seen in the low light of the hallway.

Devastator turned around several times, clearly without a clue in the world that he was not the only one who had survived the cave-in. "I'm in front of a... metal door of some kind."

"That's the vault door," said Cyborg. "There should be a fork in the tunnel near you..."

"Yeah... I think I see it," said Devastator as he continued to describe his surroundings to Cyborg. Jinx ducked back entirely to avoid being spotted as she tried to decide what to do with this Titan. Much as she relished the idea of beating his head in while Cyborg watched helplessly over the communicator, Devastator was, as before, small potatoes. She had the diamond after all, and nothing else was...

Jinx froze, her hand held over her unexpectedly empty pocket, as the conversation between Cyborg and Devastator filtered back to the forefront of her mind, and she peered once more around the corner.

"... tip said somethin' about a jewel heist," said Cyborg. "The Hive are idiots, but they wouldn't'a just left a four hundred carat diamond behind. One of 'em musta taken it from the vault."

"Yeah, well, whoever had it, they don't anymore," said Devastator back as he reached down into his own pocket and pulled out the very diamond Jinx had expected to find safe in hers. She realized with a curt groan that it must have fallen loose when she had dove to avoid being crushed by the collapsing tunnel. Just great...

Despite the situation, Devastator spent a moment turning the priceless diamond over in his hand before putting it back in his pocket and returning his attention to Cyborg.

"Is there any sign of Jinx?" asked the half-robotic Titan. The Hive all scattered after the cave-in. BB and Robin are tryin' to track 'em down now, but none of us saw where she got to."

Devastator glanced around again, and Jinx ducked back. "No... I don't see her," he said, and a note of worry entered his voice. "You don't... you don't think she got..."

"No way," said Cyborg with certainty, and Jinx couldn't help but smirk. As if a cave-in was enough to take her down. "She probably snuck off somewhere in the middle of the fight. You just sit tight, okay? Star, Raven and I are gonna get you out of there."

"Right," said Devastator, who didn't sound too overjoyed at the prospect of staying here too long. "Just be careful, okay? I can see stress fractures in this rock. You try to blast your way in here, and the whole complex could collapse..."

"Hey, you're talkin' to Cyborg here," said Cyborg in that ultra-confident tone Jinx remembered with something less than fondness. "I got everything covered. Don't you worry about a thing."

Devastator gave a nervous laugh. "Sure," he said. "Devastator out." The Titan flipped the communicator shut and took a long, deep breath, before drawing his baton once more. As Jinx watched, the flames surrounding the baton sprang back to life at his very touch, and yet she noted that despite the fact that they were licking his hand, he showed no sign of pain or discomfort. With his other hand he took the diamond back out of his pocket, holding it up to the red light emitted from the baton and turning it this way and that to watch the flames dance within the heart of the gem.

As carefully and quietly as a cat, Jinx slowly stepped around the corner. Devastator's back was to her, his attention focused on the priceless jewel in his hands. Carefully, she formed a hex in her hands, taking her time so as to make no noise whatsoever, bringing her arm up to pitch it into Devastator's back like a baseball. One clean, powerful shot would be enough. Carefully she collected the entropic energy, and -

The Hive communicator at her hip chose that moment to speak. "Gizmo to Jinx! Jinx! Jinx, where are you?!"

Both Jinx and Devastator froze.

And then, both Jinx and Devastator acted at once.

Jinx lunged forward with a shout, flinging the stored up energy of her hex at Devastator, but her moment's hesitation had doomed her brilliant plan, and Devastator dove to the side as the energy struck the vault door and tore it to ribbons of steel like construction paper. He hit the ground rolling, and snapped his baton backwards as he did so, a pair of nearby rocks blasting towards her like grapeshot. One missed high, one she disintegrated with a flick of her wrist, and with her other hand she broke off the bases of a series of stalactites looming from the tunnel overhead, which plunged down towards Devastator like missiles.

Devastator's reaction was faster than she had expected. The briefing had claimed that he had trouble with complex compounds like rocks, yet faced with them, he drove his baton-hand up as though trying to impale something above him, and the three nearest stalactites instantly burst like artillery shells. The rest shattered against the floor of the tunnel. Unfortunately for him, Jinx had not been waiting to determine the results of her attack, and a half-second later, a wave of entropic energy that she had sent roiling along the ground slammed into him and unceremoniously swept him through the open vault door and into the vault itself, where the aftereffects of her entropy caused half of the unopened jewel boxes inside the vault to explode, showering Devastator with diamond dust and semi-precious stones.

"Is that all you've got?" she asked with a grin as he scrambled back to his feet.

He replied by snatching a fist-sized chunk of quartz off the ground and spiking it at her as though they were playing dodge ball. Jinx spun like a dancer to avoid the thrown rock, and yet while the quartz missed, it exploded as soon as it was within two feet of her, threw her off her balance, and sent her tumbling to the ground. Or rather it would have, except the floor beneath her feet blew up as she was falling to meet it, the blast catching her right in the sternum and flipping her over twice before dumping her unceremoniously on her back.

... _now_ she was mad.

She did not do anything so undignified as scramble, but instead positively leaped back up, conjuring entropic energy from both hands and hurling it at Devastator, who had emerged from the interior of the vault and taken what cover he could behind fallen rocks and piles of debris. He swung his baton like he was orchestrating some mad symphony and pieces of the wall and ceiling burst at his command, but she contemptuously swatted the projectiles he fired at her aside with waves of entropy and tore his cover apart with repeated bursts of the same. Running out of things to hide behind, he desperately targeted the floor beneath her feet, but she was ready this time, and used the blast to flip backwards like a gymnast and land perfectly on her feet, before conjuring another hex and -

All of a sudden, the fight stopped.

Devastator's baton still flared, the hex still crackled in her hands, and yet both Jinx and Devastator stopped dead in their tracks as the entire tunnel began to shake and quiver. Dust and pebbles fell from the ceiling as a mighty rumble filled the air around them. Having suddenly forgotten both Devastator and diamond, Jinx rapidly looked around the quaking corridor, before her eyes fell upon Devastator again, who was staring at her with a wide-eyed expression that told her he had just come to the same conclusion she did. And then the ceiling caved in with a roar, and both of them ran.

The tunnel collapsed in sections, the most badly damaged ones first, and it was this fact alone which prevented both Jinx and Devastator from being crushed into jelly. Jinx did not look back, nor did she even consider what Devastator might be doing, as she sprinted around the corner and down the tunnel that led into regions unknown, and the full-throated roar of splintering beams and imploding rock behind her told her everything she needed to know about what would happen should she trip. She did not. Rocks thundered in her ears, clapping against one another like enormous castanets, until finally a slab of granite as large as an office building crushed a section of the tunnel several feet behind her, and then suddenly everything was quiet again.

Jinx ground to a halt, one hand on the tunnel wall, listening and feeling for more tremors. For a few seconds, she could hear nothing save for the sound of her own thumping heart and ragged breath, and it took a moment before she even realized that there was still someone else in the tunnel with her.

Devastator was standing on the other side of the tunnel, doubled over and trying to catch his breath, his baton still held in one hand, once more reduced to bare steel. He was more winded than she was, at least from the looks of things, but that didn't stop him from watching her even as he struggled to catch his breath, shifting his baton around to his right hand as though she wouldn't notice. For her part, Jinx had dispelled the entropic energy she was using when she started running, but it was still there, ready to call upon should there be a need for round three.

Another tremor, much more subdued, shook the area, and both of them froze and listened and watched for any sign that it was about to become necessary for them to run again, but it settled down without further collapse, serving only to underline just how bad an idea it would be to resume hostilities when one of the two of them wielded raw entropy, and the other supernatural demolitions

It was an idea that Devastator had apparently gotten as well, for he made no effort to restart the fight. Instead he was watching her like a rat watching a mountain lion, saying nothing, just waiting for her to move or act. Jinx got the sense that Devastator knew himself to be outmatched, and decided to try and play his fear.

"Give up?" she asked.

He didn't reply immediately, but took a few moments to consider it. Still, his answer was not 'Yes' or 'I surrender,' but "How about a truce?" Apparently he wasn't quite _that_ afraid of her.

"Give me the diamond, and I'll think about it."

His free hand automatically slid to his side where the diamond was being held. "No way," he said.

She gave him her best maniacal grin, the one that never failed to unsettle the other Hivers. "You know what happens if we start up again, don't you?"

"Yeah," he said, very nervous but still defiant. "And so do you."

"So what makes you think I won't do it?"

"Because Cyborg says you're not crazy."

That one stopped her short.

She continued to watch him with a defiant look, but while he seemed to be trying to phase through the wall away from her, he gave no indication that he was about to hand the diamond over to her, and she knew that even if she could take him down conventionally, there was no way she could do so before he made use of his own powers and potentially killed them both. Accordingly, all she could do was groan in frustration. "Fine," she said. "Keep it for now." She pulled her own communicator from her belt, the one Gizmo had interrupted her over, and contemptuously turned her back on Devastator, flipping it open. "Gizmo?"

A screenfull of static greeted her, along with a flashing yellow light in the corner of the communicator's screen that indicated no signal. She pointed the communicator in several directions, even hit it a few times, but it stubbornly refused to show her anything other than a black and white haze. However much of the tunnel had imploded, it was blocking the signal.

She looked back over at Devastator, who appeared to be laboring under the same difficulties, his own Titans communicator in-hand, the hiss of static emanating from it. The Titan using it glanced furtively at Jinx, as if not entirely certain she wasn't about to leap for his throat or blast him with a hex, and after a few more moments fiddling with the thing, he clipped it back onto his belt and turned to face her.

"I can't get through," he said, as if she was somehow in doubt. "Can - "

"No," snapped Jinx angrily, frowning as she considered the massive granite slab that had fallen behind them. "And since you decided to fight instead of just handing the diamond over, now we're stuck here."

Cyborg would have protested that he had done no such thing, that _she _had been the one to fire the first spell, but Devastator did not. "Cyborg said they were tunneling through to get us out. All we need to do is..."

"That was before all this," said Jinx. "Even if we didn't just collapse the entire cavern, what are they gonna do? Drill through a hundred yards of solid rock?"

"If they have to," replied Devastator, who was clearly more scared than he was trying to let on. "They're not gonna give up just because of another cave-in."

"The hallway _imploded_, you idiot! There's no tunnel left for them to follow. They could dig for three weeks and never find us."

Plainly, Devastator had not considered that possibility, and even in the dim light of what few overhead bulbs were still working, he quite clearly turned paler, his hands starting to quiver visibly. Jinx felt her own stomach starting to tighten at the prospect of being trapped down here to starve to death, and quickly made sure not to let any of it show, certainly not in front of a Titan.

"Well... I mean... what about this tunnel we're in?" asked Devastator. "Do you know where it goes?"

Jinx growled as she took the map out of her pocket and unfolded it once more. After a few moments' study, she shook her head. "This thing doesn't show it. It must be too new..."

"... or too old," ventured Devastator, who was looking up at the ceiling and walls. "This place looks like it's ready to collapse too."

"Well then maybe you shouldn't blow anything else up?" Jinx asked rhetorically.

"Yeah," snapped Devastator back bitterly, "instead you should throw more of those pink things around. They really help."

Jinx nearly blasted him then and there for that, but the threat of imminent death managed to stay her hand. "... all right," she said through clenched teeth. "No more powers until it's not gonna kill us both?"

"Sure..." agreed Devastator with undue haste.

A soft groan, like a tree moaning in a windstorm, emerged from somewhere overhead, and more dust filtered down from the ceiling. Devastator backed several paces down the tunnel, and Jinx had to remind herself not to do the same, at risk of appearing worried.

"I _really_ think we should get out of here," said Devastator, and Jinx had to admit that she agreed, not that she was about to tell the Titan that. Instead she wordlessly turned and started walking down the tunnel, leaving Devastator to catch up or not as he liked. She did not glance back to see that he was following her, acting as if, as far as she was concerned, he was the last thing on her mind. It wasn't true of course, for he still had the diamond, but she had a feeling that he wouldn't fall too far behind.

And besides, it wasn't like he had anywhere else to go...

**O-O-O**

For a good hour, Jinx and Devastator walked down the abandoned mining tunnel in stony silence. Jinx refused categorically to so much as glance at Devastator, save for once or twice when she was certain he wasn't looking, giving off as best she could the impression that she had forgotten he was there. In reality, nothing could have been further from the truth, but no matter how much she forced herself to think, she could not come up with a way to divest Devastator of the diamond without potentially bringing the entire tunnel down on both their heads. Accordingly, she had decided to simply wait and see what opportunities presented themselves for getting the diamond back.

So far not much had developed. The hallway's uniformity was mind-numbing, no turns, no twists, no change in the dim overhead lighting that was somehow still deriving power despite all the cave-ins. By now they had to have covered at least three miles, but still there was no sign of anything up ahead, though Jinx supposed she should count herself as lucky that they hadn't come to a dead end.

She had taken the lead, if you could call it that. Devastator had stayed a few paces behind her at all times, probably wanted to keep her in sight, and she had been content to simply let him follow her. She wanted to put him off his guard, give him a chance to make a mistake and let her get the drop on him. A single good hex would do the trick, but she wasn't sufficiently confident that she could knock him out with one shot without drawing a reply. Getting the diamond would be of no use if it meant getting crushed to death. Neither of them had said a word since leaving the scene of the last cave-in, which was fine by Jinx, and apparently fine by Devastator as well. It wasn't as though they had a lot to talk about, after all.

The first interruption to their silent walk came suddenly.

One moment, Jinx had been walking under automatic control, concentrating intently on the problem of how to get the diamond away from Devastator, if only so that she wouldn't have to consider the problem of what they were going to do if this tunnel turned out to come to an abrupt end. The next, without any warning whatsoever, the entire ceiling gave way above their heads with a crash, dumping tons of loose dirt and sand down on top of them.

Jinx may not have been concentrating on her surroundings, but her reflexes were honed to a razor's edge, and she reacted automatically, diving forwards and hitting the ground in a tight roll, coming up on her feet and sprinting out of the way. Devastator, further back and with less experience under his belt, managed to avoid the bulk of the collapse, but could not avoid being clipped by it, and was driven to the ground under hundreds of pounds of sand and dirt.

As soon as it became clear that the rest of the tunnel wasn't about to implode, Jinx quickly decelerated to a stop, turning back to see what had befallen the Titan. Devastator was pinned face-down on the ground by an enormous pile of dirt, completely buried save for his head and his right arm, the rest of him held motionless by the weight of the collapsed debris, his baton having rolled out of reach over to the side of the tunnel. As she watched, he struggled to claw his way free with his one available arm, without success, finally looking up at her with an expression halfway between apprehension and expectation.

The look on Devastator's face brought a triumphant smile to hers. "You're not actually gonna ask me for help, are you?"

He tried to reply, but the weight of the debris was squashing the air out of his lungs, and he only managed a soft "please" before collapsing into a coughing fit.

She giggled as she opened her hand and let her entropic energy form into a hex. "Give me one reason why I shouldn't blow your head off and take the diamond."

"You'll... bring the... hallway... down."

She actually might, which she knew of course, that being the reason why she hadn't simply done so instead of asking. Entropy and bad luck were fine weapons, but not the most discriminating in terms of what they destroyed.

She shrugged and let the energy disperse. "Fine then," she said, crossing her arms, "I'll just wait for you to suffocate."

She had expected him to plead with her and beg for his life, which might have been fun. Instead however, he shut his eyes tightly and tried to steady what little breathing he still could do as he extended his one free arm as far as it could go. For a few moments, she wasn't at all certain what he was doing, and then she heard the rocks lining the tunnel near her starting to groan. She looked around, and saw, to her surprise, a layer of... frost... forming all over the walls and ceiling.

"What the - "

"Help me or... or I'll... blow the tunnel in..." choked Devastator between clenched teeth, his eyes still held shut.

Generally speaking, few things surprised Jinx, but this one did. "You're going to kill us both?" she asked, more confused than anything.

"That's up to... to you!" he managed to cough out. "I can't... I can't hold it... forever!"

Despite the warning, Jinx took a few seconds to consider the situation, watching Devastator, who cracked his eyes open and looked up at her expectantly, sweat standing out on his brow, either from the strain of maintaining the explosive energy, or the strain of breathing.

The suspense was apparently getting to Devastator. "Please!" he finally exploded. "I can't... I... _help m-_"

"Fine," she said, cutting him off, her voice glacially cool, or so she deemed it, and with a very controlled, casual gait, she walked over to the pile of dirt, crouched down, took his hand, braced herself, and pulled. Very slowly, Devastator came loose of the debris that was crushing the air out of his lungs, and he gasped for breath as his chest was released, before finally struggling the rest of the way out and flopping down onto his hands and knees in front of the dirt pile, breathing heavily.

Jinx crouched in front of him, frowning at how easy it would be to blast him or even to simply hit him over the back of the head and knock him cold, and yet he had those damned explosions ready to go in the walls and ceiling, like some kind of twisted version of a dead man's switch.

"I don't suppose you'll give me the diamond out of gratitude?" she ventured. What the hell, it was worth a shot.

Instead of defiantly refusing her, Devastator gulped down more air for a few moments before sitting up and shaking his head in incomprehension. "What do you _want_ with this diamond, anyhow?"

Jinx laughed. "It's worth a hundred million dollars, what do you think I want with it?"

"Yeah," said Devastator, "but you can't _sell_ it! Every newspaper in the world's been talking about this thing ever since they dug it up. What are you gonna do, walk into a jewelry store and say you found it lying in the gutter?"

"I don't _have_ to sell it to a jeweler you know," said Jinx with a frown.

"No, but you have to sell it to _somebody. _ Even a criminal wouldn't buy this, it'd be like putting up a sign saying 'I buy stolen goods, arrest me!'"

"Look who _cares_ why I want it," snapped Jinx, suddenly tired of the questions. "I want it. And I get what I want."

"Is that why you're stuck in a mining tunnel?"

Jinx refused to be baited. "_I'm_ getting out of here," she said, crossing her arms. "_You_ may not be. And _when_ I get out of here, it'll be with the diamond."

"Well since the instant you have the diamond you'll probably blow my head off, I think I'll keep it for now." He had apparently recovered sufficiently to be ready to move on, and stood up. "Let's go."

Jinx rolled her eyes as she stood as well. "Lead the way, fearless... wait a minute... what about those bombs you set?"

Devastator stopped. "Bombs?"

"The rocks you were gonna blow apart if I didn't pull you out."

"What, those?" asked Devastator, sounding genuinely confused. "I let those go once you pulled me out."

Externally, Jinx did her utmost not to appear perturbed. Internally, she was screaming very creative epithets at herself, Devastator, and whatever malicious god had set this situation up.

"Thanks, by the way..." offered Devastator, before turning and walking off down the tunnel.

"... don't mention it," said Jinx through clenched teeth, barely managing to keep the groan out of her voice as she turned and followed Devastator away from the dirt pile.

**O-O-O**

One could only keep one's mind focussed for so long before it began to slip. Jinx wasn't quite as bad as Mammoth or Gizmo, but hours of walking down the seemingly endless tunnel with nothing to occupy herself beyond plotting how to steal the diamond back from Devastator exceeded her attention span very quickly, especially since there was clearly no way either of them could take down the other while they remained underground. She neither knew nor cared nor asked what Devastator was thinking, but the mindless trudging seemed to be getting to him too, and given that fighting was out of the question, he appeared to think no harm of complaining.

"How far does this thing go?"

"I didn't _build _it," snapped Jinx. "I don't know if it goes anywhere."

"A six mile underground tunnel?" replied Devastator. "It goes somewhere."

"Eight," corrected Jinx, kicking a small rock aside and imagining any one of several people's heads stenciled upon it "at least eight so far."

"Whatever. Nobody carves an eight mile tunnel through solid rock for no reason."

"Well what makes you think _I_ know where it's going?"

Devastator didn't respond instantly, and she could see him eying her carefully. "Nothing," he said. "Nevermind."

She rolled her eyes and kept going, and Devastator made no further attempt to make conversation, but the almost oppressive quiet that wrapped around them once more left her with an urge to fill it with _something_, so fill it she did, as he had.

"Knowing my luck, it leads to a volcano or something."

"What do you mean?"

Jinx had no intention of explaining, but when she noticed suddenly that Devastator's footsteps had stopped, she turned back, only to find that he was staring at her with wide eyes, one hand on the handle of his baton, as though he was expecting her suddenly to attack. If he was trying to look scary, he failed miserably, but she did pause for a second. "What?" she asked.

"What do you mean by 'knowing my luck'?" he said, and there was a very serious edge to his question that had not been there before.

She blinked a few times and then addressed him like she was talking to a four-year old. "I'm bad luck," she said condescendingly, "where do you think I got the name Jinx? _Knowing my luck_, we're about to walk into a - "

"I _know_ your powers are all about bad luck," said Devastator, cutting her off, "But I thought we agreed not to use them until..."

Jinx rolled her eyes and groaned theatrically before lowering her head in frustration. It was enough to cause Devastator to fall quiet. "I don't just_ use_ bad luck you idiot," she said, "I _am_ bad luck. You know, just like Cyborg _is_ a jackass? I can't just switch it off whenever I feel like it."

He seemed to get the point. "... oh," he said, clearly embarrassed. Jinx considered pretending to be outraged and insulted, just for fun, but she decided against it. Right now all she wanted to do was get out of here alive, and with that damned rock.

"Do your homework next time," she said with a smirk, and turned away.

Devastator followed. "... sorry," he said.

She laughed. "Thanks, I really need your apologies. They make everything so much better."

Her sarcasm stung, she could tell, and he frowned. "Fine, I'm not sorry then. And by the way, Cyborg's not a jackass."

Of all the subjects she didn't want to talk about... and yet did she let it pass in silence? "Uh, _yeah_ he is."

"Just because he's a Titan doesn't make him..."

"First of all, yes it does, second of all, you don't know what you're talking about again, and third of all, _shut the hell up_, okay?"

She hadn't actually meant to say any of that, well... maybe the first part but... well it didn't matter now. Devastator was as surprised as she was, and she read the confusion on his face as plainly as a neon sign before he decided to back down.

"Fine... whatever you want..." he said, and turned, and continued on, shaking his head. And Jinx _knew_ she should have left it at that, and just walked on after him, except that... well goddamnit Cyborg being a Titan had _nothing_ to do with it, and this thing with her and Cyborg wasn't just some damned adolescent snit and...

"He joined the Hive, okay?" she said all of a sudden, and Devastator froze like he'd been suddenly placed into stasis. Only then did Jinx remember that Devastator had only been with the Titans for a few months. She waited for him to recover and to turn around, and before he could ask what the hell she was talking about, she answered his question for him.

"Robin sent him to sneak into the Hive academy and find out what we were up to. He joined us."

"I remember," said Devastator. "I mean... I remember he told me once. So what?"

"So _what_?" How could he not _see _this? "He didn't just join the academy, he joined the Hive Five, _us_! We gave him a communicator, an initiation, everything! I even took him to the stupid school dance! And what does he do? He turns around and stabs us all right in the back."

"You were trying to help Brother Blood build a superweapon!" protested Devastator

"That's not the point!" shouted Jinx. "Robin and the rest of those idiots stopped us from finishing that ion amplifier, but Cyborg actually joined us, promised to help us, tried to be our _friend_, and then pulled _that_! And the worst part is, he doesn't even think he did anything wrong! And you all _agree_ with him!" She spat on the floor of the tunnel. "'Jackass' is being charitable..."

"Jinx, I know Cyborg. He didn't go in there just to - "

"I don't _care_ why he went into the Hive," said Jinx, "I care that he did it. You know what it's like to find out one of your teammates has secretly been playing for the other side all along?"

"No," said Devastator, "but the _rest _of us sure as hell do."

"Oh, right, that thing with Terra? That makes it even worse! He _knew_ what that was like and he did it to all of us. Terra wasn't _our _plant, we didn't send her in to spy on you guys! You made all this noise about how bad that was, and then turned around and did the _same exact thing_ back to us!"

Devastator had no reply to that, but Jinx wasn't done. "I bet he jokes about it, doesn't he? Laughs about how stupid we all were to believe him? I know all of you guys think we're a bunch of idiots anyway, but - "

"He never mentioned it to me," said Devastator softly.

"Doesn't matter," she said with a wave of her hand. "he did it, and he meant to do it all along, and that's why he's a jackass and always will be. And I know he's your friend and all, and you guys are on the same side and I'm just a Hiver, but since you don't know a goddamn thing about it, shut up."

As was probably inevitable, Devastator didn't let that one pass quietly. "I _do_ know something about it," he said.

Jinx laughed out loud. "Really?" she asked with as much sarcasm as she could muster. "They picked you up _a month_ after the Terra thing, so I guess they weren't so afraid of it happening again, now were they?"

"You don't know what the hell you're talking about," said Devastator in what apparently passed for an intimidating voice. Jinx had been more intimidated by bowls of soup.

"No, really, I'm interested," pressed Jinx, still laying the sarcasm on as thick as butter on bread. "What do you know about this sort of thing? What with all your vast experience and everything in having people do that to - "

"I know that Raven's been expecting me to do the same damn thing ever since I _showed up_!" yelled Devastator angrily.

Both Jinx and Devastator let the echoes of Devastator's voice fade away, staring at each other in silence, before the essence of what he had just said gelled in Devastator's mind, and he clenched his eyes shut and lowered his head, growling at himself. "Shit..." was all he could say.

"... seriously?"

"God damnit..." whispered Devastator to himself in frustration, and did not raise his eyes.

Jinx laughed, a reaction clearly unanticipated by Devastator, but that was too bad. "Raven thought _you_ were a plant?" she said. "What? Did she think _we_ sent you or something?"

"How should _I_ know what she thought?" he snapped in annoyance as he looked back up at her. "She... suspected me for a while, okay? It's done."

Jinx crossed her arms. "I don't think it _is_ done..." she said with an appraising smile. "She still thinks that, doesn't she?"

"Not that it's any of your business, but _no_, she doesn't."

"You're lying," said Jinx, not that she was certain, but it seemed a safe bet. Why else would he still be upset by it?

"Whatever," said Devastator, which, Jinx noted, was not a denial. "The point is, I know what it's like to have people think you're a traitor without being one."

"Oh, so... you're not a plant?"

Devastator's reply was almost instantaneous. "Don't _even_ start that."

Jinx laughed and started to walk away. "Well you and Cyborg can go form the 'wrongfully accused' club then if you want, but I know what Cyborg is, and I won't just forget it."

"Whatever you want..." said Devastator, still clearly upset with himself for having let something slip, his mind obviously racing to determine what the implications might be.

"Relax," said Jinx, "I can't use it to kill any of you. All it means is that Raven's a bigger idiot than I thought."

"She's _not_ a... wait... what?"

"Anyone with _eyes_ can see you're not a plant." explained Jinx.

"How do _you_ know that?" asked Devastator.

"Well... for one thing, you're a terrible liar."

Devastator considered that one for a moment. "... really?"

"Oh _God_ yes. You're as bad as - "

But Devastator was never to know who else was as bad a liar as he was, for at that instant, with no prior sign of any instability, the lights failed.

The tunnel shook violently and there was a _loud_ crash, like another landslide, but before Jinx could locate the source of it and react appropriately, she was plunged into what was quite literally the most profound darkness she had ever imagined. The shift was so stark that she nearly fell over, for the darkness was _absolute_, no light of any sort in any direction whatsoever. Jinx' cat-shaped eyes usually afforded her excellent night vision, but this wasn't like the night, it was like someone had torn her eyes out and cast them on the floor. She could not see her hand in front of her face, could not see the hexes she reflexively conjured, simply, absolutely could not see.

... _now _they were in trouble.

"Oh shit..." she said, not caring this time who heard the fear in her voice. She groped outwards for the wall of the tunnel, and found it, pressing her hand against it tightly. "What the hell - "

"Jinx," came Devastator's voice from behind her, curt and sharp but surprisingly calm. "Don't move."

It was the last thing she had expected to hear. "What? What are you - "

"There's a big hole in the floor three inches in front of you and I can't remember if you can fly or not."

... well _that _certainly got her attention.

"How do... can you _see_?" she asked, suddenly worried that the lights were still working but that she had spontaneously gone blind.

"Er... sort of," said Devastator, clearing nothing up. "Hold on." A moment later, the immediate area was illuminated by a burst of red, and Jinx turned her head to see Devastator holding up his baton, wreathed at his command in red flames. The light it cast was enough to reveal the deep hole that indeed yawned right in front of her, but not much else.

"What the hell happened..."

"I don't know," said Devastator, looking around. "I think there was an shift or something. These holes all opened up, and the lights are dead."

Jinx turned to ask him what he was talking about, but Devastator was staring off into the darkness, not even glancing at the flaming baton-turned-torch he was holding. The light from the baton barely penetrated two feet into the omnipresent gloom, yet Devastator was squinting, as if staring off into the distance.

"I think... I think we're okay," he said carefully. "It looks like we can keep going, for a while at least."

Jinx didn't even try to disguise her confusion. "How the hell can you see anything?"

"I can't," he said. "I can sense it... sort of. I can sense the difference between the rock molecules and the air ones, like... look it's not important. I can see where we need to go..."

Jinx was well prepared to just take his word for it, especially as this little fact didn't help her a damn bit. "Well congratulations," she said. "Meanwhile I've got a little problem, so if you don't mind..."

"Here," said Devastator, turning his baton around to point the end of it at her. "I'll lead the way, just hold on and try not to trip."

Jinx blinked. Was he actually offering to... He certainly _sounded_ serious enough, and as she had just been saying, he was a terrible liar, but...

"What, you think I'm stupid?" she asked. "You'll lead me right off a cliff or something."

"If I wanted to do that, all I'd have to do is walk away and leave you here," said Devastator, a trifle annoyed by the sound of it. "Now come on,"

Jinx wasn't sure what to think. "... it's on fire," she said.

Now it was Devastator's turn to laugh. He touched the business end of the baton, still wreathed in flames, to the back of his free hand with no ill effect whatsoever. "It's not fire," he said. "It's some kind of weird energy field. It won't burn you."

She wasn't entirely sure she believed him, but she touched the end of the baton gingerly. It was warm to the touch, but not hot, and in fact seemed to be... pulsating somehow, from cool to warm and back again. She was not entirely certain she liked this plan... indeed she _was_ entirely certain she _didn't_ like it, but she held onto her end of the baton and looked up at Devastator, who was dimly visible in the red glow of the baton. "Go slowly," she said, trying to sound properly defiant and ignoring the obvious fact that he would go any damn pace he liked without reference to her, for she had run out of trump cards.

Still, rather than doing as she would have and reminding her of that fact, he just nodded. "Follow me," he said, and slowly he picked his way around the hole that had opened in the floor of the tunnel, and over the rubble that had fallen from the ceiling, and on down the tunnel. It was utterly nerve-wracking to be led into the blackness, avoiding chasms that just seemed to appear as if by magic in front of her feet, and yet clearly Devastator _could_ see, for he avoided each and every one of them easily, and soon enough they were clear of the more immediate obstacles, and the tunnel was relatively clear again, though still as dark as pitch.

"So wait a minute," said Devastator's dis-embodied voice from somewhere up ahead, for the baton's 'flames' had faded down to mere embers, and she was once more unable to see him. "You took Cyborg to a school dance?"

"I tell you what," said Jinx with a resigned sigh, "I'll pretend to forget what you said about Raven, and you never mention that again. Deal?"

That one provoked a laugh from up ahead. "Deal."

**O-O-O**

If it had been hard to measure time before, now it was impossible. They moved at what could charitably be called "crawl" speed down the tunnel for what seemed like a thousand years. She didn't like the idea that this Titan was the only thing preventing her from being lost in the darkness for all time, but she liked the idea of _actually_ getting lost down here a whole lot less, and so she put up with it. The flames on the baton had soon disappeared altogether, plunging her back into the absolute blackness of before, but that didn't seem to phase Devastator in the slightest, who pressed on with the same assurance she would have if she had only been able to see.

Still, even _this_ lost its novelty after a while, at least once she gained reasonable confidence that he wasn't about to walk her off a cliff either accidentally or on purpose. Once or twice she stumbled and lost her grip on the baton, but he always dutifully waited for her to get back up and pressed the metal stick into her hands before continuing. They didn't speak a whole lot, he appeared to need to concentrate in order to maintain whatever he was doing, and she needed all her wherewithall just to avoid falling. Other than the occasional warning of debris or a turn ahead, they passed the hours in silence.

Finally though, after God-knew how much time had passed, Devastator stopped. For a brief, horrible instant, Jinx worried that they had finally come to a dead end, but he disabused her of that notion immediately.

"I... I gotta stop for a while," he said, and his voice sounded pained, though of course she couldn't see what the problem was.

"What? Why?"

"I get..." he said hoarsely, "I get headaches when I do this for too long. I just... I just need a little bit, okay?"

It wasn't like she was in any position to tell him what he could and couldn't do just now, but if he wanted to ask her permission, she was willing to pretend. "All right," she said. "How long do you need."

"I don't know..." said Devastator. "There's... the wall's about a foot to your left, and there's nothing around here to fall into. Just... wait there or something."

She reached over and found the wall, and slid down it to a seated position. They had been walking for hours upon hours, and she hadn't realized how tired she was.

The sound of someone scuffing against the rock wall opposite her told her that Devastator was doing the same thing, and she heard him sigh with relief, probably when he switched off whatever his 'sensing' powers were. He was quiet for a few moments, then unexpectedly spoke up

"How long have we been down here?" he asked.

"I don't know," said Jinx, shaking her head even though she knew Devastator couldn't see her. "All night, probably."

He considered that for a moment. "If... if this tunnel doesn't go anywhere..."

"I _really _don't want to even think about that," she replied, not letting him get to wherever he was going.

His train of thought was apparently persistent. "I'm just wondering. I don't... know the rest of the Hive very well. Would any of them find us?"

"What?" barked Jinx back. "Of _course _they would! What, you think, because we're 'bad guys' we don't care what happens to each other? They're looking for us right now, or at least for me!"

"Calm down," said Devastator. "That's not what I meant. I meant _could_ any of them find us? I don't know what they all can do."

"Oh..." Jinx thought about it for a moment, but the more she thought, the more sure she was that the Hive had no idea where they were right now. For all of Gizmo's equipment or See-More's detection capabilities, neither of them were as good as Raven, Robin, or Cyborg at this sort of thing, and quite obviously _they_ hadn't found them yet.

"They... might," she said, not willing to say 'no' out loud. "I don't intend to leave it to them."

"Me neither," he said, "I was just wondering."

"Why?" she asked. "Afraid the Hive'll find us before your Titans do?"

"Aren't you afraid of the opposite?" he replied.

She honestly hadn't even considered it. "They'd have found us already if they could," she said. "Same with my friends. We're gonna have to get out of here ourselves."

"And what happens then?" he asked.

She could perhaps have spoken platitudes or lied, but that just wasn't her style. "Then I knock you out, take the diamond, and ransom you back to the Titans," she said.

It might have been the wrong thing to say, but Jinx was fairly certain she had this do-gooder's measure by now. Even if the sane thing to do was to leave her here, both of them knew that he wasn't going to do that.

He chuckled then, either because he didn't believe her or just at the absurdity of the situation, she couldn't tell. "We'll see," was all he would say.

"Oh, what?" she asked with a weary laugh. "Did you think you were taking me to jail?"

"I think I'm trying to get out of here," he replied, sounding equally tired. "I'll deal with that part once we're out, if that's okay with you."

"Not like I have a choice," she said, trying to make herself sound nonchalant and uncaring that this kid was the only chance she had of _ever_ getting out of here. Not for the first time, she wondered what in God's name she had been _thinking_ letting Mammoth carry all the flashlights...

Distant echoes rattled down the tunnel from Heaven-knew where, soft groans in the rock from unfathomable pressure being applied to some immovable object deep within the bedrock. She shuddered involuntarily, wishing she could see something, not that that would save her if the tunnel chose to collapse, but being stuck in a lightless tomb that threatened to implode at any time was enough to give anyone a bit of a scare after all. She cursed herself for being so nervous, especially in front of a Titan, and wondered for a second if Devastator was as well, and decided that he had to be, and that even if he wasn't, it was only because he could _see_ if he chose to, and then wondered if he was watching her right now, because how could she even tell if he was or not, and if he was then had he just seen her shivering and if so would he realize that this place was _really_ starting to -

"Jinx?"

"Yeah?" she replied instantaneously, and a moment later she actually _cringed_ at how nervous she had sounded just then, so much so that she didn't bother to reflect on the same stark sound in Devastator's voice.

"I was... just wondering..."

He trailed off, not saying what he was just wondering about. Was he actually wondering something, or just trying to think of something to say to fill the eerie near-silence that predominated. Either way, he didn't finish whatever he was trying to say, leaving it hanging, until Jinx couldn't stand it any more and blurted out "Well? What?" if only to be able to listen to something other than the groan of underground rock.

"This... Hive academy... the one Cyborg infiltrated... you were a student there?"

"Yeah," she said, "what about it?"

"I just... I don't get it," he said. "It was like a high school for bad guys?"

"Pretty much," she said. "Why?"

"Well... I mean how did you even get into that kind of a thing? It's not like they could have an open house..."

She chuckled. "How do you think we got in? We applied."

"We?"

"Me and Gizmo and Mammoth," she said, not sure where this was going, "We had to show 'em our stuff, beat up some goons, rob a jewelery store, Gizmo had to get some kinda age waiver from the Headmistress, but that's all there was to it."

"Who builds a school for villains?"

Jinx had wondered that herself more than once, but she feigned indifference. "Don't know, don't care. It was there, and we all applied as soon as we found out about it."

"Why?"

"What do you mean 'why'?" she replied. "How many villain academies do you think there are?"

"I never even knew there was one," he explained, "but I meant why the hell would you apply to a place to learn how to be a crook?"

"So that you can be a really good one?" suggested Jinx in a tone that was meant to indicate that Devastator was stupid for asking.

"Why would you want to be a crook in the first place?" he asked.

She smiled despite herself. Perhaps he was expecting her to have a epiphany? "Because I like messing with people," she said without even the slightest trace of remorse, "especially people who mess with me."

"Like the Titans?"

"Just like the Titans," she confirmed. "Like you. Like everybody."

"Wait a minute..." said Devastator, skeptically. "What are you talking about? Nobody messes with you guys except us, and we only do it whenever you go looking for it."

"Don't be an idiot," she scoffed at him, or at least at the darkness from whence his voice was emitting. "Nobody messes with us now that we're famous criminals and people know what happens if they piss us off. Try being the only kid in the home who doesn't want to sit around moping about their dead parents, or the only girl in your class who can beat up the boys. Try having pink hair and an attitude problem and having 'accidents' just 'happen' every time you walk over. Tell me how little _you _get messed with when half the kids are afraid to be in the same room with you, and the other half hate your guts, and the social workers are the same way."

Devastator didn't reply to that immediately, for which she was thankful, as she was in no mood to be accused, _again_, of being a spoiled brat by yet another sanctimonious asshole, but when he finally did answer, it was with something other than what she had anticipated.

"You were... you were in a foster center?"

The question took her aback a moment. "How did you..." she started to say, before she suddenly realized the extent of what she had just said, and stopped herself short. Now it was her turn to swear. "Shit," she said sharply, and groaned. "It's none of your business. You wouldn't know anything about - "

"Which one?"

She hesitated. "A... lot of them," she said, certain that there was something here she should have been seeing, but not what it was...

"Any... any in this state?" Devastator sounded... weird. Like he was _scared_ or something.

"They were state homes," she said, wiling to play along until she figured out what was...

"Were you ever in that pit up in Redding? Or the one in Bakersfield before the Wayne Foundation replaced it?"

Now how the hell did he...

... _no way._

"You _can't_ be serious," she said, her voice now matching his in terms of being weirded out.

"Since I was two," he said in a tone that was still betraying shock. "Until about six months ago."

"State homes?"

"State homes. Almost all of them, actually."

She hadn't been through the full circuit, but then she _had_ left early. "This is... too weird."

"Tell me about it," he replied. In some ways, she supposed she shouldn't be surprised. After all, _most_ metahumans, good or bad, were orphans, or at least most of the ones whose pasts and identities were known. Even so though, there was a far jump from that to...

"Do you think we ever met?" She knew she should be maintaining a facade of not giving a damn about this Titan, but this was just beyond strange, and she wanted to make sure they hadn't secretly known one another for years. _That_ would have been just too much.

"I er... think I'd have remembered you," was Devastator's tactful reply. "'Sides, you're... I mean I think you're a couple years older than me? We probably wouldn't have met."

It made sense. It was a _big_ system after all. Still, there was one way to be sure he wasn't just making it all up to mess with her.

"So, what were you in for?"

Someone faking it would either not have understood or pretended to get angry, but Devastator didn't even hesitate.

"Car wreck," he said. "What about you?"

That was all it took, and Jinx knew he was telling the truth, which meant of course that Devastator knew that the question would have sounded surprising or even rude to anyone but another orphan, as would her freely-given answer.

"I was abandoned."

There was a few seconds' pause. "I'm sorry," said Devastator.

She snorted. "Yeah, well, I'm not. They didn't want me, I didn't want them. Worked out for all of us."

"So then how'd you hook up with the other Hivers?"

"I told you already," she said, "I applied to the Hive."

"Yeah, but you said you already knew Gizmo and Mammoth then. Don't tell me _they_ were in the system too."

"Gizmo was," she said, and she knew in the back of her mind that she probably shouldn't have been talking about all this, but she just didn't care anymore. "I met him inside. We both left the place in Crescent City about four years ago."

"That was _you_?"

Jinx laughed. Runaways from foster care weren't all that uncommon, but runaways who literally blasted their way out... well that tended to draw attention. She could only imagine the stories that must have circulated after they left.

"So... why'd you guys leave?"

She scoffed at him. "Better question is, why didn't you?"

"Me?" he asked, sounding confused. "Why would I?"

"Why _wouldn't_ you? Why wouldn't anybody?"

"Jinx, this isn't a Dickens novel. We weren't in poorhouses eating gruel. I _know_ it wasn't that bad, even in the worst places, so what gives?"

"It wasn't that bad for you maybe. You could hide it."

"Hide what?"

"That you're weird. That you had powers. I'm bad luck, remember? People noticed. That's why I started hanging out with Gizmo."

"What, _Gizmo_ has bad luck too?"

"No," she said irritatedly, and groaned before explaining. "He was like six when I met him. The other kids picked on him a lot because he'd skipped two grades ahead and had glasses and hung out reading science magazines instead of dinosaur books or whatever kids are supposed to do. And because they thought he was really funny whenever he got mad. He'd shout at them all about how much he was going to kick their asses and everybody knew he was full of it. So I'd come in and scare 'em all off with a hex and he'd yell at me that he didn't need my help and he could take care of himself. Said his parents were mad scientists or something who got arrested for whatever reason and that he was gonna figure out how to break them out of prison because he was a genius." Jinx forebore to mention that she had found out years later that Gizmo's parents had simply died of some unspecified illness the year before she'd met him, and that they had been neither criminals nor mad scientists. Gizmo himself didn't know that she knew that...

"So... what happened then?"

What did he want, her life story? "We got sick of people picking on us because we were different than them. Because they were jealous. We were both smarter than any of them, and we both knew it, and that drove them crazy. So we busted out, learned how to steal things, ran into Mammoth and sort of made a team, and then we heard about the Hive academy, so we joined up." There was more to it than that of course, a _lot_ more to it than that, but she wasn't about to start telling Devastator every little thing about her.

And perhaps he guessed that, for he didn't follow up her little story with any other question. The silence reigned for a minute or so, before Jinx finally chanced a question of her own.

"What about you? Did you have a little band of fellow freaks too?"

The reply was somewhat more somber than she expected, and quieter as well.

"… no," he said. "I never… I never met anyone else like me. Least… not until I met the Titans."

There was something else going on there, something he wasn't saying, but oddly enough, she didn't feel like going after it, given the tone in Devastator's voice. Normally that was the opposite of what she would have done, but then she supposed he hadn't actually laughed in her face as she had half-expected him to. Accordingly, rather than messing with him further, she simply changed the subject.

"So, are you ready to go yet?"

"Huh?" Devastator sounded like he'd been woken suddenly from some deep thought. "Oh, um… not yet…" he said. "I just… I'm gonna just wait a little bit more. Just a few minutes. Is that okay?"

Would it have mattered if she said it wasn't? She didn't experiment. "Whatever you want," she said, sitting back against the rock wall of the tunnel. To be perfectly honest, she was pretty damn tired herself, and all the talking and surprises of the last few minutes hadn't helped her any. Neither one of them seemed inclined to continue the conversation, and the sounds of the rock creaking around them once more filled her ears, though this time she didn't feel the same chill of fear that she had before. A few more minutes, and they'd be on their way, after all, and she laid her head back and closed her eyes just to rest her eyelids before they got going again. It would just be a few minutes… just a few more minutes…

**O-O-O**

Jinx woke up with a start.

For a brief, horrible moment, she had no idea where she was, and the fact that everything was pitch black did not help matters in the slightest. She made a few gasping horrified sounds that she would have far preferred to take back, given the opportunity, before she remembered everything that had happened, and relaxed, chagrinned somewhat at having panicked in the first place. Hopefully Devastator hadn't heard any of that. Speaking of which…

"Devastator?" she called into the darkness.

There was no answer.

The very _instant_ that she realized that he hadn't answered, she began to be _very_ worried. Sixteen different scenarios, each more outlandish than the previous, entered her mind immediately, that he'd been crushed by another landslide or abducted by mole people or devoured alive by army ants, and that she was now stuck down here. And after the quarter second it took to run through all of those possibilities in her head, she suddenly realized the most likely one of all was that he had simply waited for her to fall asleep, and snuck off by himself to find his own way out, and left her here to die.

"Devastator?!"

There was no attempt to keep the fear out of her voice this time, and within her mind she was frantically second and third guessing everything that she had remembered either of them saying before she fell asleep. He'd been disturbed by something, something she'd said. Had he made a snap decision to leave her here? Had he been pretending all along, trying to tire her out and let her guard down so she'd fall asleep? Had the other Titans found them, and just decided to leave her here to die? And what the hell was she gonna do now?! She was trapped a mile beneath the earth in a lightless tunnel leading to nowhere with none of her friends within range to help and no way to get out except for a long, slow, lingering…

"_Devastator!!_"

There was a loud gasp from several feet in front of her, followed by the sound of someone scraping against the opposite wall of the tunnel. Someone coughed several times, and then suddenly there was a flash of red, and Devastator was sitting right in front of her, against the opposite wall, rubbing his eyes with one hand, and holding his flaming baton aloft like a road flare with the other.

"Wh… what… what is it?"

Jinx blinked in the sudden and unexpected light, and found herself completely tongue tied, staring like an idiot at the Titan. "You… fell asleep," was the best reply she could manage.

"I did?" Devastator was still half-asleep, and he shook his head several times to clear it. "S... Sorry..." he stammered, making no comment about the scream she had emitted a moment ago to wake him. Slowly, he got back up to his feet, and she noticed that the baton was considerably brighter this time, bright enough to cast a reasonable circle of light around them. She brushed what dust and dirt and debris she could off of herself as she stood up as well.

"How long was… was I asleep?"

She had to admit that she didn't know. "I fell asleep too…"

"Oh…" he said, surprised, she could tell, but not shocked. He seemed to think less of having fallen asleep in the presence of his enemy than she did, though she noted with a smirk that he didn't think so little of it as to forget to check his pocket for the diamond.

"Let's… get out of here," he said.

"Yeah,"

They both turned and began to walk off down the tunnel, Devastator in the lead again. They hadn't gone more than thirty paces before Devastator asked her a question.

"So… was the Hive hard to get into?"

"Why?" she asked, "thinking of joining up?"

"Of course not," he said quickly before her laugh clued him in that she was teasing. He shook his head and continued walking. "What, is that your idea of trying to get me to switch sides or something?"

"What makes you think we'd let you in?" she said half-mockingly. "Unlike the Titans, we have _standards_."

The joke sounded mean, perhaps it was even _meant_ with mean-spirit, but it set both of them to laughing as they continued on their way, and thus accomplished what it had been spoken for. They might have been laughing for entirely different reasons, but at that moment, who gave a damn?

**O-O-O**

The tunnel was sloping upwards, steep enough to be a climb rather than a walk, which was a good sign, as far as Jinx was concerned, though it did make the going slower, as it quickly became obvious that Devastator was _much_ less agile than she was, to the point where she had to actually help him up some of the rougher patches. By now she had stopped remarking on the oddity of her doing this for a Titan, in favor of just getting the hell out of here. Besides, he had the only light.

"You actually _know_ Marcus Beachman?" asked Devastator

"I used to beat him up in sixth grade," said Jinx, remembering fondly the look of pure terror on Marcus' face that she had been able to engineer with merely a disapproving glance. She grabbed Devastator's arm and pulled, and he scrambled up the six-foot wall to join her on top of the ledge above it. "He liked to pick on Gizmo a lot, so I taught him a few lessons. How'd you know him?"

"Gizmo wasn't the only one he liked to pick on," said Devastator with a grimace, looking around before finding a way further up the tunnel and trudging on ahead.

"So why not just blow him up?"

"Because I'm not insane."

It sounded more insane to Jinx to let someone beat you up than it did to fight back, but Heroes were weird… "So you're saying he's in Jump?"

"Yeah," said Devastator, "only he doesn't call himself Marcus anymore."

"So what's he call himself?" she asked.

"Heard of a guy called 'Adonis'?" he said nonchalantly. Jinx nearly fell over.

"You're _kidding_ me…"

"Nope," said Devastator. "Tried to tear me apart, last time we met. Beast Boy beat the stuffing out of him."

"Wow…" said Jinx, shaking her head. "Wait 'til I tell Gizmo. We _have_ to screw with him."

"Be my guest," said Devastator as he clambered up the last chunk of steep tunnel to a flatter section, and turned to offer Jinx a hand. Jinx snorted and lightly flipped up over his head, landing perfectly on her feet behind him. He rolled his eyes. "Show off…"

"If you've got it, flaunt it," said Jinx with a smirk, turning and walking off down the tunnel, letting him follow as he wished to. She'd gone at least a dozen paces before she remembered that she'd done so despite the fact that he was the only one holding the light, and had to wait for him to catch up.

They'd gone another fifty yards or so before she noticed him staring somewhat intently at the walls. "Looking for more diamonds?" she asked.

"No," he replied. "There's… something weird here."

"What?"

"How come the walls are so smooth?"

Jinx glanced at the walls of the tunnel again. They were comprised of some kind of stone of course, a channel dug straight through the bedrock, but they were perfectly smooth, as though someone had taken the time to sand and even polish them. "Maybe that's how they make them," she suggested with a shrug. "Doesn't matter."

"I guess…" said Devastator, in a tone which meant that he thought it did indeed matter, but wasn't sure how. See-More used the same tones. "… I just wonder what this tunnel _is_. It's _way_ too long just to be a diamond shaft."

"I don't care what it is as long as it gets us out of here," said Jinx.

"Yeah," said Devastator, but he continued to glance at the walls periodically, as though the rock would give him some idea as to what this place was.

They had moved on for another couple of minutes, and Jinx was already trying to think of something else to say, just to pass the time, when suddenly they rounded a corner, and found themselves at the end of the tunnel.

A _massive_ cavern, easily twice the size of the one that the Hive and Titans had fought in earlier loomed before them, but unlike the previous cavern, this one was clearly not a natural cave, but some kind of underground facility, the walls carved and shaped like blocks, the floor smooth and free of stalactites, the ground covered with extraneous bits of heavy equipment and piles of building materials, and most important of all, the ceiling lined with fluorescent lights, which flickered on one by one, illuminating the entire scene in a dull glow.

Even that dull glow was like the shining lights of Heaven to Jinx, and she stopped in her tracks and just stared for a moment, her eyes accustoming themselves to the sight before her. Devastator's baton faded out to nothing as he too blinked in the unfamiliar light and chanced a smile. He was clearly thinking the same thing she was, namely that this cavern had to be man-made, and that there had to be an exit from it, for how else could all of this equipment have been transported in here? It did not matter if the exit was locked or barred or welded shut, for either of them could dispense with such fortifications with a literal wave of their hand.

They were home free.

Which… of course… meant that it was time to consider the diamond.

"Let's find a way out of here,"

Jinx simply nodded, giving no indication of what she was thinking. The terms of their little truce had been until they were no longer in danger of killing themselves by beginning a fight. The cavern was enormous and sturdy-looking, and while it was still _possible_ certainly that a battle between a wielder of entropy and a psychokinetic could destroy the entire cavern, it was extremely unlikely. Perhaps if she got a good opportunity, she could just blast him unconscious right here, take the diamond, and leave. He seemed to have forgotten that they were supposed to be fighting over the diamond, after all, so it shouldn't be hard to set him up…

… of course… there really was no harm in waiting just a bit longer either. After all, the cavern might lead to another pitch dark hallway or something…

"You all right?"

Jinx started out of her thoughts to find that she had stopped walking while considering her options. "Yeah," she said, "just fine." She studied his face to see if he suspected what she was thinking, but he merely nodded and moved on. Over piles of metal casings for God-knew-what and bits of equipment that looked like arc welders they climbed, until several minutes later, they came across something wholly indescribable.

It looked like a sewer pipe, save that it was at least twelve feet tall, and lain right across their path, crossing the cavern from one side to the other. It was metal, segmented, and stamped upon each section were numerical building codes of some sort. Tinted a very dark green, the pipe or whatever it was also had red lights installed along its side every so often, slowly blinking in the underground twilight.

It was… certainly an odd thing to encounter in the middle of nowhere, and it was much too high to see over. Devastator paused to consider what to do now, but Jinx had no such confusion. She broke into a run, and called on her powers at the same time, leaping into the air with a graceful flip, and using the reaction of her powers to push her up and on top of the pipe. She landed properly, steadied herself, and resisted the urge to raise her arms like a gymnast as she took a look around. On the opposite side of the pipe was what she was looking for, a large, paved tunnel, big enough to fit an 18-wheeler truck, that sloped upwards out of sight towards what _had_ to be the surface.

"Got it," she said, turning back to Devastator, "There's an exit over here." He smiled and gave a _very_ visible sigh of relief, and started to walk over to the pipe, and Jinx started to wonder if perhaps she shouldn't have told him there was no exit so as to put herself in a better position to get rid of him, even as she crouched down to help pull him up and over the pipe (for there was no way in _hell_ he could do what she had just done), and all of these things and more were running through her head when the pipe itself suddenly woke up.

There was a _roar_, not like a landslide or a collapsing cavern, a roar like that of a dinosaur, and before Jinx could blink, she was thrown off her feet and down onto the cavern floor, as the metal pipe she was standing on bucked and twisted and rose up into the air. Jinx did not need to know what was happening to know that she should not remain laying on the ground, and she sprang up almost as soon as she touched the dirt and ran back half a dozen paces, and turned around, and her jaw dropped.

The pipe was not a pipe at all, it was a gigantic mechanical worm.

A robotic worm the size of an aqueduct was looming overhead, its head, armed with a single red eye that stared down at them, and a huge gaping maw full of razor-sharp steel teeth that was slowly opening and closing, as though the damned thing was smacking its lips in anticipation of a meal. It opened its jaws and let out an ear-splitting roar that shook rocks from the ceiling of the cavern and nearly bowled Jinx over.

"_What the hell is_ – "

It did not give them time to ask.

The red eye glowed brightly, and Jinx realized what was coming with only an instant to spare. She lunged for one side as red laser bored into the ground where she had been standing moments ago, carving a furrow through the ground. Devastator lunged to the side as well, snatching his baton from his side and lighting it on fire as he snapped it around at the worm. A rock near the worm's coiled body exploded like a bomb, but to no effect whatsoever, other than getting the mechanical nightmare's attention.

Jinx scrambled back as the thing let loose another roar, and its head retracted into its body to be replaced by a whirling drill bit, with which it dove at Devastator. Devastator was still on his side from his last lunge, and in desperation, turned his baton on the worm itself, targeting one of the metal panels that it used for armor and blasting it to bits. The worm noticed this one, swerving off at the last second and striking the ground next to Devastator, sending a hail of stone chips flying everywhere like bullets. Jinx ducked behind a pile of rebar as the rock pieces pinged off her cover, before the worm, having realized that it had missed its target, roared once again and loomed back up into the air.

The dust kicked up by the worm was such that Jinx could no longer see where Devastator had gotten to, but she _could_ see the worm, and that was all she needed. She stepped around the cover and spun in a circle, gathering up her entropy like momentum before releasing a wave of it in a razor-sharp slash of energy that broke against the machine's metal hide, barely scratching the paint. The worm whirled about to face her, a laser blast nearly cutting her head off as she ducked, rolled, and came up with another handful of hexes which she tossed at the ceiling above the worm. Multi-ton rocks crumbled from the cavern roof and rained down upon the worm, but they might as well have been styrofoam for all the good they did. The worm fired its laser again, this time hitting close enough that Jinx felt the heat on her face as she jumped back, before ducking behind a cement mixer for cover. A second later, the worm's laser sliced the cement mixer in half, and Jinx was sent running back down the cavern, desperately dodging left and right to avoid beams of incalculable energy.

"Zap! Zap! BOOM!"

Jinx turned back to see the worm roaring in what appeared to be pain, a smoking rent torn in its face where its laser had been emitting from. Devastator stood between her and it, his baton held high, and he swung it down like he was trying to hammer something into the ground, then lifting it and slamming it down again and again, and with each swing, a small chunk of the thing's armor blew up, rocking the worm back and forth and back again. Yet no sooner had Devastator stopped to evaluate the effectiveness of his strikes than the worm discarded the shattered laser lens, and another one slid into place from within the body of the beast. It whipped its head back down and fired, and the blast would have disintegrated Devastator had Jinx not reacted instinctively and blasted him out of the way with a hex. Even that didn't spare him a series of hard shocks as the worm swung its tail around and hit him in mid-air like a thrown baseball, sending him flying back towards Jinx to land in a heap on the ground next to her, where he lay, groaning softly.

This was no time to be laying down. "Get up!" she shouted at him, in the voice she had used many-a-time to force one of her own teammates to do something they very much didn't want to do. Apparently it wasn't all that different than Robin's version, for he winced and staggered, but managed to get back to his feet, and looked back up at the worm which was slowly advancing towards them, its drill once more extended to grind them to paste.

"Can't you just blow it up?!" cried Jinx as she flung hex after hex into the oncoming worm, scoring the metal and chipping the paint, but unable to stop the drill itself.

"It's too big," he replied, "and too complicated! It's made of an alloy I've never seen before!"

"Well you'd better think of _something_ you can do!" yelled Jinx, backing up as the worm advanced on them. "My hexes can't get through his armor!"

Devastator was backing up as well, though they would soon run out of room against the cavern wall. He was not however watching the worm, but instead looking all around them, perhaps for something else to blow up? Then suddenly, the psychokinetic said something that confirmed every theory she'd ever had about the insanity of heroes.

"Hold him off! I've got an idea!"

Hold him off? How exactly was she supposed to do that? Still there was no time to properly throttle him, and all she could do was use her entropic powers to rip a _huge_ section of the ceiling off and drop it on the worm's head. As the previous sections had done, this one shattered like glass as soon as it struck, but the sheer weight forced the thing's head down, and it had to rear back up before continuing. And then suddenly, Devastator was next to her, holding a length of steel rebar as tall as he was in one hand, and his baton in the other. With a swipe, he blew a small hole in the ground, and set the rebar in it, facing up and forwards like a pike, but then hesitated. "It's… it's not sharp enough…" he said, looking around for a knife perhaps.

Jinx snapped her fingers, and the top six inches of the rebar snapped off at an angle, leaving a razor-sharp point behind. "What are you gonna do?!" she shouted over the roaring worm, "_stab_ him with it?"

"Yep,"

She did not get a chance to do a double take.

The worm roared and lunged forwards towards them, and Jinx dove to the side, but Devastator did not, at least not instantly. As the monstrous robot closed in, he stood his ground, his baton held low, watching the worm as carefully as he had watched Jinx earlier in the evening. And then finally, when the worm was so close that Jinx was about to blast him aside again, Devastator swung his baton upwards, and the sharpened rebar stake was blasted into the air like a cruise missile, straight into the diving worm, driving into its armor like an arrow into a board, where it stuck, quivering.

The impact was not particularly powerful, though the worm _did_ hesitate as it attempted to determine how badly it had been damaged. And Jinx was about to ask what in the name of Hell the _point_ of that had been, when she saw that Devastator still hadn't moved, and was holding his free hand up, fingers extended towards the embedded rebar, which was now beginning to turn white with frost…

... oh that _was_ clever…

The worm had finished determining that the attack had been nothing more than a minor nuisance, and turned back on Devastator, but it was already too late, and Devastator's fist suddenly closed. Moments later, the rebar, half-embedded inside the worm's throat, blew up, a shaped charge blast that tore a jagged rent in its armored hide, not merely peeling off the outer layers like the previous blasts, but ripping all th way through and exposing its 'throat'. The worm shuddered and roared and lunged this way and that, stabbing at Devastator and missing, but driving the Titan back into a corner from whence there was no escape at all, and it reared up again and spun around to crush the metahuman who had damaged it so, just as Devastator turned and screamed as loud as he could over the roaring machine. "_Jinx! Now!_"

There was a part of her, perhaps her rational brain, which told her that she could just as easily be a bit late, and only shoot the worm _after_ it had crushed Devastator to pulp. But by the time she thought of that, she had already acted.

Jinx fired one of her most powerful hexes with the aim and poise of a marksman, and the hex slammed right into the worm's unarmored thorax, shredding the circuitry and demolishing the machinery that gave the unholy thing life. It let out an ear-shattering screech, writhing about like it was being murdered, which she supposed was true enough in a way. It jackknifed, twisted, and then spontaneously lashed out, slamming its tail section into her like a bullwhip and throwing her through the air like a rag doll. She hit the cavern wall awkwardly, and felt something _pop_ in her left knee, and screamed as the pain bit through her, but her scream was lost in the sounds of the dying war machine. Desperately she crawled for cover, but the worm's death throes had begun to destabilize the entire cavern, and rocks were falling from the ceiling all over now. She could see the exit, three dozen yards away, tantalizingly close, but she couldn't make the difference on her feet, couldn't even stand up unaided.

But fortunately, she didn't have to.

Devastator just _appeared_, though in all practicality she wasn't watching for him and he might well have just walked over, and grabbed her arm. He shouted something, it might have been "Come on!", but the noise was too much to hear. She took his hand and managed to stand up, biting her lip until she drew blood from the pain, and with one hand over his shoulders, managed to hobble towards the exit as the cavern began to implode behind them. They were not moving fast enough and she put weight on her injured leg in desperation, and found that it would take it, though doing so made her lightheaded with pain. They reached the exit tunnel bare seconds before a fifty-ton rock landed before it, blocking the way back to the tunnel, and raced as fast as they could up, up, up, until Devastator could drag her no further, and she risked passing out. They waited only a moment or two to catch their breath, before moving on, both armed, her limping, him sore and exhausted, until finally the tunnel straightened out, and they found themselves staring at the surface.

They were standing in a desert of some sort, facing towards the coast, and in the distance, the skyscrapers of Jump City could _just_ barely be made out in the morning light. The sun was just beginning to wink over the mountains to the east, the mountains they had just emerged from. Jinx had absolutely _no_ idea where they were, save that they were somewhere east of Jump City, and that they had gone much further than she had thought, for the diamond mine itself was not visible from Jump. She did not know if it was the morning after her attempted burglary, or the one after that, and she did not care. The sounds of the collapsing cavern behind them gradually faded to silence, and they stood in the entrance to the cave they had just emerged from, at long last, and listened to the wind blowing through the sagebrush, and the distant sounds of cars on a nearby road. They had made it.

"Nice job," she said. It seemed the most appropriate thing to say.

Evidently he agreed. "Thanks," he said. "You too," and she nodded and even managed a smile.

And then she shot him.

The hex caught him flatfooted, square in the temple, and had it been a rock or something she would probably have killed him outright, but hexes didn't quite work like physical objects, and this one she had not taken the time to shape into some kind of overt slashing or bludgeoning implement. It _did_ have enough force to drop him like a puppet with his strings cut, but it didn't knock him out cold. For one thing, in her present condition, she wasn't sure she could manage a hex like that. For another, she didn't need to risk it.

Devastator landed on his back, hard, and lay fairly still for a few moments before slowly picking himself up to a seated position, only to find Jinx, still leaning against the wall, with entropic energy crackling over her hands and a triumphant smirk on her face. "Can't say I didn't warn you…" she said mockingly.

"Are you _crazy_?" he demanded, rubbing his head where the hex had hit him, not immediately reaching for his baton, perhaps realizing that it was futile.

"No," she said lightly, "just pragmatic."

"You're hurt," he said. "You think you're in any shape to beat me now?"

"Maybe, maybe not," was her reply, "but I don't have to beat you." She pulled her communicator off of her belt, and showed the screen to Devastator. It showed a series of moving blips rapidly closing on a stationary one. "They do."

It took Devastator less time than she expected to realize how much trouble he was in.

"Well _lookee _here!" came a voice from behind Devastator, who jumped and scrambled to his feet, snatching up his baton and turning around in time to see four copies of Billy Numerous walking towards him from around the side of the cave. A second later, Gizmo appeared, flying on a new set of rocket boosters, with some kind of enormous device in his hands that could as easily have been a sonic screwdriver as a scanner. Mammoth and See-More were further back, having had the furthest ground to cover, See-More floating with his eye as a hot-air balloon, Mammoth jogging across the desert towards them all.

"As soon as we got into the cavern, we were close enough to the surface for a signal to get through," said Jinx as Devastator turned from one Hiver to the next in something approaching horror. "I hit a silent alarm, and let them know where we were. I don't suppose you did the same thing, did you?"

The expression on his face told her the answer.

"Jinx!" shouted Gizmo, relief apparent on his face, to the extent that he even omitted his usual epithets in the face of the Titan. Indeed, he seemed to have momentarily forgotten that the Psychokinetic was even present. "Are you okay?! What happened?!"

"I'm fine," said Jinx, and she meant it this time. "Brought us all a little present."

"Those Titans ran us all outta the mine," said Mammoth. "We lost all the jewels we wuz gonna get."

Jinx smirked. "Not all of 'em," she said, and the other Hivers followed her gaze to Devastator, who looked rather like he was trying to decide a prayer for a bolt of lightning to strike him dead would go over well.

Gizmo and the others, as always, could sense fear. "Cool…" said Gizmo in a _very_ disconcerting voice. "I say we play with this one for a while. Let me cut him open and find out how he works."

"Nah," said See-More, "let's see if there's someone who wants to buy him."

"That Cyborg beat the snot outta me!" roared Mammoth, punching his fist into his open hand. "I want some payback!"

With each recited alternative, Devastator looked more and more like he was about to be sick. His baton was still in his hand, but he made no effort to raise it, turning from Hiver to Hiver before finally returning his gaze to Jinx.

"Well," said Jinx with a controlled smirk, "first things first. Let's have the diamond."

Devastator did not react immediately, but even he could see that there was no point in resisting. One of the other Titans might have refused on principle and been beaten to a pulp for it, but he simply slid a shaking hand into his pocket and pulled out the fist-sized gem he had been carrying, and gently tossed it to Jinx. In the natural light of day it seemed even more beautiful, and Jinx permitted herself a second to admire it before she slid it into her own pocket.

"So what're we gonna do with the snot-guzzler?" asked Gizmo impatiently.

That seemed to be the question Devastator wanted an answer to as well, and he stared at her mutely, fearfully, like a prisoner awaiting judgment. She honestly hadn't thought this far ahead, and so she took her time, trying to decide what they ought to do with this Titan, this enemy, that had now fallen right into their hands, for not in a million years could Devastator hope to take on the entire Hive by himself.

She pondered the matter while her teammates waited and while Devastator sweated and quivered nervously, and went over the various options in her mind, before finally coming to a decision she was comfortable with.

"Let him go."

She wasn't sure who was more surprised: Devastator, or the other Hivers. Devastator choked and clearly thought he had heard Jinx incorrectly, but Gizmo, who had been so happy to see her a moment earlier, nearly fell out of the air, while Mammoth just stood confused, and See-More looked frankly horrified, as though she had suggested vivisecting the Titan.

"_Are you out of your stinking mind_?!" yelled Gizmo. "Let him _go_?! Why should we do that?!"

"Yeah, I'm wonderin' the same thing, Jinx," asked See-More, albeit without the histrionics that Jinx was _still_ hoping Gizmo was going to grow out of.

"Because I said so," said Jinx, looking almost bemused. "He's learned what happens when you mess with the Hive 5. I'm not about to kill the only do-gooder who's ever figured that out. We'll send him back to his little friends and let 'em know that we could've killed him if we'd wanted to, and there wasn't anything they could've done about it. It'll give them all something to think about, next time we show up."

"So would killing him!" insisted Gizmo.

"Killing him would just get all the other Titans on us harder than ever," she said. "And I've had enough fun for one day. We'll kill him next time."

Gizmo wasn't happy. Mammoth wasn't happy. See-More wasn't happy, and Billy seemed to be vaguely confused by the whole thing, but she didn't much care. She was in charge of the Hive, not them, and she knew they'd do what she ordered, albeit with a lot of griping. One by one, the Hivers turned to go, and Jinx waved them off, telling them she'd catch up in just a minute. Devastator looked like he still expected them to kill him at any moment, and it wasn't until the other Hivers had vanished that he asked the obvious question.

"What the… what are you doing?"

"I'm letting you go," she said.

"_Why?_"

"Because I feel like it," she said nonchalantly, which was not the most accurate reason, but was the one that required the least explanation.

"But…" he said, still not quite able to believe that it wasn't a trick, "but I don't… I don't get it…"

"Relax," she said, "there's nothing to get. You… saved my ass back there, with the worm, and when the lights went out, even though I told you I was gonna take that diamond from you when we got out. So I figure you deserve a free pass this time. Besides, you're not as annoying as the other Titans."

He plainly had no idea what to say, but decided on the obvious once again. "… thanks," he said. "What… what happens… next time we…"

"Next time I'm gonna beat the stuffing out of you, just like I would have this time if that cave-in hadn't happened. You're an okay kid, and you helped me get out of there, but get in my way again and I'll mop the floor with you." Her words were harsh and threatening, but her voice was simply tired, as was his, and so rather than cringing, he simply smiled and nodded.

"What makes you so sure I won't beat the stuffing out of you?" he asked.

"Because you're not good enough," she said, plainly.

"We'll see, I guess," he said, and with a nod, he started to walk away from the cave in the opposite direction that the Hivers had gone. Even if he called for the Titans right now, it would take them some time to get here, enough for her to escape, she knew. Before he had gotten more than a few paces away though, he stopped and turned back.

"Hey, um… could you do me a favor?"

"You mean besides not killing you?"

"It's a small one. When you and Gizmo go and er… see Marcus next, could you tell him I said hi?"

Jinx grinned. "Should I tell him Devastator says hello, or David?"

Devastator's eyes shot open in surprise. "How did you – "

"Cyborg called you that after the first cave-in," she said with a laugh. "Is that your real name?"

"Um… sort of…" said Devastator, "it's a long story. But yeah, tell him David says hi."

"Sure," she said.

Devastator turned away, and walked off, and Jinx prepared to follow her teammates, who would be waiting for her nearby, but before she did, she called after him one more time.

"Hey, David?" She wasn't sure why she wanted to tell him this, but… well… why did she do anything?

"Yeah?" he said, stopping and turning his head back.

"We'd have let you into the Hive."

He did not say anything to that, simply stood there, and watched her, and then finally nodded slowly, and turned away. Jinx watched him leave, and then did the same, still limping on her injured leg, as she followed her teammates who were waiting on the other side of the entrance. Gizmo was still grumbling, but clearly relieved to see her all right, peppering his questions liberally with the insults and angry threats he used to disguise the fact that he'd been worried sick, and Mammoth offered to carry her back to the vehicle, which she refused of course, but which still made her smile a bit, and See-More wanted to know what had happened in the tunnel and what all that noise was about a mechanical worm, and all of them made snide comments about Billy, who Jinx decided would probably make a fine addition to the Hive, even if he did brag way too much, and she made a mental note that she'd tell him as soon as they all got back and could prepare for the initiation.

It was good to be home.

**O-O-O**

Starfire tested the door to the roof, and found it unlocked, not that she could not have torn it from its hinges and flung it across the city with one hand even had it been locked, but she had learned that such things were best reserved for moments of dire need.

As she expected, the roof was in use, so to speak, though there were normally no activities to be done up here, save for the occasional game of volleying the ball or basketing it (the sheer _number_ of things that people on this planet did with a ball never ceased to amaze). At present however, there was neither basketing nor volleying occurring. Instead David was standing upon the roof, staring off over the city in a manner she recognized quite easily, for she had done the same thing more than once from a similar vantage point.

She stepped onto the roof and shut the door behind her, and David must have heard her, for he turned his head to see who it was. She was afraid that she might be disturbing him, in the way that Raven did not wish to be disturbed, but he smiled and turned back to the cityscape beyond, and she walked up towards where he was standing, well back from the edge of the roof, but still staring across the bay at the city.

"You are feeling better, friend?"

David smiled and nodded. "Yeah," he said. "It was just some bruises and scrapes. Nothing serious."

"That is wonderful news," said Starfire. "We were all most distressed when Cyborg and Raven were unable to determine where you were located. We feared that you might have been crushed by one of the collapses that struck the diamond mine."

"So was I," said David, "Got lucky, I guess."

"Well, whether as a result of chance or another factor, we are all very glad to have you back among us once more."

That brought a smile to David's face, which was of course the reason she had said it, though it was not as whole-hearted as she would have hoped for. "Thanks, Star," he said, and she could tell he meant it, but that his mind was on another subject. She did not press him however, she found that doing such things rarely led to anything positive.

The city shone in the darkening sky like a glistening mountain of diamonds, and Starfire watched it in silence for several minutes, before asking another question.

"Forgive me, friend David, but… is there some reason why you are up here watching the setting of the sun, rather than downstairs with the rest of us?"

David did not answer immediately, but waited a moment or two "I'm… just thinking about some of the things that happened in the mine."

She nodded. "Robin mentioned that you encountered one of the drilling machines Slade used to try and destroy our Tower back before you were a Titan. We... did not know that there was a fourth."

"Yeah," said David, "that might have been where he built them or something. Robin said he might have drilled that tunnel to be able to sneak into the diamond mines whenever he needed to."

"Those machines were extremely fierce," said Starfire. "Was it... difficult, confronting one?"

David shrugged. "We managed," he said simply. "That's not... I was just… thinking about Jinx, and… some of the stuff we talked about."

Starfire clenched her fist. "You and Jinx were trapped for many schlorvaks," she said. "If she caused you undue harm, then we shall – "

"Nono," said David quickly. "No, it… that wasn't it. Jinx is… a lot of things, but… she's also exactly what she pretends to be. No… deceptions or hidden agendas…" he made a sound that Starfire recognized as a sigh (though on her planet it formed part of a traditional challenge for single combat to the death). "I guess… after everything that's happened… I just sort of miss that."

Starfire nodded. "If you spoke to Jinx for the length of time you were trapped, then you would know her far better than any of us do," she said. "Did you… forgive me… 'make friends' is the term, yes?"

"Yeah, that's the term," said David, "and… no, we didn't. She promised me that next time she was gonna kick my butt, and I believe her." He paused, and his voice fell somewhat, a slightly more somber tone. "But… I think that if… if things had been different. Then we could have been friends."

"Different for her?" asked Starfire.

David shook his head. "Different for me," he said. "And… that scares the hell out of me."

Starfire was familiar with the idiom David had used, but she did not get his meaning. "I… do not understand," said Starfire. "Why should that be cause for fear?"

David took a nervous breath and let it go slowly. "What… what if I hadn't been in… the Wayne Center in Jump when Cinderblock attacked it?" he asked. "What if there'd been no Cinderblock at all? None of this conspiracy stuff. I'd never have met any of you, right?"

"Most… likely not," said Starfire now hoping that she didn't understand. "Are you… thinking perhaps that this would have been preferable?"

"No!" insisted David instantly, to Starfire's relief. "Nono, Star… no, I… you've gotta believe me… meeting you guys has been the greatest thing that's ever happened to me. By a million miles. If it wasn't for all the other people that got killed, I'd say that it was worth having Cinderblock do all that stuff to me that he did if it meant I got to meet you all. That's not what I meant."

Starfire smiled and put a hand on David's shoulder to indicate that she understood, and he lowered his head to go on.

"But… it _was_ because of Cinderblock that I met you all. If that hadn't happened, I'd probably still be back in some other Center or something, or… at least that's what I always thought."

"But you no longer think this?"

He did not answer the question directly. "What if… I'd met the Hive… instead of you guys?"

"The Hive?"

"Jinx and Gizmo met up inside the system, the same place I was. They were in the same system I was in, and had it a little worse off, and turned into bad guys. I didn't. If I'd been there with them, if they'd met me and found out that I had these powers, I'd probably be in the Hive Five right now. I'd be fighting you guys every other week, just like they do."

"I do not believe you would," said Starfire. "You are a hero, not a villain, and that is not entirely a matter of circumstance."

"I'm _not_ heroic though, not like you guys. I mean… I go out with you and we do the hero thing, and I… I do it now because it's… instinct and rote memory or something, and because Robin's trained it into me, and because I've had all this time with you guys, but I just don't… _think_ like a hero. And… I'm not freaking out about this, I'm really not, because there's nothing to do about it anyway, but… I always used to assume, back before I joined you all, that… if I ever wound up using my powers, it'd be as a bad guy, not a good guy. That's one of the reasons I never used them. And if… I'd been in some other facility, and I'd met Jinx instead of you and the others… that's what I'd be."

"_No_ it is not."

David seemed legitimately confused by her certainty. "It's… not?"

"Jinx has decided to act in the way that she has, as have all of her friends, but you did not. You have made choices that have caused you to be here, now. Whether or not you sought to become a hero, you have done so, with our help or without it. You _are_ a hero, a 'good guy'. If it were not for chance, I would not have arrived upon this planet, and none of us would have found one another. You should not discount such things just because - "

"I tried to kill Terra."

Starfire stopped dead in mid-sentence. David had spoken calmly and without inflection, as deadpan as anything Raven had ever said, and his eyes had not deviated from the horizon, but his words were precise and uncluttered with evasions and extraneous terms. A simple declaration that made no sense.

"I... I do not understand. You were..."

"We were fighting, and she kept going on and on about how stupid I'd been to trust her in the first place, and how bad it was going to look once the rest of you found out about it. She said I'd led you all right into a trap with Slade and that you were all gonna die knowing that I was the one that had set it all up..." he paused and took a long, slow breath, his voice slightly hollow but calm as the waters below. "... and I just lost it. We'd been fighting, hurt each other, that's how these things work but... that was different. I wanted her blood. I went after her like... like I wanted to rip her throat out and blow her guts all over the street." He paused again. "I still do. And I almost succeeded."

David's voice was calm, but Starfire could tell how disturbed he really was just by how quietly he was standing. "But you did not kill her," she said.

"My powers gave out," he said. "I got too... excited I guess. Overused them maybe, who knows..." he fell quiet again for a second, and Starfire thought he was done and was preparing what she wanted to say, when he dropped another bomb. "... and then I did the same thing to Raven."

"What?" she couldn't help but let some surprise out this time. Neither David nor Raven had said anything of a -

"She shot me," he said simply. "Thought I was part of Slade's plan. She had plenty of reasons to, and I caught her at a bad time, but she just up and shot me," he drummed his fingers against his shirt. "Right here. And her powers failed. I don't know why, but I was hurting really bad, and wasn't thinking too clearly, and she'd just tried to shoot me, and I got…" he was having trouble continuing, "…I got so _angry_, and just lashed out…"

Silence reigned for a few seconds. "And… then what happened?"

"Nothing," said David. "I was too badly hurt, and too upset. I couldn't make the powers work. I collapsed, and she helped me, and we got through it." He took a long, deep breath. "But… what happens on the day I don't collapse?"

"You should not fear your powers so," said Starfire.

"I'm not afraid of my powers, Star, I'm afraid of _me_. My powers do what _I_ want them to, and sometimes I want to just… blow someone like Terra to pieces. And every time I practice with them or use them… they just get easier to use. Used to be if I got upset I couldn't use them, now I have to be _really_ upset. And I'm more precise, and more powerful, and everything… and one of these days I'm worried that I'm gonna…"

"David," said Starfire, "forgive me once more, but you have… missed the sharpness?"

David hesitated in confusion, and Starfire knew she had made an error with the idiom. "the… point?"

That made more sense to him, and she continued. "Forgive me if this is surprising to you, but… the King of Tamaran is my Knorfka. If I wished to, I could summon a _billion_ Tamaranean warriors to invade Earth and subjugate it, so that I might rule it as queen for all time. Or perhaps I could have them come and exterminate all of my enemies in one sweep. These things are within my power to do, but I am not afraid that I shall one day do them, for I know that I will not."

"Well, yeah, Star… you're a _hero_."

"As are you," said Starfire, "and not because of what Cinderblock's actions were. He provided the opportunity, but you took it, and made of it what you would with your own character. Robin would not have accepted you for training if you were as Jinx is, even if your powers were thirty times what they are. The 'point' which you have missed is not that you wished to kill Terra, but that you did not kill her."

"I would have if I could," said David.

"Perhaps," said Starfire, "but you could not, and so we shall never know. Perhaps you would have thrown her to the ground and then not killed her. We do not know. But we believe it to be thus, and you have not yet shown us any reason to believe otherwise, and so until you do, please do not worry that you are the same as Jinx or as Gizmo or the other members of the Hive, and that you are here simply because of luck. None of us would have accepted you as a Titan or a friend if that were so."

She knew it had worked before he spoke, for a small smile crossed David's face, and he lowered his head in a manner Robin would describe as "sheepish", and when he looked up again, much of the worry that had been inscribed on his face was gone. Not all of it of course, but much of it.

"Thanks, Star," he said simply, and she knew it was heartfelt. "I hope you're right."

"Come friend David," she said, "this worry is merely because of Jinx' escape with the precious jewel she sought. The next battle you engage with her in will not result in your butt kicking, but hers."

David smiled and began to laugh, and Starfire hesitated, for she had not intended to be funny.

"Did I… speak something incorrectly?"

"No," said David, "well… sort of actually. Jinx got away, but not with the jewel."

Starfire frowned in puzzlement. "But you said that you returned the gem to her when she – "

David reached into his pocket and pulled out the largest diamond Starfire had ever seen, a flawless gem as large as the egg of a Denubian Slime-worm. Starfire was generally not impressed by most earthly jewels, but this one elicited a small gasp, and she stared at it in disbelief. David simply smiled, and handed her the jewel, and she held it up and squeezed it hard enough that glass or plastic would have shattered, and yet the gem did not.

"But…" she said, "you… you said that you gave it back to Jinx!"

"I said I gave her _a_ gem. Not that one."

"But then… if you did _not_ give her the diamond… what was it you gave her?"

David chuckled…

**O-O-O**

The Man in Gold turned the jewel over in his hands carefully, taking his time, inspecting it, which was only to be expected, but Jinx _dearly_ wished he would hurry the hell up.

"My dear," said the Man in Gold in a calm tone, "do you believe that I am an _idiot_?"

Calm though the question was, it stung her like a slap to the face partly because of the surprise.

"What… what are you?"

"This is not the jewel I asked you to retrieve. In fact, this is not even a diamond."

"_What?!_"

The Man in Gold lowered the gem and placed it on the table in front of him. "This is a cubic zirconia," he said. "A fake. A fraudulent gem that I must assume you are giving me because you believe I am an _enormous_ fool who cannot tell the difference."

"That's…" Jinx literally did not know what to say. "That's… that's _impossible_!"

"It's not merely possible," said the Man in Gold, "it's the truth, but I have no time to play games with you, so if you have the real diamond, I suggest you produce it, now, and if not, then I suggest you leave, now."

Jinx' head was spinning. How could the diamond be fake?! "I took it from the vault _just like you said_!" she insisted.

"Yes," said the Man in Gold, "and then you let it fall into the hands of someone who can identify materials by sight and sense, and proceeded to follow him into a place where you could not see what he was doing. Zirconia and Diamonds look identical to you and I perhaps, but to Devastator, it would be as comparing apples to flaming meteors. No doubt he simply picked up an appropriately-sized Zirconia from somewhere in the tunnels while you were busy playing Blind Man's Bluff."

Jinx stared at the fake diamond in horror as the Man in Gold turned his back on her.

"Now go away," he said. "I've a lot of work to do preparing the apocalypse, and I cannot be bothered with doomed fools."

"No!" shouted Jinx. "No, wait… you… you've gotta give us another chance! There's gotta be… gotta be _something_ else we can do."

"Something worth sparing your lives when my lord returns? I think not. You couldn't even manage a simple jewel heist. You needed _Devastator's_ help to get past that damned mining worm. What will you do for an encore? Rob a parking meter?"

"Come _on_," said Jinx. "We're willing to do whatever it takes, okay?" She thought suddenly of a card to play. "Surely since you're so busy, you can think of something you need done that you just don't have time to deal with yourself, can't you?"

The Man in Gold paused, and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "Hrm," he said, and Jinx' hopes brightened. "Well… now that you mention it, there _is_ something you can do for me. Something perhaps more up your alley than mere jewel theft."

"Name it," said Jinx with relief. "Just name it."

"It's not all that complicated," he said. "All I need you to do, is to destroy Robin…"

* * *

**Author's Note:** I apologize again for the lateness of the chapter, and the length of it, and I hope if you have read this far that you have enjoyed the chapter. Please leave a review if you can, and I hope to see you again for Chapter 26 (much quicker than I did for this one).

* * *


	26. Manifest Destiny

**Disclaimer:** Reports of my death are somewhat exaggerated, as are reports that I own the Teen Titans

**Author's Note:** I am alive.

It has been far too long since I updated this story, and the reason for that is that I have been utterly unable to work on it for quite some time, due to a very serious illness that laid me low for three weeks last month. I was therefore not able to write anything for a long period of time, and this chapter was quite heavily delayed. I humbly beg the pardon of my patient readers, and hope that this new chapter (another long one) will suffice to assuage them. As always, if it does or does not meet with your approval, I beg and plead that you will let me know by means of the review feature, such that I can deliver to you next time a chapter that is more to your liking and of higher overall quality. I am, as always, deeply grateful to all those willing to read such an enormous chapter or story as this has become, and hope to see you all **very** soon for Chapter 27.

Thank you once again.

* * *

**Chapter 26: Manifest Destiny**

_"A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it."_

- Jean de la Fontaine

**O-O-O**

The nightmare was always the same.

Flames and lava and rivers of blood that coursed through the streets of a wrecked city like arteries. Smoldering ruins, charred skeletons, the bitter taste of smoke in the air. None of these things were surprising anymore. Some nights, she had no idea where she was, just some nameless city burning forever in the sunless dark. Some nights she could pinpoint a landmark she recognized, a statue or bridge or monument that identifies the particular city on fire.

Most nights, she was in Jump.

The flames she was used to, the smell of smoke no longer bothered her. Raven was not some delicate flower to blanche and faint at the first sign of unpleasantness. Her dreams were _usually_ filled with these kinds of imagery, and she'd seen enough bloodshed and death over the last couple years to send hardened warriors screaming into the night. Flickering firelight and twisted ruins had been her companion since as early as she could remember. She may not have been immune to fear, but she didn't scare easily. What scared her tonight was not the imagery, it was the company...

"Tick-tock, Raven. Time is running out."

"I'm not afraid of you!" she shouted defiantly, but it was a lie, and he knew it. He knew everything about her, somehow, his one eye boring right through her like a laser drill, laying bare all of her secrets without twitching an eyelid. He vanished and materialized at will. In dreams, you can never evade your enemies, no matter how far you run.

"Silly girl," says Slade. "I'm not the one to be afraid of. You know that."

She was standing on the ruins of the Jump City Community Center, now half-collapsed, its metal roof reduced to slag. She could feel the heat of the ruined building through the soles of her boots, hot enough to set her on fire if this were real. She knew it wasn't. It didn't help.

"What you have concealed, you shall become!"

A swarm of meteors screamed in from nowhere, and reflexively, she conjured up her shield. Explosions pummeled the building to rubble around her, fanning the flames that burned higher and higher, needing no fuel to scorch the very skies.

She threw the shield down like it was a physical object, screaming defiance back at the figments of her own imagination. "It's a _lie!_" she shouted. "I won't let this happen! I'll find a way!"

"Your optimism is really adorable," came the reply, calm as the sea before a storm, and she turned around as Slade appeared through the crackling fire. She could almost picture the leering smile concealed behind his unchanging mask. "But you're forgetting one thing. This is what you were born to do. You were sent here to destroy the Earth."

The flames loomed up around Slade, consuming her world in fire, and then a moment later they parted again, revealing the Tower. Distinctive even in death, it leaned to one side like a melting wax sculpture, all alone in a sea of magma. The curtains closed and opened once more, and then her friends appeared, turned to statues and swarmed by indescribable foes, dead as stones, their final agonies frozen forever on their lifeless faces.

"Your destiny will be fulfilled! The portal must be opened!"

The voice was not Slade's. It was deeper and ringed with thunder, a voice she had never heard in person but knew better than she did her own, and she took a step back in surprise as the world faded into a purple mist, save for two pairs of blood-red eyes that fixed on her like homing missiles. She couldn't look away from them, she couldn't run or teleport or phase through the walls. She could only stare into them as they swelled and grew and filled her vision, drawing her in deeper and deeper until...

She woke up with a gasp.

Raven was sitting cross-legged in her room, in the center of a meditation and protection circle she drew several hours ago. The circle was one of the most powerful rituals she knew, a barrier against telepathic, empathic, and all magical contact. Ten thousand warrior-monks of Azarath could have beaten their spells and weapons against this circle for a century without so much as disturbing the air within it.

It had kept Slade out for three seconds.

Slowly she calmed down, breathed, remembered where she was, what she was doing here, reached out empathically and found the five other presences within the tower, some of the clumped up in the common room, others scattered throughout the living sectors. Their very presence took the edge off the shock of waking up, and she chanted her mantra to herself once or twice more to calm herself down, but when she closed her eyes, she still saw four eyes like burning coals staring back at her, and her startled cry melded seamlessly with a soft beep from her communicator, indicating that at least one of those five presences wanted to see her.

She knew which one without having to check.

She considered ignoring it, feigning sleep or some such, but before she had made her mind up to do so or not, she was already sliding her books aside and blowing the candles out. Something to do, something other than trying and failing to meditate, might just be what she needed right now, and accordingly she stepped out of her useless protection circle with a sigh, taking a moment to adopt the proper expression of slightly annoyed disconcern before opening the door and proceeding down the hallway and up the stairs towards the common room.

All five of the others were there already, and apparently had been there for some time, to judge by the way Beast Boy was draped over his chair like a melted wax figure, the very personification of boredom. Cyborg and Robin were standing in front of the main screen, their backs to the door, staring at a frozen image of Slade, taken from one of the bottling plant's video-recorders. Starfire was off to one side, paying no mind to the others, looking down at a computer-generated printout of the fiery mark that had been emblazoned on Slade's forehead, while David (he didn't seem to resent them using his 'real' name, even now) sat on the edge of one of the couches, vaguely watching the proceedings with an empty, glazed look that indicated either terminal disinterest or shell shock. Given David, it was a tossup.

She sat down wordlessly on the opposite side of the couch, wishing she had brought a book with her, but true to form, Robin had known she was here without her having to announce herself. "Take a look at this," he said without further ado, "and tell me if you can identify anything."

Beast Boy yawned as he pressed a button on the remote control, rewinding the footage back a few moments, before playing it back. On the video screen, Slade stepped forward confidently, delivering one of his monotone messages, though with the volume muted, it was impossible to determine which one. The camera zoomed in as Slade walked nonchalantly towards it, focusing on his mask, and on the red rune burnt into his forehead like a brand.

"Freeze!" said Robin. Beast Boy obliged with a click of the remote, splaying the mark all over the screen.

"We've been trying to figure out what this mark is," said Robin at his most no-nonsense. "We think its the key to Slade's new abilities. So far, we've got nothing."

"I cross referenced it against every database on the planet," said Cyborg, sounding more than a mite annoyed. "Nothin' came up. Whatever this thing is, it's not from Earth."

"And I have been unable to identify the symbol either," chimed in Starfire. "It is not Tamaranean in origin, nor does it fit with my understanding of other races in the galaxy."

Raven drew her hood up over her head and shut her eyes for a moment as she desperately tried to think of something to say. Merely glancing at that horrible symbol was enough to send icicles stabbing through her heart, and her breath caught involuntarily. "I don't recognize it," she said quickly, trying to keep the hesitation out of her words, as well as keep a lid on that voice in her head that was screaming that she had to tell them all the truth, right here, right now.

The prospect of doing _that_ was horrible enough to make it easy to ignore.

Clearly her discomfiture had not gone unnoticed, as when she opened her eyes again, even Beast Boy was eying her quizzically, and Robin had walked over and put what was no doubt supposed to be a comforting hand on her shoulder. "We _will_ figure out why Slade's targeting you," he said, supremely confident as always. It might have worked, had that very prospect not filled her with almost as much dread as Slade himself.

"Slade doesn't concern me," she said, and it was the truth, after all. She managed to make it sound enough like her usual monotone that Beast Boy relaxed, and Robin nodded and turned back to the recording. He and Cyborg began discussing new avenues of research, as Beast Boy occasionally weighed in with a smart remark that helped very little and Starfire continued to examine the printout, periodically talking to herself in untranslated Tamaranean.

None of this concerned Raven enormously, for she was busy trying to determine what the hell she should do now. She had told the others that she was researching the mysterious mark on Slade's forehead, but her real goal in pouring over her books and tomes was considerably different. Her personal library, part her own, part 'inherited' from Malchior, was one of the most comprehensive in the galaxy, at least in the subjects of sorcery, demonology, and the occult. And yet no matter how many books she tore through, no matter what avenues she researched, she kept running straight into the same dead end. The same foregone conclusion.

On the other side of the couch, David suddenly inhaled sharply and seemed to wake up. Raven had been so occupied in her own thoughts that she hadn't even noticed him dozing. She glanced over at him, and then paused. What she had taken to be shell shock or disinterest, from a closer look, was something else entirely. David's eyes were only half-open, his head hanging, periodically jerking up as he roused himself. He looked beyond exhausted, like he was under the effects of some kind of sedative. None of the others seemed to be paying the slightest mind to him, but Raven raised an eyebrow. "You all right?" she asked.

David blinked several times, having apparently not even noticed Raven sitting down. "Y.. yeah..." he stammered out, coughing lightly. "I'm okay..."

"You don't look it," said Raven. Normally she let things like this go, but this was just weird. Besides, she needed something else to think about.

"I just haven't been sleeping great," he said, mumbling his words a bit. By the looks of things, that was an understatement, but it explained why the others were leaving him be. She was about to turn away when he added an offhand comment. "... nightmares."

She stopped.

"Nightmares?"

He shrugged. "Yeah... just... just a bad dream here and there..."

"Since when?"

There was an edge to her voice, but in his fatigued state, David plainly didn't notice. "Er... not sure," he said. "Since... since all that stuff happened?" He gestured vaguely at the screen, where Robin was playing back footage of Slade laying waste to the bottling plant.

Six different things came to mind at once, none of them pleasant, and Raven felt a apprehension beginning to wrap around her like a cold blanket, even if she couldn't identify the source just yet. "What... kind of nightmares?" she asked.

It was strange enough for her to be asking after such things that this time even David noticed, and raised an eyebrow weakly. "I don't... don't remember really. Just... bits and pieces of it. Why?"

She made up a reason. She even made it sound convincing. "We all get them once in a while. It's part of the job. I can show you ways to get rid of them if you tell me what they're about."

David seemed satisfied with that answer, either that or he was too tired to argue. "I was... in some kind of tower," he said, "with a bunch of people I don't recognize, aliens or something. They looked like big... lizards. And then... there was a man... a big man with a red beard. He was... saying something. Some kinda... I dunno... poem? I don't remember it..."

Raven exhaled slowly, her taut nerves relaxing somewhat. David's nightmare was weird, but despite her fears, it clearly bore no relation to the blood-drenched scenes she saw every time she tried to meditate. Likely it was meaningless, a sub-conscious reaction to stress and confusion, like most nightmares. One thing at least that wasn't related to her impending annihilation of the Earth.

"Do you... think you can help?" he asked.

It was something to do. "Just relax," she said. "I'll try a mind-calming spell. It was a simple cantrip, one she had learned long ago and used on all of the others at one point or another, designed to send the subject into a deep, and usually dreamless, sleep. Focusing on her energies and whispering her mantra to herself wasn't as good as meditating, but under the circumstances, it was the best she could do. David obligingly shut his eyes, and she gently placed a hand about six inches over his head, releasing a small ball of bluish energy into him. Instantly his entire form relaxed, and his head fell sideways onto his shoulder. Maintaining the spell took little concentration, and as she repeated the words to herself over and over, she took a minute to think this through. There had to be a line of research she hadn't considered, something oblique to the subject. All she needed was to find it. After all, it wasn't like there was any shortage of writings on the end of -

_"The gem was born of evil's fire..."_

Raven's eyes burst open like cannons discharging, her heart froze in her chest, and every muscle locked at once. Her throat seized up, cutting off her windpipe, choking her breath off in a gasp.

_"... the gem shall be his portal..."_

Slowly, with infinite care, she turned her head towards David, her eyes glistening with fear. It _couldn't_ be. It _couldn't_ _be_! _Nobody_ on Earth knew that verse except..."

_"... he comes to claim, he comes to sire..."_

David was fast asleep, his face composed, and yet it was _his_ voice speaking, _his_ lips moving, barely audible even to her, just a whisper. Asleep or not, _David_ was whispering words that no living being save Slade could have known, before her very eyes.

_"... the end of all things - "_

"NO!!"

Everyone in the room froze.

Before Raven could stop herself, she was on the other side of the room, backed up against the counter like a cornered animal. David, like everyone else, was wide awake, for the spell had ended the instant Raven had moved, phasing through the couch before she could stop herself. Slade's frozen face still leered from the video screen, but nobody was watching it. All eyes were on her, reflecting fear, concern, surprise, and confusion.

For a few seconds, nobody said anything. And then everyone spoke at once.

"Raven?"

"Friend?"

"Dude!"

"Whoa..."

"What?"

She warded off the questions already forming. "Sorry..." she said, mastering her emotions once more. "I thought I..."

"Raven, are you okay?" asked Beast Boy, giving her one of those looks of worried concern that almost _hurt_ to see. "You don't look so good."

"Yeah," chimed in Cyborg. "You look kinda..."

"Pale?" suggested Robin.

"Well... paler," said Cyborg.

"I'm fine," said Raven. "I just... haven't been able to meditate recently."

It was perhaps saying something that they all seemed to accept this explanation, albeit not without some more questions she desperately didn't want to deal with right now.

"Is there... some way in which we might assist you?" asked Starfire. "Perhaps the mind-cleansing properties of the - "

Whatever Starfire had in mind was not something Raven was prepared to entertain. "I'll be fine," she snapped. "Stop worrying."

She had meant to say 'don't worry'.

"Look uh..." said Robin, the way he always did when trying to phrase something delicately, "we're gonna be at this a while. If you need to... get some rest or something?"

Right now, there was nothing she wanted more, and nothing she was less likely to be able to do, not that she could explain that to Robin. "... right," she said, unable to conjure up the words to express anything further. "I'll... do that..."

Robin nodded slowly, though his and the others' concerned expressions became no easier to bear. "David," he said, without even looking at the psychokinetic. "You should probably go too. Try and get some sleep. You're both on patrol tomorrow."

"Sure," said David. He also had not removed eyes from Raven, surprise having shaken off fatigue for the time being. "I'll try." David stood up slowly, and walked towards the door, casting the occasional glance back at Raven. Raven waited only a bit longer before taking her own leave, wanting to get out of here and back to her room before the others could start asking her the questions she could _see_ forming in their minds already. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Beast Boy make a move to follow her, only to be stopped by Cyborg, who set a hand on the changeling's shoulder and shook his head no.

She moved quickly to the door, through it, and down the hallway, taking a different route down than David so as to avoid everyone. The instant she was out of sight of the others, she broke into a flat run, racing back to her room, panic bubbling up in her chest as she did so. She reached the door to her sanctuary, and phased through it without even bothering to open the door. As soon as she was inside, she stopped, falling back against the door and clutching the sides of her head as she slid down it onto the ground, her breath coming in short gasps, eyes clenched shut.

_The gem was born of evil's fire..._

She screamed.

The walls and door were close to soundproof, and nobody could hear her unless they were right outside her door, so she didn't stop herself, but screamed formlessly in rage and frustration for a good ten seconds. It helped a little bit. Slowly her heart rate dropped, she calmed down, and the frustration and anger she had been feeling were replaced with fear and dread. Her constant companions ever since her birthday.

By all the Gods, _what now_?

She'd asked herself that on her birthday. She'd asked herself that the day she found that thing inside David's mind. And the closer it got to judgment day, the more and more she demanded answers from the ether, and heard nothing. The people she _knew_ she ought to be turning to for help were the very people she couldn't tell. Some things she could tell them, but not this. If they knew...

_Did_ they know?

The others didn't but... Great Azar, David had been reciting the _prophecy_! _THE_ prophecy! Did he even know what he was saying? Had he known he was saying anything at all? And what did that mean? If he knew, then he would tell the others. He'd been quick enough to tell Beast Boy about Terra after all and this was _way_ beyond that. If _they_ found out...

She shut her eyes again, tight, and forced herself to calm down. No, he didn't know. They didn't know. Not yet at least. She still had time to find a way out, but all her research had failed, and she had no idea where to turn. She opened her eyes again, and they fell on the piles of books scattered liberally around the room. Ten thousand volumes on every demon, monster, and occult nightmare in existence, and none of them had given her the solution she desperately needed. She needed answers. She needed _help_. Someone who she could talk to. Someone _connected_ to all this. Someone who might have the answer she sought...

Her eyes opened wide.

No... No that... that was... she _couldn't_!

She... she couldn't... there had to be another...

One look around her room, at the sum total of the knowledge of ancient Azarath... and the absolute certainty of what she knew she was about to do landed on her like a six-ton weight.

Slowly, without even thinking about it, Raven stood back up. For a second she didn't move, and then mechanically, robotically, she turned around, walked over to her front door, and slid it aside with the touch of a button. She glanced up and down the silent hallway, stepped out into it, and let the door slide closed behind her.

It sounded like prison bars slamming shut.

**O-O-O**

This was wrong.

Raven stood in front of the unadorned metal door, still as a statue, waiting for... well for Azar-knew-what. For divine inspiration, for all she knew. Just waiting. And as she waited, the reminder kept popping back up.

This was _wrong_.

Raven had a very strong sense of what was right and wrong, partly innate, partly from training. One did not live amongst pacifist monks for all of one's childhood without picking up some sense of ethics. That she herself was a product of pure evil only served to help. Like recognized like.

And this, this thing here, this action she was about to take, was _wrong_.

It wasn't like there were laws about this sort of thing. Superpowers were rare enough across the galaxy that they didn't come with such things, hence why a good half of those with superpowers used them to commit crimes. Superpowers set one apart, above the limits imposed on normal society. Even the most stalwart of heroes got away with things no normal law enforcement agency in the world could. Superpowers gave one the ability to do things no legal scholar had ever thought of, even on alien worlds where such things were more common. What Raven was about to do was perfectly legal.

It was still wrong. And she knew it.

The stakes were more enormous than anyone but her knew, and she owed it to the others to try and stop what was coming, without burdening them with the weight of the terrible fate she had brought into their lives. She knew it sounded like an excuse, a cop-out, but it was _true_. And how many small little crimes had they permitted or even committed in order to perform a greater good? When Cyborg threw a car into a supervillain threatening the city, did he stop to ask permission of the owner? When Starfire snatched a pedestrian out of the way of gunfire, did she give them a choice in the matter? This was no different.

Except, of course, that it was _completely_ different, not to mention _wrong_.

She sighed. In the end, what choice was there? She could not tell them. For better or worse, she couldn't risk it. She simply couldn't face their horrified stares, their angry shouts, their unanswerable demands as to why she had not warned them of the mind-numbing horror that they had let into their midst when she first arrived on Earth. Maybe that made her a coward. She didn't know. All she knew was that she could not tell them. She had to solve this on her own.

And so she phased through the door.

The room was sparsely furnished, in fact it didn't look much different from when it had just been a guest room. Neither the catastrophic mess of Beast Boy's nest, nor the obsessively-ordered neatness of Robin's cave, it, like its resident, was something of a middle ground. The desk on the right wall had several pages written in a shaky hand, weighted down by a stainless steel baton. A poster sat above the desk, a composite of all five of the original Titans, clearly one dating back at least a few months. Despite the anachronism, Raven wasn't surprised that it hadn't been replaced with one of the more modern versions that the souvenir shops around Jump were already selling.

A handful of books lined the shelves along the left wall, not enough to fill them, half of which were her own volumes, lent out for this or that reason. Next to that sat a pair of large, framed pictures, but puzzlingly, they were blank, slate grey like the rest of the wall. It was only upon approaching that Raven realized they weren't pictures at all, but some kind of tactile composite, an invisible mosaic of patterns and materials that looked identical to her, but no doubt stood out quite vividly to someone who could see via means other than light. She wondered for a second where he'd gotten it, then remembered the insane things people often sent _her_ for no reason whatsoever, and only then did she remind herself that time was a factor here, and that putting the deed off made it no easier to stomach.

David lay on the far side of the room, in his bed, asleep, or close enough. She didn't have to approach to see that he was having another vivid dream, possibly another nightmare. His head twitched every so often, and his eyes were moving beneath his eyelids. Any second now, he might suddenly wake, an eventuality she would need to avoid in order to pull this off. As silently as a field mouse, she approached the bed until she was standing next to it, and she extended one hand and gently laid it on the blanket, whispering her mantra as quietly as she physically could.

"Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos..."

A soft blue glow enveloped the bed and the sleeper within it, as Raven released a spell into him. David went rigid for a moment, then slowly relaxed, his breathing slowing to a steady pace, his head falling over to one side. Raven maintained the spell for a few more moments, then drew her hand back and took a deep breath. The spell was a variant of a healing ritual she had once been taught, one that placed the subject into a deep, rapid, regenerative trance. Even if he only received ten minutes of actual rest, David would wake up feeling completely refreshed and alert.

But more importantly for Raven's purposes here, he would also, baring a massive sensory intrusion, be absolutely comatose for the next eight hours,

The voice of Azar came back to her as she gently slid a chair over to the side of the bed, and sat down in it, calming herself, steadying herself for what she was about to do.

_"It is anathema to enter an unwilling mind..."_

The words were practically burnt into Raven's head, a lesson repeated over and over by the monks of Azarath. No amount of excuse-making or moral relativism could change it. This thing she was doing was forbidden. It was criminal. It was _wrong_.

And worst of all, she knew the others would agree if she asked them.

The last time she had entered David's mind, she had done so with an astral projection, entering a psychic trance and leaving her body behind momentarily as she deployed her consciousness into his mindscape. That sufficed for simple investigations, certainly, and carried next-to-no risk, save that of being evicted rudely back into one's own body, but that was not what she intended to do here. She knew that whatever was in there would resent her intrusion, would resist a simple mind connection. She would have to do it... 'properly'.

She reached into her cloak, and drew out a small object...

"Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos."

"Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos."

"Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos..."

**O-O-O**

The mindscape was not as it had been.

Floating above the forest, Raven saw instantly that something drastic had changed here. Anyone could have. The trees still sat quietly in the still air, no sound of bird or beast disturbing them. The golden hemisphere that twinkled in the midst of the forest still shone as brilliantly as she remembered it, but there was something else here too. Five towers as tall as skyscrapers loomed over the canopy, each one massive enough to serve as the centerpiece of the Jump City Skyline. The five towers were scattered randomly across the forest, but they somehow did not look foreign, despite the setting, their bases merging seamlessly into the foliage, as though they had grown naturally out of the ground somehow. Each of the towers was comprised of a different material. One tower was made of polished steel, another of varnished wood, a third of shining crystal. The one nearest to her was made of a black stone that looked like volcanic pumice, and the last one seemed to be comprised of rubber. What these towers were, where they had come from, what they represented, all these were questions she could not answer now. There was one reason, and one reason alone she was here, and it lay within that golden dome.

She floated over the the canopy, giving the towers a wide berth, moving to the border of the hemispherical golden dome, within which lay the answers she sought, for better or worse. She paused at the border, collected herself, readied the small arsenal of spells she had a feeling she was about to need. And with everything ready, she stepped through.

It was as she remembered, a featureless black moonscape of cold ash, like the aftermath of an asteroid strike or a nuclear war, enveloping her the instant she stepped through the golden dome without limit or barrier visible from horizon to horizon. Unlike last time, however, she appeared to be alone. She had half-expected to see whatever-it-was sitting here, in its ash-dusted satin armchair, waiting for her to return, but instead the bleak terrain stretched on without break or pause, revealing nothing but more of the same.

She turned a complete circle, carefully surveying the surroundings for any threat or sign of life. Other than the charred skeletons of what might have once been steel girders, there was nothing nearby. She wasn't sure what she had anticipated coming in here, a discussion, an argument, a fight, but she certainly hadn't planned on being _ignored_.

... no, strike that. She wasn't being ignored. The area was _too_ still, too quiet, too nondescript even for somewhere like this. She could feel her empathy prickling in the back of her mind. There _was_ something out there, watching her, waiting for her to let her guard down.

"Come out," she said in as calm a voice as she could. "I just want to talk."

A babble of responses greeted her, coming in from all directions, and she snapped her head around back and forth, hoping to catch a glimpse of what was making the noise, but there was nothing visible. Disjointed words, bits of thirty different languages with no uniformity and no single voice, male or female, human or alien, echoed around her as though shouted by an invisible chorus. An angry one. None of the words were English, but there were a few human ones among them, Latin, Sumerian, something she guessed to be Chinese, lost among a hundred other tongues, some too alien for a human to even pronounce.

She kept circling, kept watching, kept her spells ready on the tip of her brain for instant deployment. "I'm not leaving until you answer me!" she shouted over the cacophony of noise, trying to sound resolute and determined. Perhaps it worked, for the voices stopped like someone had thrown a switch, leaving her listening to the soft sounds of her own footsteps, and then there came another voice, one deep and sharpened, its tone as cold as ice.

"I _told_ you to leave this one alone..."

A shimmer in the unlit sky, a trembling of the air, and a figure coalesced out of the darkness. Indistinct, indescribable, it was tall and short and thin and broad and dark and light by turns, humanoid and otherwise in succession. It could not be described with any regularity, it simply _was_, but whether it had two eyes or fifty or none at all, it was staring straight at her with a savage gaze that could have struck a man dead at a hundred paces. She steeled herself, and stared right back at it.

"Who are you?" she asked.

"He is _not_ for your _filth_!" screamed the being venomously as it walked, slithered, and floated towards her, its form shifting so frequently and fluidly that it was dizzying to watch. The only constant was the venomous hate pouring from it like a stench, lighting her empathic senses afire, sending a warning screaming through her head a second before the creature lifted its arm/tentacle/appendage, and brought forth fire.

Fire, roiling, nuclear fire, obliterated everything in sight and plunged the world into an undifferentiated riot of red and orange, enclosing her like an ocean, blotting out the very ground she stood upon. As before, the only defense she had was her shield, a barrier of pure will, one that had failed her last time, forcing her to retreat into her own body once again.

But this time was different.

With one hand, she manifested her shield, and whereas last time it had shattered beneath the flaming barrage, this time it held, held strong and firm as the flames of rage battered against it, and with her other hand she conjured forth psychic energies and mystical powers unnameable in human tongues, and clenched her fist like a boxer, and brought it around, and commanded the fire to be gone.

And it went.

Flames potent enough to consume a planet and burn stars to ash were extinguished at her command, swept aside like leaves before a hurricane, and when they were gone, they revealed the same ashen moonscape, the same space-dark sky, the same monstrous figure standing before her, rage and hatred mollified perhaps by what she took to be shock, that it's powerful toys had availed not to drive the intruder back.

"I _didn't_ ask you if he was for my 'filth'!" snapped Raven, darkly, her voice locked in the no-nonsense tone she took with recalcitrant supervillains. "I asked what you are! _Answer me!_"

The creature did not reply, though its shifting features began to slow, devolving down into a small humanoid, one she knew she was going to recognize before she recognized it. One she had been expecting to see. David.

But it wasn't David. It couldn't be David. As before, the expression was too direct, too out of character, for it to be anything of the sort. Whether expression of some subconscious facet of his personality or something else altogether, it now stood before her looking surprised. Astonished. Even scared.

"What have you done... ?"

There was such apprehension in that voice that Raven nearly hesitated, but caught herself as she stepped forward, her shield falling to be replaced by a swirling network of energy that kicked up dust about her feet.

"I'm not some amateur psychic you can just push around," she said to the thing that wore David's expression. "And I'm not leaving until you _answer me_!"

"Dear God... you... you've... _manifested_?"

David, or whatever it was, recoiled a full pace and a half at this realization, and there was no mistaking the fear, the near-panic in his voice as he said it. He brought his hands around again, and tongues of flame and fire burst from them, as raging and potent as before. Yet with a single extended palm, she conjured forth a shield strong enough to repel them, advancing at an even pace, parting the fire before her with an outstretched hand.

"You can't get rid of me with mind-tricks," she insisted, brushing aside further bursts of flame and raw energy, the creature that resembled David retreating as she approached, blasting away at her with what she hoped was everything it had. The ground warped and twisted, the sky burnt and buckled and collapsed inward, the air itself combusted around her, but nothing could David inflict upon her that she could not counter. She had spent the necessary time in preparation, hanging spells on the edge of her brain, preparing her mental disciplines for the contest she knew would result. She was not merely projecting some image of her own mind into this place. She was here, physically and mentally, in a form Euclidian physics was not equipped to describe. In psychic terms, it was called a "manifestation".

No matter how desperate 'David' was, no matter what world-shattering powers he called upon, against Raven, such powers were not enough, and she swatted them aside, willing herself forward, teleporting directly in front of him and grabbing him by the shirt, hoisting the smaller figure up as she did so. "_Tell me what you are!_" she shouted in his face. And as she did this, she saw a spirit-shriveling fear flash in the thing's eyes, and then all of a sudden it was gone.

For a second, Raven stood there, blinking at her empty hands, alone once again in the dark landscape. She looked left and right, unsure of where he could possibly have gone, until it occurred to her that they were on this thing's home ground, and it was unlikely to have just moved a few virtual feet, not when it exhibited such mortal terror.

She suddenly realized what she needed to do.

"Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos," she chanted quietly, channeling her energy into a powerful breaching spell, and she extended one finger, which began to spark a pale blue, like a live wire severed and brandished in the air.

"Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos," she repeated, and the sparks grew in intensity with each word. "Carazon, Rakashas, Endere. Vaserix Endrien Animadus! Azarath, Metrion, _Zinthos!_"

Reality tore.

Slowly, painfully, she dragged her sparking finger down like a butter knife, ripping open a gash in the very fabric of her present location. Only once a massive rip had been torn, six feet tall and spilling light like a cracked windowshade, only then did she dispel the magic with a sigh of relief, and stepped through.

And as she did so, she swore that just for a second she could hear the sound of bells...

**O-O-O**

Before becoming a Titan, he had not thought it was possible to actually hate an alarm.

One second he was blissfully asleep, unconscious, unaware of the world, and the next, the room flashed red, and an klaxon suitable to raise the dead was blaring in his ears. Had someone walked into his room with a cannon and discharged it next to his head, he could not possibly have been more rapidly woken up.

It was not the most pleasant way to greet the morning.

No... strike that, it wasn't the morning yet. In fact it wasn't even close. The clock showed 9:27 PM. He was fairly certain that he'd only gotten to bed somewhere around 9. He'd been asleep for less than half an hour, or at least he _thought_ it had been that. Honestly, he had not stopped to check the clock when he reached his room, collapsing in his bed without bothering to draw back the covers or change out of his uniform. He hadn't even taken off his belt, a fact he now regretted, as the buckle had dug into his stomach as he slept. Yet... weirdly... he no longer felt tired. Indeed he felt _miles_ better than he had before collapsing, like he had slept for twenty hours rather than twenty minutes. Maybe he was finally starting to adjust to the Titans' weird semi-nocturnal schedule, as Robin kept insisting he eventually would. Either way, it was hardly something to complain about...

He reached over and hit the acknowledge button on the far wall, which mercifully cut off the klaxon, and sat up on the bed to try and find his communicator. As he did, he noticed something _else_ odd. His chair, normally sitting way over by his desk, was right next to his bed, sitting upright and empty, facing him. And sitting on top of the chair was a small purple hand mirror.

The sight was so incongruous that David did a double-take. The chair he might have moved while stumbling about his room in a half-comatose stupor, but he was almost _certain_ that he had never seen the mirror here before. Granted, a mirror was hardly the most menacing of objects, but he felt a chill of unease run down his spine as he looked at it, and slowly reached over to pick it up...

"Robin to Devastator."

Jolted out of his musings on household objects, David withdrew his hand and seized the communicator on his dresser.

"Devastator here," he said.

"We've got a situation. Meet us in the common room."

"Got it." David clipped the communicator and baton onto his belt, and got back up, sliding the chair back over to his desk and absentmindedly dropping the mirror on top of the letter he had been writing back to one of the kids from the DCS. And a moment later he was out the door, the mirror already forgotten, as the old, familiar tightness in his stomach that accompanied any alert began to re-assert itself, as it always did. As he realized by now, it probably always would.

This was not the time...

He rode the elevator up to the common room, trying to steady his nerves and quiet the voice in his head that was screaming that this time, _surely_ this time he was going to go out there and get pounded into jelly by whateverthehell they were going after. It was when he stepped through the doors into the room itself that he realized that this time, that voice might not be so wrong this time...

The viewscreen was covered with pictures of Slade, as it had been before, but rather than old recordings, the symbol in the upper right of the screen showed that this was new footage, live footage, filled with the same scenes of fire and destruction that the old ones had been. It did not take a leap of genius to determine what the emergency was. Slade had decided to make a typically 'theatrical' re-appearance.

The knot tightened.

" - still not answerin'," said Cyborg as David entered. "And the sensors are sayin' she's not in the Tower."

"She is not within her room," said Starfire, entering behind David with a look of concern on her face, having apparently taken the stairs up. I can find nothing to indicate where she may have gone."

By process of elimination, they were talking about Raven.

Robin looked singularly unamused, but said nothing immediately, as Beast Boy looked from one Titan to the other. "Well, we gotta go looking for her, don't we?" he asked, clearly deeming it a self-evident fact.

"We can't," said Robin. "Slade's tearing half the city apart. The police have called in a Code 1."

Cyborg whistled and David winced. Code 1 was _bad_ news. It meant that the civic authorities were abandoning the entire area pending the Titans dealing with the issue. Faced with something like the newly re-energized Slade, David supposed he couldn't blame them, but time had not softened his reaction to having been appointed one of the solutions of last resort for an entire city. And the last fight they had had with Slade had... not gone well...

That Raven had gone missing just as Slade had chosen to show up again made things even worse.

Still, the situation was bad enough that even Beast Boy didn't protest, at least not after a quick glance showed him that Cyborg was clearly behind Robin this time. The only remaining question was dealt with quickly.

"Can you go?"

It took David a second to realize that the question was aimed at him. "Er... yeah... yeah, I'm okay," he said.

He was surprised when that didn't suffice immediately. Starfire and Beast Boy exchanged looks and Robin narrowed his eyes. "You sure?" he asked. "You were pretty out of it earlier."

"Got some sleep, I guess," said David. "I feel a lot better." Not that he was _eager_ to go racing off to face Slade, but he physically felt up to it, at least. Scared as he usually was, he wasn't going to lie about it...

Based on the way Robin was looking at him, David guessed that had the situation been any less urgent, he would have _ordered_ him to stay behind. To be frank, David didn't really understand it himself, but there were plainly more important mysteries to pursue right now, and so at Robin's order, they were soon headed for the T-car, David bringing up the rear, whispering a prayer to whoever might be listening that the situation be not quite as bad as had made it out to be.

**O-O-O**

Whoever was listening had a perverse sense of humor. It wasn't just as bad as it looked. It was _far_ worse.

David knew that they were in for trouble when they passed the first burning minivan. It was lying on its roof, wheels still spinning as the burning tires cast thick black smoke into the air. Starfire had gone pale at the sight, Robin and Cyborg fallen silent as Cyborg's grip on the steering wheel tightened visibly. Even if Beast Boy hadn't stopped trying to call Raven, there was a subtle shift in his increasingly desperate calls over the communicator, an edge in his voice that augured nothing good. David by now knew how to read the signs of the cold fury that all of them felt when faced with things like this, and had it been anyone but Slade waiting for them, he would have rated the villain's chances slim to none.

As it was, he was sitting in the backseat trying to convince himself that it had there had been nothing inside the driver's seat of the minivan but skeletal-shaped shadows and figments of his imagination...

The area looked like a bomb had been dropped on it. Buildings lay in gutted ruin, vehicles torn to pieces and scattered over the area. Bodies lay ostentatiously in the streets, some burnt down to skeletons, some still adorned in their clothing and uniforms. Two cops lay scorched to death beside their blackened police cruiser, their useless guns still held in their hands. Beyond them were scattered a half dozen other corpses, most burnt beyond recognition, several of whom were on their backs, their hands held up in front of them defensively, as though they had tried to ward off whatever had killed them.

"We split up to find Slade and _take him down_," said Robin in a voice that was barely controlled, "whatever it takes!" Nobody responded in words, certainly not David, whose finely tuned sense of when he was in over his head was screaming like it never had before, yet in the face of this... this _atrocity_, what else could be done? Even from a half-civilian? Nobody else said a word, but David didn't have to look at them to know that they were all ready to subject Slade's new invulnerability powers to a _very_ rigorous test.

And then suddenly, Slade was there.

He was standing next to what had once been an abandoned storefront, now a smoldering wreck, his arms crossed, staring down at his handiwork with evident pleasure, watching as the T-car screamed towards the building, screeched to a halt, and disgorged all five Titans at once.

"I do love my job..." said Slade, just within the range of hearing, and he raised his hand to summon more fire just as Cyborg planted a full-power blast of his sonic cannon straight into his back. The shot would have torn a hole through tank armor, but sufficed only to stagger Slade, and extinguish his flames, and he turned around to face the Titans almost resignedly, like this was nothing more than an inconvenience on his time.

"Mass murder?!" said Robin, his voice seething with outraged anger. "Vandalism?! This is low even for _you_, Slade!"

"The Teen Titans..." said Slade, preternaturally calm, as always. "So nice of you to drop by, but... as you can see, I'm in the middle of something. I'll deal with you in a few minutes."

Slade's cavalier attitude seemed to only antagonize Robin further. "No!" he said. "We'll deal with you _now_!"

"You can't always have what you want, Robin..." said Slade, and before anyone could so much as blink, he slammed his fist into the ground, shattering the pavement, and throwing David and all the others off their feet. In the time it took to scramble back up, Slade had vanished again, leaping up onto a roof nearby and out of sight.

Robin didn't hesitate. "Titans!" He shouted. "_Go_!"

They went, Starfire and Beast Boy flung themselves upwards after Slade, Robin pursuing them with piton guns and grappling launchers to propel himself up. Cyborg could not do so, and neither could David, but Cyborg had no intention of being left behind, and to be honest, neither did David, for many different reasons. Both of them took off on foot, over and through the debris that choked the alleys and streets they raced down. Cyborg had enough weight and mass to smash his way straight through most of the blockades in his path, and anything he could not simply shove aside, either he or David blew to pieces without pausing, lest Slade get out of their sight.

Still, they could not catch up with the aerial battle already begining to rage overhead as Robin hurled birdarangs, Starfire's blasts lit the entire area up in green, and Beast Boy slashed at Slade in form of osprey, eagle, or vampire bat. Cyborg bellowed in frustration as he shunted yet another fallen girder aside after David helpfully blew it in half. "It just don't make _sense_!" he exclaimed, though David wasn't sure he was talking to him. "This whole place is getting demolished in a couple weeks! If he wanted it gone, there just wasn't no _call _to come in and... and..." Cyborg couldn't even finish his sentence, opting instead to finish off with a roar, and a low percentage shot at Slade with his sonic cannon that missed by a dozen yards. David had to content himself with chasing after Cyborg, and waiting for an opportunity to make himself useful.

A child's scream provided it.

As it was designed to evolutionarily, the sound pierced right through everything that was happening and found Cyborg and David on the ground, though not well enough to pinpoint where it was coming from. Nevertheless, neither David nor Cyborg paused to listen for it to repeat itself, but simultaneously stopped, turned, and raced towards what seemed to be the most likely group of burning buildings, Cyborg rushing towards the one on the right as he signaled for David to take the leftmost one.

The doors were closed and burning, but doors had long-since ceased to be a barrier to David, and he snatched the baton from his waist as he ran, and swung it vaguely at the entrance as he approached it, blowing both doors to bits with scarcely a thought. A moment later he was inside, wordlessly praying that the building wasn't about to collapse on his head. Wordless prayer had become a far larger part of his life in recent months...

For the moment, his luck held, and the building remained standing. He ground to a halt, listening for anything, and heard it soon after, a little girl's shriek, unintelligible, but likely a call for help, given the circumstances. He spotted a stairwell and bounded up it as quickly as he could, a mistake, as the top step collapsed under his footfall, and nearly sent him plunging down two stories into the basement. He managed to catch himself on the edge of the stair, and scrambled back up on top of it, thankful as never before that his uniform was fireproof, and tore down the hallway, shattering anything in his path with swings of his baton and bursts of his powers, until he finally reached the end of the hallway, blasted both hinges off the final door in his way, and entered.

The room was _choked_ with smoke, so much so that he nearly fainted. He could see nothing whatsoever, and so dispensed with light and switched to his molecular vision, but the vaporized carbon made that no better, and he switched back and simply ducked down. Two children, one a baby, one a little girl of barely four or five years lay crouched on the ground next to a younger boy, two at the most, David guessed. The girl was frantically tugging at the toddler's arm, but a falling beam had apparently landed atop him and either killed him or knocked him out. The beam itself had broken... indeed it almost looked as if it was _bitten_ in half, covered in something resembling bite marks, but David had no time to worry about that. The smoke would fill the room completely in a moment, and the building might collapse at any time.

The windows were made of shatterproof glass. David nonetheless shattered them with a thought, sending glass cascading down into the alley below, and crawled over to the three children. The toddler was breathing, coughing in fact, and both of the other children were crying, but David didn't have time to worry about that either. He scooped the fallen toddler up without a word, and thanked what little luck he had when the little girl, instead of screaming her head off or going catatonic, picked the baby up herself and extended one hand tearfully to David. Grabbing her hand with his own, and holding the toddler as best he could with the other, he scrambled out the window onto the fire escape, helped the little girl over the navigate the windowsill by simply blowing it out of the wall, and was trying to figure out how they would all get down the fire ladders when something hit the fire escape and tore it apart.

He fell a full story down onto the ground, landing on his back atop the shattered safety-glass, which might not have been so annoying had the toddler he was holding not landed on top of him an instant later. Once again his uniform saved him, as the titanium polymer threads withstood the sharp fragments far better than his skin would have, and other than a few bruises and a splitting headache, he was by and large all right. A glance around revealed that the girl had hit an awning before falling onto the ground alongside the still-crying baby, and was weakly trying to say something. David caught the name 'Bobby'. Probably one of the boys' names. He got up gingerly, reaching down for his communicator to call someone down to help him get these kids out of the danger zone, but his hand fell to his side as he realized, all of a sudden, that he was not going to get that far...

Slade stood in the alleyway, blocking the exit onto the street, his fists closed and wreathed in flame. His single eye was trained on David like a laser, but he did not move, not immediately, waiting as David's face lost what color remained in it, and while the little girl picked herself and the baby up, and crept up behind David, peering out from behind him at the armored cyclops in their path.

"I have to say," said Slade. "You weren't the one I was expecting to meet here."

David tried to swallow the enormous lump forming in his throat as he glanced around in vain for the other Titans. Slade had somehow given them the slip, and he could not do the same in return without guaranteeing the deaths of all three kids, or worse. The knot in his stomach tightened so much that he could barely breathe, and Slade smirked and slowly walked towards them.

"Wh... what do you want?" asked David.

"What any messenger wants," said Slade simply. "For their message to be heard. Unfortunately, that requires the recipient to be present, and she seems to have declined my invitation."

"You mean Raven?"

Slade laughed. "It's not Raven I'd be worried about right now if I were you, Devastator. And in any case, I've a message for you too..."

Scared or not, David's next actions were essentially automatic. He pressed the panic button on his communicator, and drew his baton once again, all in the same motion, falling back half a step, the most he could while still remaining between the kids and Slade. With a thought, he sheathed the baton in its red aura. The pulsating warmth of the baton was a slight comfort, but only a slight one.

Slade looked amused. "Are you _joking_, boy?" he asked. "What do you intend to do with that?"

"Take another step and you'll find out," spat back David, trying to mask his apprehension with little success. "They'll be peeling you off the walls with a spatula."

"You're going to blow me up then?" asked Slade, spreading his arms wide. "By all means try." There was the barest hint of a smile as Slade ostentatiously took another step, pausing momentarily to offer the opportunity to detonate him. "But you already know that's not going to work, don't you?"

If anything, molecular vision was even more terrifying than the normal reality. Against the backdrop of gas, liquid, and solid molecules that ringed him, Slade stood out only by his absence. In normal vision, he was a walking, armored figure, but in molecular terms, he was _nothing_, a black hole in reality, a stable vacuum displacing everything normal. Slade was right. David could neither manipulate nor even _detect_ the elements Slade was comprised of, could not determine what they were, could not determine _if_ they were.

Somehow this made everything several orders of magnitude more terrifying than before.

Slade read the astonished fear on David's face like he was a book printed in block letters. "I thought so..." he said, and resumed walking. "Honestly, child, do you even know who I am?"

Desperately forcing himself not to turn and run, David managed to stammer a reply, all attempts to appear unafraid abandoned. "Y... yes," he said, tightening his grip on his baton. "But..."

"But what?"

David shut his eyes and took a ragged breath. "But I also know something you don't..."

"Really?" asked Slade with an amused laugh. "And what's that?"

David set his teeth, braced himself, and cracked his eyes open. "The exact chemical composition of asphalt."

It took Slade just a moment, a brief hesitation to figure out what David was talking about, and just as he did,the street exploded underneath his feet.

The blast was raw and powerful, as strong as an anti-tank mine, and it blasted Slade up like a rocket, an ascent aborted a second later when he slammed headfirst into an overhanging streetlight built into the side of one of the buildings. The light shattered on impact in a cascade of sparks, and Slade plunged back down to the alley floor, only to be met by another blast, this aimed both up and outwards, which threw him back towards the entrance to the alley.

Maybe the explosions had hurt Slade and maybe they had not, but they bought seconds, and David didn't even try to determine what had happened to Slade before he turned on the brick wall of the building next to the one he had escaped from. A wave of his magic wand, and an eight foot hole was torn through it like lacework struck with a cannonball. Waving the smoke out of his face, he half dragged, half shoved the little girl through the hole, laying the stirring toddler down next to her, and shouted over the echoes of the blasts for her and her siblings to run like hell. He had to hope that the blasts hadn't deafened them, or if they had, that she'd have the sense to run anyway while he tried to hold Slade long enough for the others to...

Something _grabbed_ him from behind and pulled him up, off his feet, and before he knew what was happening, he was dangling forty feet in the air. He squirmed and twisted reflexively, not even considering what would happen if he _did_ break free, but it mattered not in the end, for a second later he was spun around and hauled over a metal railing and onto another fire escape, face to face with Slade.

They had plainly _not_ hurt him.

"Was that supposed to be clever?" asked Slade, looming over him, pressing him up against the railing of the fire escape so hard that he would have pitched over backwards had Slade not been holding him by the shoulders. He tried to bring up his baton, But Slade contemptuously swatted it out of his grasp. "Did you think I came here to watch your little fireworks display? Do you think this is all a game? Are you such a fool as to ignore the message I bore you?"

Even in the midst of panic, there was a kernel of logic left to David that recoiled at this. Something made no sense here. "You... you killed a dozen people to _deliver a message_?"

Slade laughed. "I already delivered you the message. I killed a dozen people to make you pay attention to it."

"What are... what are you _talking about_?!" shouted David, making a renewed effort to break free and damn the fall, but Slade's hands were like steel vices, and in a flash, he remembered laying on the pavement of another street somewhere in the city, watching Slade hold Raven in a similar trap.

"I am talking about _Armageddon_!" snarled Slade, and he spun around, throwing David down onto the floor of the fire escape. "I am talking about the end of the world. Skies burning, oceans boiling, fire from the heavens. It is all coming about."

"You're _insane!_"

"Oh I'm very much in control of my faculties, David," said Slade, crossing his arms and watching as David picked himself up. "Come now, you _always_ knew it was going to end this way, didn't you?"

"End _what_ way?"

"With you destroying the Titans?"

David froze. "... _what_?!"

"Oh perhaps you didn't think it was quite that dramatic," said Slade. "But I know you've always suspected that there was something wrong with you... those powers you're so afraid of... even now... the ones any sane superhero would already have turned to instead of standing there staring at me like a gape-mouthed child..."

"I _couldn't_ destroy the others, even if I wanted to!" shouted David back at Slade, not bothering to ask himself when it was he had decided to take this line of discussion seriously.

"Relying on your own weakness as a defense?" asked Slade with an amused tone, and he strolled over towards David as though he was on holiday. "Face it, David, you haven't got the first idea what you are and aren't capable. But you've always known that whatever these powers were augured no good, haven't you? You knew that if you made use of these abilities of yours, you'd one day wind up on the opposite side of propriety... that's why you hid them for so long, never turned to them, never dared even think about them. You knew that if you ever started to use them, it wouldn't be as a hero..."

David blinked. This was... he'd...

"You've been spying on us!"

"We're all being watched," said Slade. "You and I have something in common in that regard. But both your conscience and my message gave you the same warning, one you've chosen to ignore. I brought you all here to bear witness to the consequences."

David's anger was boiling over by this point. "I don't know _what the hell you are talking about_! I'm not going to destroy anyone except _you_!"

"Oh, but you are, David," replied Slade. "You _are_ going to destroy someone else. In fact, you're going to destroy _all of them._ Whether you like it or not, whether you deny it or not, it doesn't matter in the slightest. You are the catalyst for the annihilation of the Teen Titans."

David could barely speak, but as Slade simply stood there, watching him, a voice of defiance welled up in his throat. "No!" he snapped. "No, that's a _lie_!"

"Oh is it?"

"You told Raven the _exact same thing_!" said David, pointing a finger at Slade accusingly. "You stood there in the street and told her that _she_ was gonna end the world. Flesh to stone, blood from the skies, _I remember _all that! And now all of a sudden _I'm_ the one who's supposed to kill everybody? At least keep your lies straight!"

Slade chuckled darkly. "I told Raven she was destined to destroy the world. You on the other hand... are not merely prophesied to annihilate humanity. You're the cancer that will bring your friends down from within."

"That's _not true_!"

"I assure you - "

"I _don't care_ what you assure me of! It's _not_ happening! Not _ever_! Not to Raven, not to me, not to _anyone_!"

Slade laughed, a long, roaring, belly laugh. "David, don't you see? You've _already done it_."

"... what?"

"It's already happened. It happened long ago in fact. You've already struck the blow that will destroy your friends. You just don't realize it yet." Slade inclined his head almost mockingly. "Raven does though. On some level, she's always known it would come about, hasn't she? And do you want to know the best part?"

Slade stepped over and leaned in. David was in no position or mindset to stop him. "The best part is," whispered Slade almost conspiratorially, "unlike her, you still have a chance to stop it. Even now, you could still undo the damage you've done, reverse it, save your friends. You could do it... but you won't. Even if you knew how, you wouldn't, because you've addicted yourself. Because it's become more important than you dare acknowledge, even to yourself. And so you're going to sit back and watch your world burn, rather than lift a finger to put the fire out..."

Slade stood back up, slowly, taking a step or two back as he flexed his hands and fingers, summoning fresh flames to dance over his unblemished armor, as David stared mutely at him.

"So no matter how much you or your little friends squirm and cry," said Slade. "You are going to be the agent of their annihilation, and there is nothing anyone else can do to stop it..."

"How 'bout _this_?!"

Both Slade and David turned their heads upward in search of whoever had spoken that last question, an instant before it dissolved into a formless war cry as Cyborg suddenly plunged out of nowhere.

Slade had only enough time to blink as a half-ton of titanium and circuitry landed on his head at a hundred miles an hour, all focussed on Cyborg's fist, which he slammed into Slade's faceplate so hard that the fire escape collapsed under the blow, as did the three beneath it. David found himself falling towards the ground, but suddenly there was Starfire, grabbing him around his chest and pulling up hard for a second, before setting him down gently on the trash-littered alley floor. It was all so fast that David barely had a chance to blink before he was standing on the ground, and Starfire was handing him his baton, which had landed nearby.

"Are you unharmed?"

He had no idea how to answer that question, but one way or another, he was not required to, for a moment after Starfire asked, there was a massive explosion from further down the alley, and both of them turned in time to see Cyborg blasted bodily into the air by a huge gout of flame, which parted to reveal Slade, unperturbed as ever, standing in the center of a shallow crater surrounded by the wreckage of several fire escapes.

Starfire gave a shout and unleashed a beam of green energy from her eyes, but Slade absorbed it like a sponge, and released flames from his fingertips that forced both Starfire and David to dive to the ground to avoid being incinerated. David brought his baton around and fired a half dozen bricks at Slade from the wall behind him, but as they had the last time he tried such a stunt, the bricks merely shattered against his armored hide, doing nothing whatsoever, even when he commanded them to detonate on impact with all the power he could muster. Starfire had no better luck. Her blasts of energy were worse than useless, for Slade caught one of the starbolts and hurled it back, blowing both of them aside and cloaking the entire area in smoke.

And when the smoke cleared, Slade was gone.

David and Starfire both assumed it was a trick, and both immediately scrambled back to their feet, watching to see when Slade would re-appear. But despite their assumptions, Slade did not show himself, and only slowly did it occur to them that this time he might not be returning.

Their communicators crackled to life at once, and David pulled his off his belt to see Cyborg standing on the roof he had been blasted onto. "I can't see anybody," said Cyborg. "Are y'all out there?"

"We're here," said David, as Starfire lifted off the ground to continue searching either for Slade, the others, or other survivors. David glanced over at the hole he'd blown in the wall, but there was no sign of the three children he had told to run. He'd have to go looking as soon as he called it in. "Slade's... gone, I think."

"I doubt that," chimed Robin in over the communicator. "Can anyone else see him?"

"Uh... no..." came the voice of Beast Boy. "But uh... I can see something else..."

"What is it?" asked Robin.

"Um... dude... you know that symbol of Slade's... ?"

**O-O-O**

The floor was made of marble.

On Earth, marble was associated with antiquity, with Ancient Rome and temples to forgotten gods. People thought of it as a fancy, polished, civilized-looking stone, and used it to line the floors and walls of office buildings, hotel lobbies, or government buildings. It was associated with culture and respectability.

Alien cultures, on the other hand, understood what marble was really for...

Raven crouched on the side of the round atrium, one hand on the polished marble floor. The stone was white, pure white, no imperfections or 'marbling' to color it, save for in the very center of the room, where a circle of black stone had been inscribed into it, with seven rays extending from it equidistantly. Each ray was a different color, purple, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red, set against the white marble surrounding them in a stark and striking pattern. Raven poured her mind into the marble surface, feeling the currents of magic pulsing through them, using the natural conductivity of marble in regards to all things sorcerous to distribute immense power throughout the room.

Or at least the simulation of it.

She had sliced through every misdirection and layer of obfuscation to get here, and stopped. She could not explain why she had stopped in words, but there was a sixth-sense to these things, one she had long ago learned was your best friend in mind-travel. Particularly within your own, but often times even within other people's.

She stood back up, surveying the atrium, a riot of arched alcoves, open to the elements on the sides, the roof carved in mahogany and other exotic woods, save for in the center above the black inlaid circle, where an open oculus admitted the sky. Above shone no sun, and glimmered no moon, but instead sat an alien sky full of planets and stars near enough to resolve. The atrium was perched atop an immense tower of ivory or limestone, and down below it lay a vast city, but the city was on fire, glowing red and orange in the shallow half-light, smoke vaguely shimmering in the distance. The air was still now, but once in a while it would pick up, and carry with it the faintest echo of distant cries.

Painful cries.

Not even in the wildest conspiracy fantasies she had indulged in, did she ever imagine that _David_ had ever laid eyes on a scene like this one, which of course meant only that she wasn't viewing a memory, but a mental construct. Why his mind, or whoever's mind this really was, had decided to erect this scene was a question best left to psychologists. She had work to do.

There was something here, something hidden, and she had to find it, for she suspected she knew what it was. She closed her eyes and floated up into the middle of the atrium, her cloak wrapped around her, repeating her mantra to herself as she reached out with her mind, a recursive scan of this mind-space she had entered laying bare its foundations and feeling for the patterns of thought that formed its skeleton, isolating the most powerful ones, homing in mentally until she could...

"_Curse_ you!" came a shout from right behind her. "Have you not done enough?! _Curse_ you and all that bears your touch!"

Raven opened her eyes and turned, and saw a horror.

A writhing mass of tentacles sat in the middle of the atrium, some capped with fanged mouths, some with octopus suckers, and some with lidless, bloodshot eyes. Agitated and angry, the tentacles snapped their jaws and beat the air and floor, extending and retracting around a pulsating central body quivering with a raw malevolence so thick she could _smell_ it.

"You invade our home!" shouted the monster, though no specific mouth was doing the talking, the voice originating from somewhere inside the core. "You assail our very thoughts! And you demand answers from _us_?! _Curse you_! We shall lay your mind bare to be devoured, and spare the universe your tainted filth!"

Raven had been called worse things than this by many a villain, and the threats did not phase her. "You're not in charge here," she said. "Tell me what I want to know."

"We will tell you _nothing_!" shouted the slithering horror. "You have performed a final sacrilege, and you shall _suffer_ for it!"

Several tentacles snapped at her, but she raised her shield and blocked each assault as it came, gathering energy of her own and encasing the writhing mass in a black sphere, lifting it bodily off the ground and keeping it hovering in mid-air.

"This isn't some memory-scape," she said to the screaming, twisting mass of alien flesh. "David didn't invent this. You did."

"We are one and the same, and you defile us _both_!"

"No you're not," said Raven, forcing herself to remain in control. "You know things he doesn't. You know what I am. You know about my father."

The tentacles all froze, the unblinking eyes locked on her like lasers. The voice, when it spoke next, was raspy and quiet, but contained a core of shocked revulsion that could not have been fake, not this deep inside the mind...

"Your... _father_?!"

It _didn't_ know?

Suddenly the tentacle monster disappeared, popped out of existence like a burst balloon, and Raven was once more alone in the atrium, or rather she appeared to be. Carefully, she reached out empathically, looking for something out of the ordinary, and had just begin isolating the patterns of thought around her when the entire scene shifted.

The ground beneath her feet turned from marble to some other kind of stone, and she found herself standing atop a flat-cropped pyramid. Another city was arrayed before her feet, but this one was not on fire, indeed it was gleaming and polished, sparkling in the twin suns overhead. Throngs of people surrounded the enormous structure, all staring up at the platform Raven was standing on, but not at her.

A dozen feet away, there stood a young woman dressed in white. Though the figures filling the courtyards and plazas below were armored and armed with a variety of lethal weapons, the woman herself wore no armor, nor held any weapons save one, a gleaming scepter of gold and brass, atop which was set a crimson ruby the size of a pineapple. Cries and cheers wafted up from the crowd below, cries of victory or acclamation, who could tell, but as Raven watched, the young woman smiled, and raised the scepter high above her head, and before everyone's eyes, the golden instrument caught fire, flames ringing it like a halo, and yet the young woman's hand was unburnt...

The sight of the flames sent the crowd into a delirium of cheers and trumpet-calls, but Raven heard none of them, her eyes fixed on the flaming scepter, as the young woman lowered it slowly to her side, letting the flames lick at her skirt without scorching the fabric or shimmering the air. Fire without heat had many metaphorical or psychological interpretations... but all she could think of was the literal one she knew all too well.

"What are you?"

Raven whirled around and found a facsimile of David staring back at her, a red-sheathed baton in hand, to her eye, infinitely more dangerous than the real thing. Its eyes were blazing like bonfires, and its demeanor unquestionably malevolent, albeit cautious.

She decided on honesty. "You know what I am."

"Daughter of Trigon, why are you here?" asked David, baton held menacingly forward.

"I need to know what you know," said Raven carefully, "about what's happening."

David's eyes narrowed. "Why?" he asked.

"Because I need to know how to stop it."

Her counterpart seemed to consider this for a moment, and then, disconcertingly, began to laugh, the laugh building and building until it was uproarious, and the figure that was either some extreme manifestation of a buried side of David's personality, or something completely different, was shaking with booming, thunderous laughter.

"You pathetic_, idiot, _demon!" he shouted back at her. "How great of a fool do you think I am?!"

"It's not a trick!" insisted Raven, "and I'm not joking! You know what's going to happen, don't you?!"

"Of course I know," said David, winding his laughter down. "You are the gem. You're going to bring about the end of the world."

"Then you _have_ to tell me how to stop it!" said Raven almost desperately.

"Stop it?" asked David. "Stop the destiny of the gem of Trigon the Terrible? Are you _mad_? There _is_ no stopping it! You _know_ that!"

"That's not true!" shouted Raven, sending tremors through the pyramid they stood upon. "It _can't_ be true!"

"And why can it not be true?" asked David, unphased by her anger. "You know the prophecy do you not? The promise of the gem, of your birth, if you are his daughter, is _absolute_."

Even now, she could not bring herself to believe it. "You can't be sure of that! There _has_ to be something I can do to stop it!"

"There. Is. _Nothing_!" said David, punctuating each word with a finality that felt like a door slamming shut in her face. "There is _nothing_ you or any other living thing can do to prevent Trigon's return. Do you understand me, girl?! _NOTHING!_ Not with all the powers of the _universe_ can you or _anyone else_ stand against Trigon, a fact you yourself would know if you weren't busy deluding yourself into imagining you are _anything_ but a vessel for the annihilation of your entire species!"

"That's _not true_!" repeated Raven, practically screaming now, her psychic restraints blasted away

"Isn't it?!" shouted back David. "You're the one who slashed your way in here demanding answers from me! _Think_, demon! How many generations of scholars and mystics have sought what you are seeking? How many civilizations have tried to stand against Trigon the Terrible? How many warriors of virtue and light has he left broken on the ground to feed the carrion birds? Not with _every spell ever invented_ could you prevent this! _I_ know. And whether or not you believe me is no concern of mine."

It was like someone had reached in and torn her guts out. Raven clutched the side of her head and clenched her teeth and tried to force down the urge to scream, which in this place might cause anything to happen. All of her efforts, all of her research, all of her attempts to find an answer, some way out of the fate creeping up on her... all for nothing...

What was she supposed to do now?

"I have given you your answers," said David, his voice darkening once more to an augury of violence. "Now _get out_."

The command crystalized Raven's attention, and she raised her head sharply.

"No."

David looked almost surprised, and a strong current of fear wafted off of him, quickly masked, but no less indicative for it. "No?"

"Not until you tell me who you are."

"And why should I tell the _gem of Trigon_ anything at all about myself?!" demanded David.

"Because I'm _not leaving_ until you tell me who you are! If you say there's no hope, then I want to know who's saying so! For all I know you're trying to trick me or working for my father! _Answer _me!"

David shook his head, almost incredulously, as he slowly raised his baton up. Raven could feel the concentrations of power forming within it, feel the very decision being made within the empathically nebulous figure to use it. "Is it somehow not plain enough to you what I am?"

In truth it was, but Raven wanted, _needed_ to hear it from his own mouth. "Who are you?" she repeated quietly for what she already knew would be the last time.

"Demonspawn," said David quietly with a shake of his head. "I am the Devastator."

And then the baton twitched, and everything burned.

**O-O-O**

"You _sure_ you're all right?"

David grimaced and massaged his temple. "Cy, I'm _fine_. Really. I just got knocked around a little." He wished to God they'd shut off those damned sirens. Every howl was like another blow to the snare drum pounding in his head.

"Hey, I'm just checkin' man."

David sighed. "I know," he said. "Sorry. Just got a headache is all..." A glance at Cyborg's surprised expression made him realize what the next question would be, and he headed it off. "Not... like those. Just a normal one."

"Look, if you're not feelin' up to - "

"It's _not_," David insisted. "It's just a normal headache. Trust me." Honestly he wasn't sure _what_ it was, but it was manifestly not one of the massive pain spikes that had laid him low during his fight with Terra. For one thing it felt entirely different. For another thing, if it _had_ been one of those, he would not have been able to speak.

Knowing that didn't make it any less unpleasant. His head felt like something was beating against the inside of his skull with a pipe wrench, but he gritted his teeth and tried to erase the signs of it, reasonably certain that it would calm down as soon as the police cars shut their sirens off. And besides, he _knew_ that this time he didn't want to just head home, not without any idea what had happened here, not after what Slade had said...

... not that he _believed_ Slade, but...

Cyborg shrugged. "You know best, man," he said. "Just don't try to push it. We don't need you collapsin' on us again."

"I won't," said David. "Just... do me a favor... don't tell Robin."

Cyborg stopped short, and turned his head back with a look of surprise so acute that David instantly thought he'd made some sort of terrible mistake, only to relax again as Cyborg broke into a broad grin.

"My _man_," said Cyborg, laying a heavy hand on David's shoulder and shaking his head. "I never thought I'd see the day..."

David had no idea what Cyborg was talking about, but as it happened, Starfire landed a moment later, and he didn't get a chance to ask.

"I have searched the entire area," said Starfire. "There is... no sign of any children."

David grimaced, half from another surge of pain that pulsed through his head, half from the Starfire's revelation. Expected or not, it was not what he wanted to hear.

"They were _right there_," he said, a bit sharper than he meant to, pointing with his baton towards the hole in the brick wall. "I put them there and told them to run."

"Then maybe they did," suggested Cyborg. "You said Slade came after you, right? Could be they got away."

"Yeah, and maybe they got buried by a collapsing building or something," replied David, his head hurting too much, and _spinning_ too much, to realize how uncharacteristically forward he was being. "We've got to look for them at least, don't we?"

"We _are_ lookin' for them," said Cyborg, _just_ a bit more forcefully, enough for David to notice, but probably not enough for Star to. "Robin's got the cops and EMTs on the way. They'll be pourin' all over the place in a couple minutes."

David forced himself to stop and take a deep breath, and the pain in his head lessened a bit as the sirens _finally_ cut off, but only a bit. Footsteps pounding over the rubble testified to the arrival of emergency crews. He glanced sheepishly up at Cyborg, who simply nodded, and gestured for him to follow as all three of them moved off to regroup with Beast Boy and Robin.

They found Robin talking with one of the police officers, and he no sooner saw them than he signaled he would be just a minute. Cyborg closed with him to join in whatever the conversation was, but David neither knew what he would say to a policeman, nor had any illusions that whatever strategy was being plotted was within his capacity to understand. Beast Boy on the other hand was further away, perched on top of a toppled chimney, curled up in the crouched posture that David by now knew was a signal of nothing good. Accordingly, while Robin, Cyborg, and Starfire conferred with the cops, he made his way over.

"Beast Boy?"

Beast Boy half-turned back to see who it was, and David saw that his communicator was in his hand, open and with a screen full of static. Beast Boy's face was so full of worry that David forgot about his headache, and even about Slade for a moment. "You... you all right?" asked David.

Beast Boy glanced down at the communicator for a second, as if the screen might resolve to something any moment. "She's not answering," he said, and there was no need to ask who. What with everything that had just happened, David had completely forgotten about Raven's disappearance, but plainly Beast Boy had not. The green changeling was plainly worried, tapping the signal button on his communicator every few seconds.

"Maybe she's just busy," suggested David, not really sure what else he could say. Raven kept her own council in all things after all. "Meditating or something. She was kinda wound up earlier..."

"Yeah, but there was an alert dude. She never misses those. You think something's happened?"

The thought had not occurred to him. "I'm... I'm sure she's just..." he was not sure of anything of course, and finally gave up trying to come up with a proper platitude. "I don't know... but whatever she's doing, she'll be all right, and if she's not, she'll let us know, won't she?"

Beast Boy didn't sound particularly convinced. To be honest, David wasn't either, but thinking straight with his head aching like this was far harder than it should have been. Beast Boy shook his head. "I really think we oughta be trying to find - "

Robin interrupted him, calling them over from where the others were standing. "Beast Boy? David?"

David glanced at Robin, then turned back to Beast Boy, extending a hand. "She's _Raven_," he said. "Whatever it is, she can handle it, right?"

Beast Boy considered that for a moment and nodded. "Yeah..." he said, noncommittally, but he took David's hand to get up and even managed a nervous grin. "Yeah, I guess she can."

**O-O-O**

Minutes later, they had rejoined Robin in front of a massive stone building, one that the police were giving a wide berth for the simple reason that Robin had asked them to. Why he had done this was obvious, even to David, but as usual, Robin explained his reasoning anyway.

"Everything in a three-block radius has been destroyed," said Robin, facing the imposing stone structure, "except this. Slade left it standing for a reason."

The building was made of granite and shaped concrete, and David was willing to guess that Slade had left it standing because of the fact that it would have taken a lot more firepower than even he had been deploying to bring it down. Robin sounded convinced however, and Robin knew better...

"According to the city's master plan," said Cyborg, "this is the original town library. But it's been abandoned for decades."

"No wonder," commented Beast Boy. "This place is a dump." He proceeded to prove it by lightly kicking one of the columns, the base of which shattered, sending sixteen tons of rock slamming to the ground an inch away from crushing him into a fine green paste. Starfire yelped, Cyborg jumped forward, and Robin was about to berate him for being careless, save that all of their attentions were drawn by a curious mark carved into the now-revealed lintel above where the column had once stood.

"The Mark of Scath."

David glanced at Robin with a raised eyebrow, but his question was answered before he asked it. "Slade told me the name," said Robin without glancing back, and he stepped up to the solid oak doors, glancing at Starfire as he did so. Chained shut and sealed by years of abandon though they were, Starfire threw them open like the doors to a dollhouse, sending a cloud of disturbed dust wafting out and into the air above.

As soon as the dust cleared, Robin entered, followed one by one by the others. Something in the back of David's neck twitched as he entered, and he quietly slid the baton off of his belt and into his hand, and coated it with a soft red aura, letting the warmth pulse through his fingers. By now it was almost normal.

"Dudes," said Beast Boy, "even without the creepy librarians... I'm not digging this place."

It wasn't like one would expect to see something different than this in an abandoned library, but David nonetheless agreed. The stacks were coated with dust and cobwebs, some bare, some with a few moth-eaten books still on the shelves. The power was off, and the only illumination came from their various powers or lights, and from faint moonlight glimmering in through the opaque windows.

They hadn't gone more than fifty feet or so before they reached the end of the room, and were forced to stop. "Dead end..." said Robin, allowing just a hint of frustration to enter his voice, and turned away to give instructions for a search of the room when David stopped him.

"No it's not..." said David, and the others turned to him, but he wasn't watching them. He was staring straight at the wall, not as a wall but as a mass of rock molecules.

"That section there," he said, pointing at it with his baton. "It's hollow."

Cyborg and Beast Boy glanced at one another and walked over to the section of wall that David had indicated. No sooner had Beast Boy touched it than brilliant shafts of white light stabbed through the air in the outline of a door, and the wall crumbled to dust. Beast Boy yelped and jumped back behind. "Uh..." he said. "I mean... secret passage! Cool! You go first."

Cyborg extended a floodlight from his shoulder and illuminated the stairs down, and the Titans descended single-file, all five of them as silent as their surroundings. David couldn't speak for the others, but he was almost glad for the silence. His head was begining to hurt worse, to the point where he had to stop every couple dozen yards to rub his temples, and then quickly catch back up with the others. Cyborg and Starfire gave him a few concerned looks, but he waved them off. All of them had better things to be worrying about. He certainly did...

They marched on in silence, but for footfalls and the soft click of Beast Boy's communicator as he kept trying to reach Raven, before finally the stairs spilled out into a large open room lined with statues. One look was enough to tell David that this was not a place he wanted to be. The statues were of robed, skeletal figures, carved in exquisite detail from pure obsidian.

Robin and Cyborg's lights reflected off the shining figures and the dust-covered ceiling and walls, even as the nearest statues twinkled in green and red from Starfire and David's own powers.

Starfire was the first one to say anything. "I did not realize your libraries housed such unpleasant sculptures."

"They don't," said Cyborg, retracting his flashlight and consulting his forearm computer. "This part of the building is old. I mean _old_ old." He looked back up, panning his head around slowly, as though hardly able to believe what he was seeing. "Like... before the city was built."

"But... the city's _two hundred_ years old..." said David hesitantly. "How's that even possible?"

"Radio-dating says this stuff was carved even before that," said Cyborg, shaking his head. "You tell me man, I just work here..."

Another jolt of pain shot through David's head, strong enough to make him hiss and shudder, holding the side of his head with one hand as his baton extinguished by itself. "David, are you all right?" asked Robin, sounding as all-business as ever.

David waited a second for the pain to fade and nodded, but clearly Robin wasn't as easily convinced as Cyborg was. He quickly approached and looked David over with a practiced eye. "Your head again?" he asked. David was forced to nod, not without a wince first, and that appeared to be all the evidence Robin needed.

"All right," he said. "Go back upstairs and wait with the cops. We'll be back as soon as we've - "

"No..."

The sole indication of Robin's surprise was the mask over his eyes widening ever-so-slightly. "What?"

David shook his head, trying to force himself not to show how much it hurt to do so. "Slade... Slade said that... I was... I was gonna..."

Cyborg stepped in. "Slade was talkin' some of his crap before I jumped him," he said. "Nothin' important. Just some stuff about - "

David cut Cyborg off as well. "He said I was going to kill you all."

That one _definitely_ surprised Robin. "What?" asked the Boy Wonder.

David could only lower his head. "He said... I was gonna destroy the Titans. That I was gonna... _decide_ to destroy you guys, or something..."

Cyborg simply folded his arms, having overheard much of this from the rooftops before he had tackled Slade. Starfire and Beast Boy looked flatly astonished, but at least both of them looked more sympathetic than angry or afraid. In the end, everyone here knew that despite the leaps and bounds he had made, destroying even one of the Titans was well beyond David's capabilities, let alone destroying all of them.

At present, he was _very_ glad of that fact.

"Like I said," said Cyborg. "Buncha crap. Don't pay no attention, man. Slade likes to play mind games."

"Maybe..." said Robin cryptically. "Do you have any idea what he meant."

David shook his head. "No," he said. "But... I'd really like to ask him."

Robin thought it over a moment. "Sorry," he said, "we can't take the risk that this might be another episode. You're gonna have to wait upstairs with the - "

_"The Gem was born of evil's fire..."_

Everyone froze, as Robin's instructions were cut off by a ghastly, hollow voice that was utterly _bonechilling_. As all five Titans spun around, they watched in horror as one by one, the eyes of the obsidian statues lining the vault began to glow a milky white, and one by one, ghostly spirits, hooded skeletons like the statues themselves, floated up off the statues into the center of the room, chanting the verses to a poem like a chorus of the damned...

_"The Gem shall be his portal..."_

Beast Boy took several steps back, jaw hanging open at this spectral sight. Starfire's fists glowed green with energy, and she too closed on the others, as if there was safety in numbers. Cyborg closed and opened his human eye slowly, unable to quite believe what he was seeing, while Robin, as he always did at the first sign of trouble, crouched low and reached for his telescoping staff.

_"He comes to claim, he comes to sire..."_

David watched the ghosts in abject horror, feeling like his lungs were seizing up. His head continued to throb, but he paid it no mind, as the words of the ghosts seemed to course through him, rattling and rolling about in his ears, like the sound of a car's backfire setting off the flashbacks of a war veteran, and he felt something stir up from within him, something familiar and alien all at once...

"The end of all things mortal."

And then all of a sudden, every eye in the room, ghostly and living alike, was fixed on David, for it had not been the ghosts that had spoken the last line... but David himself.

For a few seconds, nobody said anything. And then, as one, the ghosts vanished into nothingness, leaving behind only the five teens, and a host of questions without answers

"Um... _dude_?" asked Beast Boy.

"How did you know that?" asked Cyborg, looking at David like he could scarcely believe his eyes (or ears).

Would that he could answer coherently. "I've..." he stammered, "I've heard that poem before. I _know_ it from somewhere."

"Where?" asked Robin. "_How?_"

But to that question, all David could give in reply was a confused and helpless shake of his head, and weak, almost plaintive words.

"I don't know..."

**O-O-O**

_"A bunch of people I don't recognize, aliens or something. They looked like big... lizards."_

Raven had to admit that the description was clinically accurate, if nothing else

She was back in the atrium again, the marble-floored, open-skied atrium that towered above a burning city, only this time it was not empty, but filled with people.

Lizard people to be precise.

Seven of them there were, standing around the room atop the various multicolored starbursts inlaid into the pure white marble floor. Tall, scaled, green, and adorned in flowing robes and carven symbols of power, they stood rigidly still, eyes shut, hands folded quietly over their chests, while in the center of the room stood an eighth figure. Just as the robes of the first seven lizards matched the colors of the symbols they stood upon, that of the one in the center was black, like the circle he stood on. Rivers of energy flowed about this central figure, as he spoke in tongues so alien that Raven had trouble identifying it as speech. It was clearly some sort of ritual, and judging from the signs, a _very_ powerful one.

She had fended off assault after mental assault, and found her way back here again through the twisted jungle of meaningless symbolism that this thing had tried to lose her in. What she was viewing now was beyond her, but she paused to watch anyway, on the off-chance it would prove useful.

The chanting grew stronger, louder, more intensive, and the magical energies flying about the central figure gained in intensity apace. The marble beneath her feet began to quiver and fracture as powers of enormous potency flowed through them, and above all the oculus that opened up on the heavens began to glow with swirling forces beyond description or measurement. Even though this was only a mindscape, even though nothing here was real, Raven still took several steps back, just an instant before the figure in the center of the room burst into flame.

It wasn't like a normal combustion, it was _far _quicker. The lizard creature cried out in a terrible voice of mixed pain and ecstasy and went up in flames like a piece of paper in a blowtorch, reduced to ashes in but an instant. And yet the flames did not extinguish but twisted and danced in the center of the room, as all seven figures standing around them chanted louder and louder, crying out in full-throated roars as the magical energy pulsing through the building burst forth and brought down a river of light from the oculus above, a beam of pure whiteness that struck the flames and fractured as though broken by a prism into a kaleidoscope of rainbow colors that twisted and turned and shifted and finally came to settle, one beam of colored light shining directly upon each alien.

And then one by one, they threw back their heads and cried out in agony or joy or some mixture of the two.

And one by one, their cries were answered by a low and terrible roar, echoing up from somewhere below them, amidst the endlessly burning city. It was a nondescript roar, but it was deep and malevolent enough to turn Raven's blood to icewater.

"Do you imagine yourself to be clever?"

Raven spun around and found herself facing an _enormous_ man, six and a half feet tall at least, big and bulky, with red hair and a broad beard. The man's clothes were a riot of colors, a thousand hues tossed together largely at random, but it was the three foot sword, polished and gleaming and burning with shimmering flames in the man's right hand, that _really_ got Raven's attention.

"Waltzing in as though you own this place," said the man, walking slowly towards Raven, "slashing through anything inconvenient, demanding answers imperiously. Does this make you feel superior? Powerful? In control of your own destiny? To toy with others as though we are your anointed playthings? Are you amused?"

Sarcastic or not, there was nothing amused in the red-haired man's gaze. Raven fell back before the advancing swordsman, retreating into the center of the atrium, noting that the lizard-people had all apparently vanished as soon as this man had appeared.

"Tell me what you are," she said. "Tell me how you know who I am, and about the prophecy."

"That you might race off to tell your masters all that I say?" asked the man. "I think not, demon."

"Trigon isn't my master!"

"You _lie_!" screamed the other, and he swung his sword at Raven. Raven's shield appeared with a thought, but while her shield had sufficed to repel everything the denizens of this mystery realm had thrown at her so far, a single touch of the flaming sword shattered it like glass and threw her across the room, where she slid to a stop up against a column. "Even if I believed you," bellowed the large man, "you are the _Gem_! The Gem exists to serve the Master! There is no other way."

"And what do you exist for?" replied Raven, as she slowly got back up. Whatever was in that sword was several orders of magnitude more powerful than anything she had so far encountered, more powerful than anything she had ever _seen_ in a mindscape before.

"I exist to repel monstrosities like yourself," said the man. "You have committed a _heinous_ violation in coming here. I exist to ensure you suffer for it."

"Oh, _bullshit_!" she shouted back at the man. "You're not some subconscious emotion. You're not part of David at all! You're not even _human_!"

"Coming from one such as you, demon, that is quite a claim." said the man, circling around the room, eyes fixed on her with a blistering intensity.

Raven matched the man's movements as she tried to provoke some kind of confirmation. "What are you?" she repeated. "An alien? A ghost? A possessing spirit? Is that it?"

"Be _silent_!" snapped the man, spittle flying from his mouth like bullets.

Raven was not silent. "He's not a kinetic at all, is he? That's why his powers don't work the way they should... he gets them from _you_, from whatever you are, doesn't he?" She frowned at the man, glaring at him from under her cloak. "So where did _you_ come from..."

"_SILENCE!!_"

The man swung his sword at Raven, and though she was 20 feet away, the distant slash picked her up and _slammed_ her back into the column of marble hard enough to crack it, tearing a fissure in the featureless marble and shaking the entire atrium with the force of his blow. Raven scrambled back to her feet as the red-bearded man, screaming incoherently in thunderous rage, stomped towards her, his sword slashing back and forth through the air, cleaving columns and inlaid symbols apart with each swipe. The telekinetic blows slammed into her, knocking her back against the wall again and again and again. Desperately, she fired back with her own spells, powerful enough to send a subconscious screaming into the night, but the black beams and bolts bounced off of the charging swordsman like foam bullets off a tank.

"_Get out!_" screamed the swordsman. "_Get out get out get out get out!_" but Raven could not have gotten out even if she had wished to, not with that level of ease. Manifestations were not a matter of simply throwing a switch, something the man appeared to either be unaware of or past caring. Raven cast up another shield, fortifying it with all her might, the strongest protective barrier she knew how to produce, but with one blow, the swordsman cleaved it in half and threw her to the ground, looming overhead with his sword held high. Such rage poured off of him that he seemed almost framed in red, nightmarish rage, enough to match anything that she had ever conjured up within her own half-demon soul. And as he raised his sword for a final blow, Raven scrambled to find a spell or power that would ward him off, but the beams of black energy she flung into him from her hands were absorbed like water into a sponge.

An effect she remembered well...

And then, with a hell-raising cry, the red-bearded swordsman plunged his sword down towards her, and she opened her mouth to scream.

**O-O-O**

"David? _David!_"

David could not answer immediately, for a jolt of pain three times worse than any of the ones that had preceded it was burning through his skull like lightning. He staggered and stumbled and grabbed at the wall and missed, and would have fallen had Cyborg not caught him. He remained limp for a moment or two, face contorted in pain, until slowly the savage jolt began to fade away, and he was able to open his eyes.

"I'm okay..."

Nobody was convinced by that, not even David himself, but Robin did not once more insist that David return topside to wait with the police, though it clearly took _physical_ effort not to. Shortly after the recital had stopped, Robin had spoken a few words with the others, and had permitted himself to be convinced that since whatever was going on here clearly had _something _to do with David, and since Slade had apparently chosen to target him in the absence of Raven, that David might well be in _more _danger if he went back without the others. Robin clearly didn't like it... to be honest neither did David... but there was nothing to be done about it. They would have to simply hope that what was happening was not one of David's crippling migraine-episodes.

So far, the results were not encouraging.

As soon as David could stand again, they continued on. Robin and Starfire were in the lead, trying to decode what the poem could possibly have meant.

"The gem shall be his portal," quoted Robin. "I think they mean this 'Scath' person. And this 'gem' is how he gets here. If we're going to stop him, we need to find it and destroy it."

"I have never heard of someone named 'Scath', said Starfire. "Do you believe the gem is located somewhere in this complex?"

"I don't know," admitted Robin, "but I'll bet Slade does. If we find him, we can make him give us some answers."

At this point, David wasn't sure if he wanted any more 'answers', especially since they all seemed to turn into more cryptic questions whenever they _were_ found. Still, there was nothing for it now. At least his headache had died back down...

"You holdin' up?"

David looked up at Cyborg and nodded solemnly. "I think so," he said. "I... I wish I knew what was going on..."

"We'll figure it out, man, don't worry." said Cyborg, putting a twenty-pound hand on David's shoulder. "Whatever happens down here, we got your back."

The gesture helped. David took a long, deep breath, and let it out. "Thanks," he said.

"No problem," replied Cyborg. "And hey, don't worry 'bout what Slade said, okay?"

David laughed hollowly. "Little easier said than done, Cy..."

"I know, but Slade likes to mess with your head by sayin' things like that. You really didn't even have to tell everybody 'bout it. We all know how Slade is with this stuff."

"Yeah, I did," said David. "Even if it's nothing... I'll feel better if the rest of you all know about it."

Cyborg shrugged. "Your call," he said. "Just don't want you feelin' like you gotta clear everything through us. You're still pretty new to this thing, but you're gettin' the hang of it. You're gonna have to trust yourself one o' these days."

Despite everything, the comment brought a smile to David's face. He glanced back up at Cyborg. "Maybe tomorrow, eh?"

Cyborg laughed. "Whatever you say, bomb squad..."

All further opportunities for discussion were curtailed immediately, as the hallway they were proceeding down came to an abrupt end at a massive vertical shaft, forty feet across and so deep that the bottom could not be discerned, not even with lights or molecular vision. A broad spiral staircase adorned the outer wall of the shaft, spinning down into the darkness.

Cyborg whistled. "How far do you think it goes...?"

"Only one way to find out," said Beast Boy, and before anyone could contradict him he hocked up an enormous loogie and spat it over the edge of the stairwell, letting it plummet down out of sight as he and the others all waited to hear the splat.

The silent drop lasted _twelve _seconds.

Cyborg stated the obvious. "That's... far..."

"Then we better get started," said Robin, turning to the stairs and beginning to descend them. "I'm willing to bet that gem is down there."

"Yeah," said Cyborg, "but what else is down there with it?"

Nobody cared to answer him, and all five Titans began to descend along with Robin. The stairs were wide enough to take three or four abreast, and they naturally grouped up fairly tightly, none of them confident that there wasn't some eldrich horror lurking in an unseen corner waiting to spring out and ambush them all. Fortunately, David's headache had begun to recede, and was now manageable enough that he could spare some thought for something else. He found himself wishing that he knew what had happened to those three kids... hoping that the cops had found them already. Slade hadn't been out of his sight long enough to target them, but then again who could tell what Slade was capable of now?

And where the hell was Raven?

Beast Boy was still fingering his communicator nervously, though for the moment he had given up on calling her. Every so often, Beast Boy glanced back at him, and he did his best to smile reassuringly back, though he probably wasn't too convincing. Raven missing, in trouble, or otherwise out of sorts made everyone nervous of course, even David (though perhaps for different reasons), but it seemed always to hit Beast Boy the hardest.

No points awarded for guessing why of course, but that was a subject for another day.

"Sounds like we've got company."

Of all the things Robin could possibly have said, that was the one David least wanted to hear, but an instant later he knew that Robin was right as a pale blue light emerged from further down in the shaft, and quickly rose up towards them. Everyone, David included, quickly adopted a combat position, ready for anything, even Slade.

But not for this.

What rose up from the depths of the darkened shaft sent cries of fright from Beast Boy's lips, and would have from David's had his throat been working properly. Starfire swore in Tamaranean, and Cyborg in English, while Robin, characteristically, simply gripped his staff tightly and set himself to receive the charge of the horde of armed ghosts that wafted up through the very stairs.

Not just ghosts. Monsters.

The skeletal spectres were hideous to look at, beaked, bat-winged, and festooned with rotting flesh and decayed skin, all translucent and glowing with an unearthly light. A terrible sound, a moan mixed with an anguished wail, emerged from all of them as they lifted scythes and swords and rusty blades of no description, and advanced on the Titans from all sides.

For once, Robin needed to give no orders.

Instantly, the Titans were submerged in a horde of the undead monsters, but rote training paid off, and all of them sprung away, dodging clumsy slashes and snatching claws to strike back as they could. Beast Boy became a kangaroo and leapt over one, kicking at another, while Robin simply dodged through five slashes and lashed out with his fist to catch one of the ghosts in the face. In both cases however, their feet and hands passed through the ethereal creatures with no effect whatsoever.

"I can't hit them!" shouted Robin, an instant before Starfire tried to vaporize two of the ghosts with her Starbolts, and succeeded only in disrupting them for a bare second. Cyborg punched at one, with the same result, and for his trouble was belted in the chest by the offended spirit hard enough to throw him back into the wall.

"Yeah, well they can hit us!" cried Cyborg, opening fire with his sonic cannon at point blank range. The disruption lasted longer this time, but no permanent effect was scored, and he quickly had to retreat to avoid getting sliced to pieces.

David had no idea what to do.

His baton was unlikely to have any better effect than Robin's fists had, and the ghosts were already swarming towards him. Desperately he fell back, switching into his molecular vision to try and gain some purchase on the spirit's physical bodies. To his horror, he found that in molecular vision the spirits were completely invisible. They _had_ no physical bodies. Ergo there was nothing to destroy.

Desperately, he targeted a piece of the stairs themselves, hoping to catch the ghosts in the explosion, but the blast barely shook the spirits, even when set off _inside_ their ethereal forms. One of the ghosts charged at him, and he stumbled backwards, narrowly avoiding the slash but winding up backed against the wall with a sea of ghosts all around him and nobody else in sight. The nearest ghost stepped towards him, and he swung at it with his baton, unsheathed and silent, to no effect at all, as the ghost casually pivoted around with an enormous sickle.

And then, before his very eyes, the spirit rammed all two feet of the blade straight through his chest.

**O-O-O**

The scream never came.

The sound of marble being rent, of metal screaming as it sliced through rock, sundered her ears and resonated inside her head, but Raven remained laying on the ground, and no corresponding spike of pain indicated where the red-haired swordsman had impaled her. And then slowly, she cracked her eyes open, and saw something she did not expect.

The swordsman was crouched over her, the sword driven straight down into the ground like a railroad spike, buried up to the hilt in the white marble floor. But rather than stabbing right through her, the sword had been driven into the ground an inch away from her head, close enough that its flames licked the side of her face, though like all flames here, they did not burn. And even more strangely, rather than drawing the sword back once more and striking home this time, the swordsman was sitting there motionless, watching her with a mixture of anger and fear in his eyes.

What the _hell_?

Raven blinked a few times to ensure that she was not hallucinating, and then quickly phased through the floor, re-appearing on the other side of the atrium with her powers crackling over her hands. The swordsman remained crouched where he was, following her with his eyes, and only after she had taken up her new position did he slowly stand back up, though he made no move to pursue her.

She should be _dead_. She knew that much. There was enough power in that metaphysical sword to kill her twenty times over, and she could not have mis-read the murderous rage flying off the swordsman empathically like a machine gun spraying bullets all over the room. He had wished to kill her. He had possessed the means to kill her. He had availed himself of the opportunity to kill her.

He had failed to kill her.

There was nothing _she _had done to prevent it, so what the hell was this?

The swordsman watched her like a mouse watching a snake. There was still anger there, but more fear now, more and more every second, though why he should suddenly become afraid was beyond her. Her powers, her most devastating mental combat abilities, had not served even to scratch his clothing.

"Why won't you just _leave_?" demanded the swordsman. His massive bulk shook and then suddenly shrank, resolving a moment later back into the form of David, his sword transforming back into David's baton. All this was strange, but stranger still was the tone in which the question had been asked. It was utterly bereft of command and confidence, a pleading tone that sounded thin and fearful.

What was she missing?

She left her defenses at the ready, but called upon another slew of powers entirely, and reached out empathically towards the figure standing there in the guise of David. He tried to resist her, tried to establish a mental block of some sort, but his skill at mental scan-blocking did not exceed her own, and she brushed aside his attempt. Of course he could always counterattack, reform his sword and lash out again, or blast her with some kind of mental feedback, but he did no such thing.

"Why didn't you kill me..." she asked him, vocally and psychically both, and on both counts she received no answer save more bursts of anger. Accordingly she searched. She was not trying to read his thoughts. Alien thoughts were almost impossible to read in any event. All she was looking for was something odd, anything out of the ordinary that might explain what she was dealing with. She felt the creature's emotions, felt its, confusion, anger, surprise, but above all its terrible fear, fear of her. The only conclusion she could come to was that he _wanted_ to kill her. Badly.

But he had not.

... perhaps... he _could_ not.

Why? Why could he not? He had means, motive, and opportunity. What was stopping him? What was going on here? Why wasn't he leaping at her throat this very instant to tear her apart. After all, as long as she was manifested inside him, then to slay her here would kill her entirely. If he wanted this 'demon' dead, why not take the opportunity to simply do away with...

By _Azar_...

"Leave," pleaded the thing resembling David. "In the name of all the Gods, _please _leave!" it sounded almost pathetic now, begging her to leave it be.

"You weren't trying to kill me," she said slowly, working it out herself at the same pace as she spoke it. "You were... trying to scare me into leaving, weren't you?"

"You have _got_ to leave! _Please_!"

"You want to kill me. I can feel it from you even now. But you can't do it yourself... why not?"

"You don't understand!"

"Oh, I think I do..." said Raven, as a hollow pit opened up inside her stomach at that very prospect. "You've got the power to kill me outright, but something's stopping you. Something won't _let_ you. It's can't be David stopping you, he doesn't even know I'm here. It's _you_."

"_Damn_ you!" shrieked David, by now nearly in tears. "Damn you, _get out!_"

She built to her crescendo, her powers searching for the key, the missing part to the puzzle that was staring her in the face now that she knew what to look for. "You _can't_ kill me! You can't hurt me at all, even though you have the power and you want to! In fact, you can't kill _anybody_, can you? You're not permitted to! You're not posessing David at all! David's possessing _you_!"

A hideous, baleful scream was all that the creature could reply with as the entire tower shook and twisted on its foundations, and the sky clouded over grey. A moment later, great fractures were torn in the firmament, and sinister-looking blades jutted in from them, bony and sharp and enormous, like the prows of gigantic ships. One emerged near to her, and she threw herself to the ground to avoid it, and landed hard, rolling over just in time to see the figure standing on the opposite side of the Atrium scream an anguished cry to the heavens.

"_LEAVE THIS ONE ALONE!!_"

**O-O-O**

He felt nothing.

For a second or two he was frozen in shock, aware only of the fact that there was an enormous ethereal sword sticking right through him, his brain telling him that any moment now he would feel the unfathomable pain of having been pinned to the wall like a beetle by this thing, and that shortly thereafter he would feel nothing at all, as a wound like this was certainly mortal.

A moment passed, and he _still_ felt nothing.

Dimly he heard shouts, screams even, people shouting his name, and blue and green beams of energy flaying the air around him, but he could not piece together what that meant. All he could do was stare the ghost in its skeletal face, and wonder when he would feel it. A full second passed, another, another. Only then was he beginning to realize that no blood was streaming down his shirt, that no nerves were tingling with the pain of being severed, that no force was pinning him to the wall, that in short, the ghost's magical blade, one which had proven capable of physically striking every one of the other Titans, had passed through him like it was made of smoke, and done nothing at all.

And just as he was trying to figure out how that could possibly be, _every single_ ghost assailing the five Titans blew up.

Like a bomb had gone off within it the ghost in front of him flew apart, its form destabilizing like a cloud scattered by wind. Nor was the explosion merely ethereal. The wall behind David cracked, the stairs below the ghost crumbled, and debris was blown off them into the deep well behind the ghost. And yet despite this, not a single bit of pressure did David feel, the blast wave that should have shattered his ribs and pulped his organs, warping around him as though it was _he_ who was without physical form. And no sooner did this happen than the entire stairwell was _filled_ with smoke and fire as _every _ghost without exception was instantly obliterated. All four of the other Titans were knocked sprawling, battered and thrown about by a mass of concordant pressure waves. Beast Boy was slammed into the wall, Starfire blown up into the air, Cyborg knocked face down onto the stairs, and Robin nearly pitched off the stairwell itself into the shaft.

But in the center of it all stood David, motionless, baton still held in his frozen hand, staring out like a shell-shock victim at the now-empty stairwell shaft, and at the four other Titans who stared wordlessly back at the architect of this impossible act. By no understanding of the ways that the world worked was this thing that had just occurred even possible, and yet here it was. And as Beast Boy and Cyborg and Starfire and Robin all simply stared, David stood like a statue, unable to move or act or even think beyond the fact that the mother of all inexplicable events had just occurred, far _far_ beyond the relatively minor mysteries of before.

But that like before he had _no goddamned idea_ what had just happened.

And before he or anyone else could consider what in God's name to do or say or ask now, the entire stairwell, weakened by the cumulative effects of _two hundred_ simultaneous explosions, gave way all at once and collapsed, spilling all five Titans down into the impenetrable darkness of the underground shaft.

* * *

**Author's Note:** I apologize once more for how long it took to finish this chapter, and assure you I will do everything in my power to finish the next one in a timely fashion. Meanwhile I ask you please please _please_ to drop a review, no matter how quick, such that I can determine what in the above chapter worked, and what did not. Thank you all once more, and may you find success in every endeavor.


	27. Devastator

**Disclaimer:** Myself, the ownership of the Teen Titans, and never the two shall meet.

**Author's Note: **At long last, I have finally completed the next installment of my story, and I hope, as always it meets with your approval. This chapter represented a great deal of editing work, not in the sense of typo-elimination (though I do still strive in that field), but in the sense of determining what was and was not involved in the chapter. Several entire scenes wound up on the cutting room floor, to be perhaps recycled later, perhaps not. Either way, I hope that you enjoy the result, and whether or not you do, that you will deign to please leave me a comment in the form of a review that I might be better able to deliver a superior product with the next chapter. Once again, I apologize for the length of time it took to finish this chapter, but time waits for no man, as ever. Please enjoy this chapter, and, as always, may you all find success in every endeavor.

Thank you.

* * *

**Chapter 27: Devastator**

_"Run your fingers through my soul. For once, just once, feel exactly what I feel, believe what I believe, perceive as I perceive. Look, experience, examine, and for once, just once, understand."_

_ - Anonymous_

**O-O-O**

Twelve seconds.

Eleven.

The experience of falling from an immense height was usually so rapid that you scarcely had time to blink, let alone take in your surroundings. The acceleration of gravity was such that it felt more like being fired downwards out of a cannon, wind whipping past your face, spinning and twisting you around like a toy. The few occasions David had had to fall any great distance, his overwhelming impression had simply been how _fast_ it was. Normally, one instant you were miles above the ground, and the next you struck.

But now it seemed he'd been falling for a hundred years.

Ten seconds.

Nine.

Perhaps the world had slowed. Perhaps time itself was warping again. Perhaps his brain had finally snapped, and he was perceiving the world as some kind of decelerated, surreal nightmare. Perhaps it really was one. Everything was free falling, above, below, to the sides. He spun on all three axes, catching only brief glimpses of the others, themselves spinning and calling to one another, or warding of the falling debris which flew about them in pieces ranging from the size of a pebble to the size of the T-car.

Eight seconds.

Seven.

His brain was working so sluggishly, he could no longer remember how far there was to fall, or why he was falling. All his available bandwidth was spoken for, and his memory was dominated by the image of a ghost shrieking like a train whistle before bursting into spectral fragments that flayed the air and shattered the walls and ground...

... but not him.

In the back of his mind, warning bells were ringing. The ground was not an infinite distance away, and at the speeds he was falling, he would dash himself to pieces on the rock below if he did not act now. But the rules of reality had melted away, and he could not remember what to do, or if there was something for him to do. Explosions and blades of force had melted away before him, and while he managed, barely, to convince his conscious mind that what was happening merited action, when the moment came to decide what sort of action was required, he could draw nothing but a blank

Six.

Five.

Below loomed a white glow, not bright but glistening and ethereal, a cold and unwelcoming light from whence issued a low moan, like a distant cry for succor and deliverance. David heard the others shout to one another as they recognized the sound and light for what it was. More ghosts, _hundreds_ more, waiting down at the base of the pit for the Titans to fall within reach.

Four seconds.

The baton was still in his hand, unlit at this point, as the sea of spirits below resolved to individual figures and loomed closer and closer, rusted spectral blades brandished in anticipation of blood. David had destroyed their fellows just seconds ago, blotted them out of existence by the dozen and the hundred, but the base fact that he had done this somehow was still seeping into his conscious mind, and even if he had possessed the wherewithal to try and determine how, he had no conception of how he was to avoid splattering himself into paste on the ground below.

Like a deer in headlights, he stared, motionless, thoughtless, unable to act, only able to watch as his own doom approached. As he fell, one of the spirits flew up to meet him and lashed out with a ghostly sword, as though to cut him in half. He had no means of pivoting or moving to avoid the blow, and he closed his eyes as it struck. He felt something tighten sharply around his waist, roughly where the sword had hit, and instantly knew it was all over, that he'd been torn apart, and that in any event there was nothing left but the few seconds remaining before he slammed into the ground at a hundred and twenty miles per hour.

Three seconds.

Two.

**O-O-O**

The floor was made of stone.

Raven could feel it beneath her hands and knees before she saw it, for she had closed her eyes tightly when the world seemed to disintegrate around her, and only once she felt something solid beneath her did she open them again. Porous stone lay there, volcanic pumice perhaps, illuminated dimly by light from far above, and she raised her head and saw a soaring, Gothic hall laid out before her, arches piled upon arches, studded with windows of violet glass and cloaked with velvet draperies dyed a rich indigo. Light suffused the room, partly from some invisible source lost in the riot of buttresses and vaults far above, partly from the soft glow through the stained glass windows, casting everything into a solemn blue.

Slowly she stood up, looking and feeling around for any sign of life in this strange new setting. Her surroundings had shifted many times already in this investigation, but something in the undercurrents felt different this time. The other locations had felt like facades, matte paintings erected to present a subconscious illusion, but the mental architecture of this location felt solid, physical, real. Or at least as real as one got in a mindscape.

"Hey there!"

Instinct took over, and Raven whirled around with shield raised and powers charged and ready, but instead of a monster, she found herself staring at a person made of water.

A small, slight figure was standing a dozen feet away, arms held behind his back, smiling and rocking back and forth slowly in a relaxed and casual pose, but the figure's demeanor could not have been further from Raven's mind at present. The being was comprised entirely of a clear liquid, sparkling in the dim light, its surface eddying as its motion sent minuscule hydraulic waves rippling through its body. Made either of water or some water-like substance, it nevertheless was an exact facsimile of a person, the water conforming exactly to the shape of a teenaged boy, down to the folds of his clothing, the short-cropped cut of his hair, and the gently smiling features on his face. Nevertheless, a mass of translucent water was not the easiest thing to identify, and it took Raven an embarrassingly-long three seconds to realize who she was looking at.

"David?"

"Expecting someone else?" asked the water-mass with a grin, speaking with David's voice despite possessing neither throat nor tongue, its 'mouth' moving like a computer-generated graphical effect. The simulacrum smiled, or at least appeared to, and laughed, sending ripples all over its surface. "It's his head, after all."

"You're not - "

"Devastator? Nah. He's busy. He'll be along though." The water-figure grinned and ambled over to one of the purple windows, whistling pleasantly as it walked, though how it did that with neither lips nor lungs was anybody's guess. Raven watched it quietly, as it stared out the window for a few moments, hands clasped loosely behind its back, just watching whatever was going on outside.

"How come you keep going in there?"

It took Raven a second to realize the question was meant for her, and she walked to the window to see what the animate water-sculpture was talking about. The window looked down on a forest far below them, verdant and green. And directly opposite them, glistening in the perpetual sunlight, sat an enormous, translucent gold dome, the same one she had entered an eternity ago. Around the dome were arrayed four other towers, of gold and crystal, rubber and wood, and only then did Raven realize she was standing inside the fifth tower, the one of volcanic rock. Back when she had first entered David's mind, she had not had time to consider the new construction here, but plainly it served _some_ purpose...

"Who are you?" she asked, not so much to find out the answer (she already had theories), but to see how the water-David would answer it. As it happened the hydraulic figure just shrugged, his body gurgling like water sloshed about in a bucket.

"You're the mind expert," he said, smiling and resuming his tune, a light and airy one, as he turned away from the window and strolled, not walked but _strolled_, as though free of any worry or care, a dozen steps away before turning his head back and gesturing to her to follow. "C'mon," he said. "I wanna show you something."

Raven was still trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together, but there didn't seem to be any undercurrents of malice here, and so she followed the water-figure down the hall, past rows of stained glass and intricately-carved statuary. They reached the end of the hall, coming to a wide staircase upholstered in a carpet of imperial purple, which led down into a massive open atrium, carved directly out of pumice-stone and hung with tapestries on which were sewn gold and silver and crimson symbols, none of which she immediately recognized.

"What is this place?" she asked, assuming that the water-being would not give her a straight answer, but wanting to hear its reply regardless.

"What, this?" asked water-David with a hint of amusement, as though the answer ought to have been obvious. He gestured up at the ceiling. "Take a look."

Raven lifted her head and drew breath sharply. The entire ceiling was made of colored glass, a mosaic of infinite complexity and incredible detail. But it was _what_ the glasswork displayed that surprised her, for the image on the ceiling was a stylized glass portrait of Raven herself, cloaked in writhing shadow, hands raised in an attack position, hood thrown back to reveal her violet eyes staring daggers at some immutable foe.

"You like it?" asked the water-David pleasantly. "

Raven took the time to stare up at the ceiling for a few seconds. "I don't get it," she said. "What is... what is that doing _here_?"

"Well you do sorta leave an impression..." said water-David with a chuckle and a grin as though this answered all possible questions. He gestured for her to follow, leading the way down the stairs towards the ground floor of the atrium. "I thought we should use a different shot, but I got overruled as _usual_." He rolled his eyes, an impressive feat for someone who possessed none, but he seemed to bear no ill-will despite. "Still, it's kinda... you know... striking? I mean purple's not my thing really, but - "

"This is... David's _head_," insisted Raven, who was still trying to figure out the basics of what was going on here.

The watery figure stopped and turned back to Raven, bemused. "So?"

"So... why would - "

It laughed, shaking like a puddle in a windstorm as it grinned and shook its head and even put a hand on her shoulder, cold, but surprisingly dry considering what it was made of. "Raven, do you seriously not get how this works yet? This is _your_ place. That's why we built it."

Raven scarcely knew where to _begin_ with that. And settled for the most immediately obvious question.

"We?"

This question, like all the others before it, was greeted with another laugh. "Well," said the water-statue. "Most of us at least..."

A shuffling noise from her right attracted her attention, and Raven turned her head and saw another figure standing five paces away where none had stood before, shaped as the water-sculpture was, with the same face, the same features, and the same level of detail. But this one was made, not of water, but of soft, gray smoke, swirling and twisting within itself, and yet clearly forced by some means or another into the proper shape. Surprised as Raven was to see this new simulacrum, it appeared even more so, blinking and looking around at its surroundings in wonder and astonishment, until it fixed false eyes on Raven and let out a Hell-raising shriek. An instant later it had vaulted the railing and landed on the floor of the tower lobby, backing up towards the wall, its mouth moving but no coherent sound emerging, arms held out in front of it as though trying to ward off a dangerous predator.

"I... I _told you_!" shouted the figure of smoke, and the voice was David's once again, but terrified beyond anything Raven had ever heard from him before. 'Tears' of white smoke leeched from the thing's false eyes and dissolved into nothingness as it backed up against the wall, sliding back into a corner and babbling almost incoherently. "I _said _this would happen! Please! It _wasn't me_! I _told _them to listen to you! I _tried_!"

Raven turned back to the water-David, but it was not moving, silently watching both her and the smoke figure, and so she turned back and took a tentative step down the stairs towards the cowering simulacrum, only for it to scream like a banshee and collapse into a tight, quivering ball, blubbering half-formed apologies for Azar-knew-what transgression.

This was rapidly becoming one of those days she wished she had stayed in bed.

The water-David continued to simply watch the proceedings with its arms crossed, neither venturing a comment nor offering assistance, and so with a sigh, she slowly approached the smoke-David instead, descending to the atrium floor and crossing it. Traces of gray ash were smeared over the floor and walls near where the thing was sitting, and as she approached, she could hear its terrified sobs, intercut with desperate-sounding pleas for mercy.

"We told them..." he said. "We told them not to tell him, but they wouldn't listen to us! They vetoed us! Please! Please don't..."

"Oh, relax," said the water-David, descending the stairs behind her and stopping at the foot of them. "I _told_ you, it'll all work out. She's not here to - "

"We _shouldn't have told him_!" screamed the smoke-David almost desperately, before collapsing back into a huddling ball.

The water-David merely sighed and shook its head, leaving Raven to try and make heads or tails of what this thing was talking about. "Told him what?" she asked, and the smoke figure nervously turned its head to Raven and stammered a brief reply.

"About T... Terra..."

She paused. "... what?"

"They wouldn't _listen_!" sobbed the smoke-David. "They won't... they don't listen to me anymore! Not when it's important! I told them to do whatever you wanted! I told them you knew best! But they... they... don't..." the smoke-figure suddenly burst into tears, and before Raven could even register a protest, it was sobbing into her shoulder, its touch light as a feather, wafting the smell of burnt wood across her nostrils and covering the front of her uniform with fine ash.

Normally she would have objected in the strongest _possible_ terms to something like that, but apart from the fact that everything happening here was only a mental construction, the smoke-David's tearful admission and pleas for mercy brought an uncomfortable chill to Raven's mind, and so instead of flinging the thing across the room, as every cell in her body begged to be allowed to do, she simply edged back away from it.

"It's... all right," she said awkwardly. "It'll... all work out." She had no idea of course if it would or wouldn't, but there was something more than slightly embarrassing about this whole situation, and she found herself wishing she were still dealing with Devastator instead of... this...

The smoke figure lifted its head. "P... please..." it begged almost pathetically. "Don't... don't... kill us! We won't do it again! I'll _make_ them see! _Please_!"

"Hey!" shouted Raven suddenly, silencing the smoke-David instantly. "Will you _quit_ that? Nobody's gonna kill you."

"Speak for _yourself_."

The last statement was a cross between a hiss and a growl, and Raven whirled around to see who had spoken. Up on the opposite staircase, staring down at her with clenched fists and a gaze like a basilisk, was yet another David. Only this one was made of solid ice.

White and glistening, like an ice sculpture brought to life, this David's demeanor could not have been more different from that of the other two. The light shimmered around it with condensation, yet it did not melt, but filled the air around it with a wintry chill that was actually visible as a blueish haze. Its blank eyes bored into Raven and the smoke-sculpture like lasers, and it strode down the stairs like a juggernaut, with purpose and intent, white frost spreading over the carpets wherever it placed its feet. Its hands were packed into balled fists, and the right-most had the outlines of a baton in it, also made of ice, but brandished like a truncheon or cudgel.

"Who the _hell_ do you think you are?!" snarled the ice-David, the voice still David's but harsher, echoing with reverberated malice. Raven felt the temperature of the air drop as it approached, and the smoke-David gave a yelp and retreated behind her. The water-David remained quiet, turning back to watch as the ice sculpture descended the stairs like a vengeful shade, coating everything in his wake with an expanding sheet of frost.

"What gives you the _right_ to come in here?" it snapped at Raven, brandishing the false-baton in its hand like the magic wand Cyborg had humorously called it when she had first introduced the concept to David. Its words dissolved into near-incoherent screaming as it raged at Raven like an arctic storm. "You have _no call _to be here! _None_!"

"Oh good lord, who _cares_ if she has a right or not?" asked the water-David, sounding almost bored by the display. "We're just - "

The ice-David did not reply or even slow down, but extended its left hand towards the water-simulacrum and flash-froze it solid, an instant before it glanced contemptuously at the frozen water-statue, shattering it like a pane of glass struck by a tank shell, and scattering sundered bits of ice all across the room. The smoke-David behind Raven gave a whimper and cowered against the wall as the ice-David turned its gaze back on Raven, a cold, merciless glare that seemed to sap the very warmth from her blood.

"What are you _doing _here?" raved the ice-David, tracing patterns of white ice on the floor as it rushed towards her.

"I..." stammered Raven, and to her surprise she found herself hesitating before this thing's obvious hostility. It wasn't that she feared it, she knew how to handle hostile mental presences after all, but its outrage was so _genuine_, so clear and unadulterated and pure, that she paused despite herself as she considered what this portended, given who she believed these sculptures _were_.

"You _what_?!" shouted the ice-David. "_Answer me_!"

"I needed answers!" she finally insisted, already preparing her shield.

The ice-David physically recoiled, like it had been slapped across the face, the appalled, disgusted horror on its face apparent despite its ice-chiseled features. "You needed... _answers_?" it asked, incredulous, as though this was the crowning horror atop the pyramid of atrocities being committed before his eyes. "_Answers_?!" it screamed, loud enough to damage its throat had it possessed one. "_Fuck you_!"

And then it took a swing at her.

Careful though Raven was trying to be around here, her efforts at not disturbing David's mind did not extend to permitting herself to be assaulted. The ice-David's blow was thrown with supernatural force, hard enough to hammer a hole through a cinderblock wall, but Raven was an accomplished master at mental combat, and caught the frozen fist with one simulated hand lightly, as though catching a thrown baseball. A second later she shoved forward with the open palm of her other hand, gathering up energy as she did so and releasing it all at once. Her hand stopped a millimeter from the ice-David's chest, but the energy hit him like a brickbat, and he staggered back ten feet before recovering his footing. Raven did not follow up, a full-fledged battle in here could cause brain damage if not contained properly, but she wasn't sure if the ice-David knew that.

As it turned out, the point was rendered moot a moment later.

Ice-David recovered its footing, instinctively clutching at its chest where the energy had struck it, and took a second or two to recover, before raising its head once again, its snow-white eyes staring flaming daggers at her, and frost flowed along the floor from the shimmering haze around it, riding up the walls and draperies and condensing on Raven's cloak. It said nothing, likely it was beyond speech, and took two menacing, determined steps towards her before there was a blur of motion, and it suddenly shattered into a million pieces which flew in every direction like bomb fragments, mingling with those of the frozen water-simulacrum from a moment ago.

In its place stood yet another version of David, crouched on the ground where it had just landed upon the ice-sculpture fist-first. It remained motionless initially, then slowly stood up, with infinite care and poise, staring at Raven with a look that she could not immediately read, for _this_ version was comprised entirely of metal, sculpted in exquisite detail like the others, but its face and body the unvarying gunmetal-gray of wrought iron.

"He's right, you know."

It was David's voice again, calmer now, controlled and confident, and the iron-David lightly kicked the fragments of the ice-David aside, walking towards her without any apparent hostility, but equally without hesitation. As it did so, the smoke-David behind her slowly crept out, slipping to the side silently as the iron-David's heavy footfalls sent tremors through the floor.

"You really _don't_ have any right to be here," said the iron-David, but the words were not angry. They simply were. "And you know it too, don't you?"

Behind the iron figure, the ice fragments were melting and re-coalescing, and moments later, both water and ice copies of David were reformed again, the ice one staring daggers at her, the water one merely shaking its head slowly, as if in disappointment, with her or with the other Davids.

"Yes," said Raven. "I know."

The iron-David did not seem at all perturbed by her admission. "So then what are you doing here here?" it asked, folding its arms and staring up at her (like David, the simulacra were shorter than she was), like a headmaster lecturing a recalcitrant student.

"I already answered that," replied Raven evenly, using the voice she adopted whenever she was trying to get one of the others to drop a line of inquiry. It usually worked.

"Well..." chimed in the water-David, "you did and you didn't. You said you needed answers, but... why come _here_ for them?"

"Isn't that obvious?"

The last question was instantly distinguishable, if only because it, unlike the others, was not in some permutation of David's voice. Instead it was deep, rich, tonal, like thunder from a distant storm, and one and all, the various Davids present here turned about to follow it, and raised their water or iron or smoke-filled eyes to the top of the stairs leading into the grand chamber they all stood in. Raven did the same, and at the top of the stairs, there stood a large man with a fiery red beard, draped in rich clothes of a thousand different colors, a polished, gleaming scabbard hung at his side, in which was sheathed an enormous jeweled sword. At the sight of the red-bearded man, the water-David smiled, the smoke-David shuddered, the ice-David sneered, and the iron-David smirked, but the bearded man paid them no mind, moving down the stairs with surprising agility, before arriving on the landing below.

"She is here to find me," said the bearded man as though pronouncing a eulogy. "And she has done so." He looked around at the various Davids arrayed here, spending several moments on each one, before slowly drawing the flame-shrouded sword at his side, and the ringing of the steel on the scabbard was like a fine bell.

"So now," said the bearded man, "the only question left, is what do we do with _her_?"

**O-O-O**

The floors flew past, one after the next in dizzying succession, but Robin was no stranger to freefalls, and he kept his head. With one hand he reached for a grappling launcher, and with the other hand... well... with the other hand he reached for _another_ grappling launcher. At this point, he was fairly sure he was going to need both.

Beast Boy could fly. Starfire could fly. That left Cyborg and David who could not. None of Robin's tools could hold Cyborg's weight, but he knew that Starfire could, and he knew that she would have the presence of mind to go after him. They'd practiced this very drill a hundred times after all, and she knew what to do without stopping to think.

Which left him free to do the following:

He twisted his shoulders, his titanium-polymer cape acting as a rudder, causing him to spin around in mid-air. As he moved, he caught a brief glimpse of a red mark on the wall flying past, and instantly raised his first grappling launcher and blindfired without bothering to confirm what it was. A moment later, and the mark was gone, but so confident was he in his aim that without even taking the time to determine if the shot had struck home or not, he whirled back and fired the other launcher down, towards David. It was an impossible shot, a heavy, non-aerodynamic slug fired by a shooter in free-fall, aimed at a target also freefalling.

Fortunately, Robin made a habit of doing the impossible on a daily basis.

The first grapple pulled tight just as the second one wrapped itself around David's waist. Out of the corner of his eye, Robin spotted Starfire catching Cyborg, mere moments before he would have landed in a sea of angry, armed ghosts. Cyborg fired his sonic cannon downwards, disintegrating the spirits by the dozen and score, but always they snapped back into existence the second his cannon had finished firing. He could not afford to spend any more time paying attention to that though, and an instant later he triggered the retraction winch on both grappling hooks, reeling himself and David up out of reach of the spirits.

Of course the spirits were not going to give up without a fight. Several of them leaped into the air, screaming in fury, lashing out with their weapons. Robin himself was too high for them to reach, but David was not, and without anything to push off of, he could not avoid the dozens of blows that rained down from all directions, twist and squirm though he might. There was simply nothing Robin could do but hurl a handful of useless birdarangs down, which sailed right through the ethereal attackers swarming David, and hope that whatever had prevented them from impaling him before would hold true now.

It did.

The spirits did not detonate or vaporize as they had before, but their weapons again carried no bite when deployed against David alone. This only seemed to enrage them further and they roiled like a pond full of man-eating piranha, slashing and rending and ripping with scythe, sword, and claw. Yet the enraged ghosts might as well have all been figments of Robin's imagination, for all the good it did them, for their scythes melted into vapor, and their swords disintegrated by magic, and their claws passed through David like radio waves through a sheet of paper, emerging on the other side, leaving no trace of their passing. And then a moment later the winch kicked in, and David was wrenched upwards, out of reach of the screaming phantasms. Robin landed on the stair ledge and turned back, grabbing the cable still attached to the grappling launcher on his arm and slowly began to reel it in. A second later, Starfire landed next to him, depositing Cyborg, and lightly tugged on the cable herself, hoisting David up like a line-caught fish and pulling him over onto the stairwell, where he collapsed onto his hands and knees, shaking like a leaf in the wind, one hand clutched to his stomach as though still unable to believe he was in one piece.

The wailing of damned souls was growing louder by the second. It was plain that they were not going to get any time to process the insanity that had just transpired. Behind them sat the red mark Robin had fired at blindly, an enormous Mark of Scath carved into the rock and glowing in the dark stairwell like hot coals. Robin glanced at Cyborg, who ripped the stone from the wall and threw it down the stairwell shaft, where it was instantly torn to bits by the ravening spirits. Behind where it had sat was a wind-swept hallway, disappearing downwards into the gloom.

"Come on!" shouted Robin over the wailing ghosts. "This way!"

The others raced down the exposed hallway, save for Beast Boy who stopped long enough to help David back to his feet. David looked like he was in deep shell shock, like a survivor from some kind of unheralded catastrophe, but he managed, with help, to scramble to his feet and move all the same. No doubt he had no better idea what was going on here than Robin did, but there simply wasn't time for any of them to stop and think this through. Between everything that was happening, Robin simply had to hope that he wasn't about to fold up and collapse on them. They had to run.

So they ran.

Starfire flew above their heads, tossing starbolts backwards up the tunnel at the pursuing ghosts, and Cyborg occasionally spun around to blanket the area behind them in blue energy, but nothing would keep back the tide of spirits who ignored every assault, every blast, and boiled down the shaft after them like avenging demons. Robin snatched a bomb from his belt and hurled it back towards the ghosts, following it up with a barrage of birdarangs, explosive and otherwise, trying to buy himself the time he needed to figure out what they should -

A _huge _explosion rippled down the tunnel, nearly blowing Robin off his feet, as every single birdarang and shaped charge he had just thrown, explosive and non-explosive alike, blew up at once. The nearest dozen spirits were ripped to shreds, their ghostly filaments flung all over the walls. And as he turned back towards the others, he saw David standing with his back to the others and his face to the horde of ghosts, his baton held outwards like a fencing sword, sheathed in flickering flames of red light. The baton was shaking in his hand, his eyes were open wide and his expression was halfway between mortal terror and thunderstruck awe. But as the ghosts started to reconstitute themselves once more, he shut his eyes and swung the metal stick sharply back and forth, and sent a wave of cascading blasts flying off the walls and ceiling of the tunnel beyond Robin, which sufficed to slow the spirits down for about three seconds.

It was something. And moreover, it was considerably more than Robin had expected David to be able to do at this point.

Robin turned and ran, and grabbed David's arm as he ran past to encourage him to do the same. David proved to require little encouragement, and the two of them soon had caught the others, moments before they all entered a small stone chamber with half a dozen undifferentiated exits leading out.

"Which way do we go?" yelled Beast Boy, as the sounds of the pursuing ghosts thundered towards them.

A ghost lunged into the room and would probably have taken Robin's head off if Starfire hadn't obliterated it with a starbolt first, a temporary measure to be sure, but appreciated nonetheless. "Follow the Mark!" Robin shouted, ducking and rolling as a dozen more appeared where the first had come from, their ethereal weapons clashing against the rock behind him. Starfire and Cyborg both opened fire, point black, scattering the ghosts and sending clouds of debris flying in every direction, but it was all a stopgap. They could not hurt their enemies. They could only flee.

Fortunately, the Mark as a guideline held true. It was prominently displayed above one of the doorways out of the chamber, and an instant after Robin had told him to look for it, Beast Boy spotted it. "This way!" yelled Beast Boy, morphing into a fly to evade a ghost that had moved around to cut him off. The ghost slashed at Beast Boy and missed, and then dissolved violently as Cyborg charged right into and through it, opening a way for the others to escape. Still the ghosts pressed them, hot on their heels, slashing and slicing at every opportunity. Robin took up the rear, ducking under and leaping over slashes with every other step, his staff striking empty air as he tried to swat back the attacking spirits.

Then suddenly, disaster struck.

Robin could tell that David was moving largely on autopilot, his mind dulled no doubt by the shock of everything that had just happened. Even Robin was prepared to forgive that at this point. Between Slade, the migraines, and now whatever miraculous salvation he had experienced after being _impaled_ by the ghosts, more seasoned minds than David's would have seized up by now or succumbed to panic or catatonia. The purpose of training, in part, was to ensure that even when you were distracted, shocked, or otherwise outside the focus you normally needed to fight and act, you could still operate by rote muscle memory if necessary. But muscle memory and gut reaction were treacherous things to rely on, and so it was that when the hallway suddenly dipped, the others all managed to negotiate it without thinking, but David, whose battered mind was simply _elsewhere_, tripped over an uneven stone, fell flat on his face, and was instantly submerged.

Two hundred ghosts swarmed over David before he had even slid to a stop, screaming soul-rending cries of bloodlust and rage, slashing and hacking with their weapons to tear him to ribbons. His own scream of surprise and fear alerted the others, and despite the imminent danger they stopped, and turned, and tried to blast their way back to him, but it was utterly impossible. Cyborg roared and flayed the air with his sonic cannon, Beast Boy morphed into shape after shape, large and small by turns, and Starfire cried aloud in Tamaranean and sent a fusillade of white-hot blasts to desperately try and clear a path, but more and more ghosts lunged past David towards the others, howling like devils unchained. If they did not resume running now, they would _all_ die, as surely as the rising of the sun, for the ghosts could not be stopped in these numbers, not by ten times the firepower of all of the Titans combined. Yet even if David appeared _somehow_ to be proof against these things' attacks, even if the alternative was certain death, Robin could not give the order to abandon their efforts and flee for their lives. Not like this. Despite everything, he hesitated.

But to his utter astonishment, the one person who he would never have imagined able to keep his head in such a situation, did not hesitate at all.

For a moment, a single moment, the ghosts seemed to part before a full-power blast from Cyborg's cannon, and in that instant Robin saw David laying on his stomach, pinned down by a hundred ghosts, with two dozen ethereal blades actually sticking right through him and into the floor. His expression was that of terror and confusion and panic all mixed into one, but in the instant that he was visible, something... else... a realization perhaps, or a crystalization of thought came over David's face, and the fear and confusion vanished like vapor. And before Robin even realized what David was doing, the psychokinetic had reached down and grabbed his baton, lighting it afire with a thought, and raising it up towards the ceiling...

Robin understood an instant later. "Wait, _no_!"

A peal of thunder ripped through the hallway, loud enough even to drown out the shrieking ghosts, and a twelve-foot section of the ceiling between David and the other Titans shattered like glass. An instant later, three hundred tons of dirt, rock, and debris plunged through the broken ceiling, like water spilling from a pent-up dam. Several ghosts were caught beneath the surging tide and were dispersed like fog in a windstorm. The remainder howled and screamed for only an instant before their cries were cut off as the impenetrable earthen barrier slammed shut like a security gate, leaving all four remaining Titans standing alone in the suddenly silent hallway.

**O-O-O**

The four Davids of various compositions just stood there, quietly watching the red-bearded man descend the stairs at an even pace, his eyes almost downcast as he rested one hand on the banister while the other held his enormous, burning sword. He reached the foot of the stairs without a word, stopping there, and only then did he look up at Raven and wait, as the eyes of the the four David-figures turned back to her as well.

There were a few moments of silence.

"_Kill _her," snarled the ice-David through clenched teeth.

"No!" yelped the smoke-David, causing the ice one to whip his head around to face him. Before his gaze, the smoke-David literally withered, but he managed to stammer out a reason. "We... we _can't_..."

"Yeah..." said the water-David with a smirk. "I'm gonna go with 'no' on that too."

"Tear her _guts_ _out_!" shrieked the ice-David at the bearded man, with such force that flakes of ice actually flew out of his mouth. "Rip her mind to pieces and let her rot in - "

"Absolutely not," said the iron-David. "And that's final."

"Oh of _course_," yelled the ice-David. "Wouldn't want to stop you all from _sucking up_ some more! Maybe she'll threaten to kill us again! That's fun, isn't it?"

"Honestly, will you go take a _pill_ or something?" asked the water-David, in what sounded like mock-exasperation. "Are you gonna act like this _every_ time we meet someone new?"

"If the last few times are any indication, _somebody_ has to around here!"

The iron-David groaned and shook his head. "Give it a rest already. She's not going to start anything here. And if she does, we'll take her apart. Now shut up."

"I'll talk whenever I feel like it you preening piece of - !" insisted the ice-David.

"Oh you _don't _say_?_" said water-David, laying the sarcasm on thick. Iron-David chuckled, and even smoke-David chanced a small laugh, which ended the instant ice-David turned his eyes on him again.

"May I _please_ get a decision?" asked the bearded man in a long-suffering tone.

"No," said the water-David.

"N... no..." stammered the smoke-David a moment later.

"_Yes_," snarled the ice-David.

"_Hell_ no," said the iron-David chuckling as he said it, as though the very idea were laughable.

The bearded man sighed almost resignedly, and nodded, as though this was a result he had been long-expecting, and slowly he slid his sword back into its sheath. Only after he had done this, and taken several deep breaths, did he slowly walk forward towards Raven. He closed to within half a dozen paces, folding his arms as he did so, and shaking his head. Raven did not move as he approached, but simply watched, as did the four Davids, and when finally the bearded man had stopped, he stared down at the floor for a few seconds, as if preparing himself for the ordeal of speaking, and then finally raised his head.

"Well," he said. "Here we are."

Raven scarcely knew where to begin. Experienced though she was in dealing with mindscapes, everything she had found in here had generated far more questions than it answered. And yet right now, the red-bearded man appeared to be waiting for her to say something, so she opted to start with the basics.

"And where are we?" she asked, guardedly.

"Oh, I imagine that much is obvious," said the enormous man. "We're inside David's mind, of course. And as you no doubt have surmised," he gestured back at the four Davids behind him, "some of the locals have decided to pay you a visit."

"Ice and smoke?" she asked. "Is that supposed to be a metaphor?"

"This is a mindscape, Raven," replied the large man. "_Everything_ is a metaphor. Not everyone color-codes their emotions, after all."

The iron-David stepped forward, walking around to the right side of the the bearded man and Raven, even as the water and smoke-Davids did the same on the left, the ice-David remaining where he was. "Some people see the world through other lenses," said the iron-David.

"Thanks to him at least," added the water-David, smirking and gesturing at the bearded man.

"It's... it's about... what things are made of... and... why..." said the smoke-David hesitantly, pointedly keeping the water-David between him and the ice-David at all times.

Raven considered this, indeed she'd already determined most of it. "So then what am I supposed to draw from a tower with my picture in a window?"

"Well I imagine you'd have to ask _him_," replied the man with a hint of frustration in his voice, "but if I had to guess, I'd say you occupy a fairly major role in his life right now, wouldn't you? As do the others."

"Besides," said the iron-David, "_I_ think volcanic rock applies pretty well for you"

"Should've been nerve gas," muttered the ice-David.

"You see, _this_ is why we can't have nice people over..." said the water-David, and he met the ice-David's withering glare with a laugh.

"None of this is real," continued the bearded man, "it's just how you choose to perceive what's going on in here. Your mind is an alien landscape full of disjointed fragments because you arrange it as one. His is a forest with towers because he presents it as such, and you choose to perceive it that way. He's no more schizophrenic than you are. In fact, a great deal less."

Raven's gaze narrowed. "And how would David know any of that?"

"He doesn't."

"But you do?"

The man said nothing, and his silence was answer enough.

"Who are you?"

"I told you already," he said.

"You said you were 'Devastator'," said Raven. "What does that mean?"

"An _enormous_ number of things," replied 'Devastator', crossing his arms, "none of which I am about to explain to the Gem of Trigon. But in the most basic sense, it means I am your enemy."

He said it evenly, with no particular emphasis or even malice to the words, but while no deception or trickery could she sense, and given his previous demeanor, she would normally have believed him, there was something she was wondering about...

"If you're my enemy, how come I'm not dead?"

That one seemed to catch Devastator off-guard. He considered his answer carefully for a few moments, but finally seemed to decide that there was no point in obfuscating.

"Because I can't kill you."

"Can't?"

"If I had the means, Raven, I assure you, you would be dead," said Devastator evenly, "and the world spared much pain in the process. But I can't kill you. I tried to scare you off, and I failed. So here we are."

"Why can't you kill me?"

But instead of answering, the large man shook his head. "No," he said sharply, "no, I am _done _with your questions. Especially since you're simply going to run off and report every answer to your father."

A burst of anger at the mere _mention_ of her father boiled through Raven unbidden. "I am _not_ working for him," she hissed back at Devastator.

"'I'm not working for him'" mimicked the ice-David, before turning to the others. "Does that sound... _familiar_ to anyone else?"

"It does," said the iron-David, crossing his arms and looking singularly unamused. The smoke-David seemed to shrink a bit and recoil behind the water-David, who was simply shaking his head, but Devastator himself ignored them all.

"Raven," said the bearded man, "right now, the most important things I know about you are that you are the daughter of Trigon the Terrible, and that despite the fact that David has been _far_ more patient with you than I would in his place, you suspected his loyalties to the point where after claiming to be his friend, you broke into his room, sedated him with magic, and then forced your way into his _mind_."

"I didn't come in here because I thought David was a traitor!" insisted Raven, just a second before she could catch herself.

"Firstly, you're lying, and secondly you say that as though it _matters_ why you came in here," said Devastator. "I doubt seriously that any of the others would ask as to your motives. Or were you planning on leaving as secretly as you entered, and hoping none would be the wiser?"

"I don't have a plan for how I was going to leave," admitted Raven freely. It didn't matter at this point. "Besides, aren't _you_ gonna tell him I was here?"

Devastator laughed. "I would have thought it was apparent by now, Raven, that David and I cannot communicate directly. Otherwise I would not only tell him that you were here, I would suggest to him certain 'actions' he might consider taking. But that is neither here nor there."

Devastator stepped towards her, his gait unhurried, as he spoke in simple, declarative statements, that bore all the force of falling artillery shells. "I'd accuse you of bad faith and criminality if I thought it had the slightest chance in Hell of making an impact, Raven, and I'd claim to be shocked that you would do this to a so-called friend, save that I know how you treat all of your _other_ so-called friends. You know, the ones you're going to be complicit in murdering in a few weeks' time?"

"Stop it," she said curtly, a warning anyone who knew her well would have heeded.

"I think you should go on," said the ice-David who seemed almost to be enjoying this.

"Come on," said the water-David, "we don't need to start - "

"No, I agree with him," interrupted the iron-David, gesturing at the ice figure. "This is our house, we set the rules, not her."

Whether he was heeding the advice of the Davids, or whether he was continuing on his own volition, Devastator persisted.

"The apocalypse is coming, and you're at the very eye of the storm, and yet when the others ask you what's happening, do you tell them? Do you warn them? Or do you let them blindly walk into the darkness behind you. Even _Trigon_ has the decency to leave portents and warnings of what he's about to do, but you conceal it even from your supposed friends."

"_Stop_ it!" yelled Raven, but her words had no threat to back them up, and Devastator knew it.

"I mean, hiding your true nature is one thing, but hiding someone else's? I can't speak to David directly, but you've known about me since before Slade returned. So how is it that it required Slade and Terra to make him realize that something was amiss? And even if you can justify lying to him, how you can _possibly_ justify lying to the others, particularly Beast Boy - "

"_Stop it_!" screamed Raven with the force of a loudspeaker, and she lashed out almost subconsciously, slashing at Devastator with a blade of pure will manifested from nowhere. A black swatch of energy struck Devastator and broke against him like water on rock, drawing nothing more than a small smirk, even as the Davids behind him shook their heads or cringed or clenched their fists or merely frowned. She paid them no mind. "I'm not gonna kill them! I'll _find_ a way to stop it!"

"_Find a way_?" asked Devastator, sounding halfway between contemptuous and confused. "Girl, you are fated to destroy the - "

"I _know_ what I'm fated to do!" yelled Raven back at Devastator. "But I won't let it happen, with or without your help, I'll find _something_, _do_ something. There has to be _some_ way to stop it from happening."

She turned away from Devastator, largely to avoid screaming in frustration, and clenched her eyes shut, balling up her fists and trying to suppress the urge to shatter everything in this mindscape to splinters and volcanic dust. It might have been a full minute before Devastator said anything, and when he did, it was, oddly enough, a question.

"Is that... is that _actually_ why you came here?"

"Of _course_ it is!" snapped Raven as she turned around, but from the expression on Devastator's face, that much was not as obvious as she had perhaps assumed it to be. "I know what I'm supposed to do."

"And you want to stop it?"

"_Yes!_"

"Why?"

Raven actually blinked, so unexpected was the question. "What do you mean _why_? Trigon's going to destroy the entire world if I can't stop him."

"You're his _daughter_," said Devastator, who was looking more confused by the second. "You're his right hand. You're the Gem of Trigon himself. 'The Gem was born of Evil's fire.' Those words are not merely hyperbole..."

"You think I don't know that?"

"So then - "

"I _hate_ my father!" shouted Raven, and the sound of her own words surprised her, for despite everything, she had never before actually vocalized this sentiment in words, indeed never spoken of her feelings in this regard at all. "I hate him and everything he made me! I hate everything about him, _everything_! I don't _want_ to be part of his prophecy! I _won't _be part of it!"

Raven's voice echoed around the stone atrium, as silence descended once more, and she found to her surprise that she was actually shaking, not from fear, but from raw emotion. Too many days and nights balanced on the razor's edge of disaster had strung her nerves out to the breaking point, and all of the insanity of this excursion into David's head was simply too much. She had been doing nothing but confronting the blasphemy that was her own parentage for weeks on end, and the loathing and disgust kept simmering beneath the surface simply needed an outlet. She closed her eyes again, and the image of the fire-scorched cities she saw every time she slept or meditated appeared once more.

She fought the tears that threatened to form.

"... why should I believe you?"

The vision vanished, and Raven opened her eyes to see that Devastator had reverted to the form of David, identical with the four others lined up behind him save that he appeared to be made of flesh and blood.

"If you don't help me, then the world ends, whether or not I'm lying." said Raven.

"The world is _going_ to end," replied Devastator. There is no stopping the prophecy. I already told you that."

"Then why do you care if I'm telling the truth or not?" asked Raven. "If the world's going to end anyway, what does it matter what I do?"

"Because if you _are_ telling the truth," said Devastator, "then the stakes in this are _considerably_ higher than even you realize,"

That one made no sense. "What do you mean? If Trigon comes, it's the _end of the world_. I know that already."

Devastator shook his head. "If you enact your role, and you will, and Trigon is made manifest on this world, then the Earth will die, yes..."

Slowly, he turned away from Raven, looking back at the other assembled Davids, and only after a few moments did he seem to dredge up the courage to finish his statement.

"... but if I misjudge you, and reveal to you what is actually occurring here... and I am _wrong_... then the _entire universe_ will die."

Raven could not say anything for quite some time, staring at Devastator's back as she tried, and failed, to work out what possible permutation of the prophecy could even theoretically lead to something like that. Was he making things up? Exaggerating? Was he trying to trick her?

Or... was the link she had assumed between Devastator and the Prophecy perhaps a deeper one than she realized?

"What are you?" she asked, not for the first time, but for the last.

For several minutes, Devastator said nothing, and neither did the other Davids, all of them watching Devastator and Raven in silence. Devastator's head was bowed, almost like he was seeking spiritual guidance, and when finally he raised his head once more, he did not turn around.

"I am a weapon," said Devastator quietly, as though to raise his voice a single decibel would be to invite ruin and destruction on them all. "Perhaps the most terrible weapon ever forged. I exist... solely, to lay waste to the world of matter and energy, to fight fire with nuclear holocausts, and dye the world red with flames and destruction. And while I do not understand all of the particulars of what is going on here, I believe that I am the reason that all of this is coming to pass."

Slowly, Raven stepped forward, reaching out and placing a hand on Devastator's shoulder, so as to turn him around. He permitted himself to be turned, until he was facing her, apprehension as clearly visible on his face as paint would have been.

"Is there some way I can stop my father?"

Devastator's breath caught an instant before he finally answered.

"Yes."

"Tell me what it is."

"You won't..." stammered Devastator, "you don't understand..."

"Then tell me _everything_," said Raven. "_Make_ me understand."

Devastator raised his eyes to look into Raven's, and froze there as he did so for ten long seconds. And then softly, weakly, as if he could scarcely believe that he was doing so, he began to speak.

"It began with fire..."

**O-O-O**

"Know your own limits, know what scares you, what damages your concentration, and consciously suppress it. Anyone can make their body obey their mind. The trick is making your mind obey _you_."

At the time that Robin had told him that, David had remarked (to himself of course, and later to Cyborg and Beast Boy) that it sounded like fortune cookie wisdom, a bad joke used to make the art of punching someone's teeth in sound deep and mystical. The others had agreed.

Well it was _still_ a bad joke, but David was no longer laughing.

He lay on the ground up against the wall, eyes tightly shut, one hand clutching the baton to his chest like a religious icon, the other holding the side of his head in a vice-grip, both to try and suppress the headache that was still thundering inside his skull, and to try and keep out the wails and shrieks of the mad demons that swarmed all around him. Robin's advice had been to intentionally block out anything that got in the way of doing your job, but while Robin was the expert in this, as he was in everything, David would have liked to see _him_ "block out" hundreds of screaming ghosts that were even now trying to rip him apart.

Focusing his frustrations on Robin helped a little.

He steadfastly refused to think. If he thought, he would have to consider the fact that he had just immured himself inside yet another lightless tunnel buried somewhere underground, with only the company of an army of enraged ghosts trying to re-enact Night of the Living Dead. That they had thus far failed was due to no act of his, they'd certainly been able to hit all the others, and David knew that, if he were to look right now, he would no doubt find that _dozens_ of ethereal weapons were sticking through him, while other ghosts were trying to tear his head off with razor-sharp claws.

Which was why he didn't look.

Whatever Robin might have thought, to David, it had been no sudden epiphany that led him to seal the tunnel. It was merely a matter of the first thing that came to mind. He had been running full tilt, right alongside the others, when his headache had suddenly reared up again, and in the instant's distraction that provided, he had tripped on a rock and fallen. His scream had been largely automatic, and had he taken the time to _think_, he would have realized what a disastrous position he was in, but instead of thinking, all he had done was open his eyes, and see the other four Titans being overwhelmed by the tide of ghosts. It had not occurred to him that they were trying to force their way back to help _him_, nor that the ghosts were _already_ engaged in trying to tear him to shreds, he had been able only to focus on what was happening to the others, and in just a split-second, he had reacted by instinct, and brought the roof down to block the ghosts' passage.

And it was only after the rock had fallen, sealing the way ahead, that he realized just what he had done.

The roars and screams grew ever more frantic, and David kept his eyes squeezed shut as he tried to concentrate on something other than the nightmare around him, and clear his head enough to think of what the hell he should do now. It took longer than it should have for him to realize that, whatever his plans were now, the first step probably involved getting up, and to that end, he cracked his eyes open tentatively.

It was a mistake. The ghosts were _all over_ him, screaming in his face, slashing at him with everything on hand like frenzied sharks. Though their weapons and claws passed right through him like they weren't even there, their shrieks and hideous appearances were real enough, and as David's nerve was not exactly steady right now, he yelped and cringed and shut his eyes again. It took the better part of a minute before he could work up the courage to try again, but this time, he took refuge in his own private sanctuary. Raven had her mantra, Robin his rote training... and David had his molecules.

Much better.

The ghosts were still screaming, but in molecular vision, they simply did not exist. He could see the air whipped into a lather of flying currents as the ghosts continued their attacks, but the ghosts themselves had no physical forms, and thus did not directly intrude on his world here. Without pausing to let himself grow afraid again, he quickly got up and took stock of his surroundings. The rockslide behind him was utterly impenetrable, but the hallway they had been fleeing down was still open. He could retrace his steps if need be and select another passageway, or if all else failed, return to the massive well they had fallen down and ascend to the surface there. Part of the stairs had broken away, but he could blast new stairs out of the rock if he needed to.

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Just having some kind of plan was a relief, and he slowly turned the baton over in his hand until he was holding it normally, and looked down at it, a solid, familiar mass of iron, carbon, and chromium molecules in a solid lattice, each little point humming with its own energy. He extended a grip on it with his mind, taking control of the energy points and feeling them react to him as the baton began to pulse warm and cold in his hands in tune with his own heartbeat.

And then all of a sudden there was the sound of a deafening blast. The floor shifted under him, nearly knocking him off his feet, and then, most ominously of all, there was utter silence.

Without thinking, he switched back to his normal vision, only to find that something like a bomb had just gone off in front of him. The walls and ceiling and floors were scorched black and run through with fissures, none of which had been present a moment ago. Bits of rock shrapnel were scattered all over the hallway around him. But strangest of all, the ghosts who had just moments ago been trying to tear him apart were now... just... _gone_. Gone as though blotted out of existence. And far up the tunnel, fifty paces or so at least, there sat another horde of ghosts, but rather than scream and charge and attack him, these held back, still clutching their weapons and watching him in silence.

Or rather, he suddenly realized, watching his _baton_ in silence.

He looked down at the baton, sheathed in red as it always was when he was making use of it. Beyond that, there seemed to be nothing abnormal about it in the slightest, and yet every ghost's spectral eyes were fixed to it. Tentatively he raised the baton, and their eyes followed. He shook it side to side, and their gaze did not falter. He took a small step forward...

... and the _entire army_ of ghosts fell back.

And suddenly, David realized what the thunderous sound from a moment ago had been.

The communicator on his belt suddenly began to vibrate and hiss with static. He reached down and pulled it off, opening it up slowly as his mind's gears turned as if soaked with molasses. At first he could make out no words, for the static was too thick, but slowly it cleared, revealing Cyborg.

"David? David, can you hear me? Goddamnit, can _any_ o' y'all hear me?"

The chorus of voices in the background revealed that the others were with Cyborg, no doubt just on the other side of the rockslide, and David coughed and pressed the com button. "D... Devastator here..." he said.

Instantly the voices quieted as Cyborg waved a hand at them. "I got him!" he said to the others. "Hey man, can you hear me? Are you okay?"

"Y... yeah I can... I can hear you," stammered David, still staring at the ghosts. He left the second question unanswered, for he had no idea how to answer it.

There was relief apparent in Cyborg's voice. "God_damn_ man, you scared the hell out of us. What _is_ it with you and cave-ins?"

Cyborg's sarcasm was _precisely _what David needed to hear right now, and as he laughed nervously, the tension in his stomach loosened a bit, as did the headache he still had. "Seemed... seemed like the thing to do..." he said sheepishly. Honestly, right now he'd have taken any punishment Robin wanted to give him for 'recklessness' to just be out of this insane place.

"Take heart, friend," said Starfire, calling out from behind Cyborg somewhere. "We shall soon break through the barrier and retrieve you."

That snapped David back into reality. "No!" he said, startled. "No, the... the ghosts are still here."

"We'll deal with them, man, you just keep tight and stay low."

While thinking was not David's strong suit right now, he objected immediately. "Guys, the ghosts can't hurt me," he said, wishing that there were some wood around to knock on, and glancing back at the huddled phantasms just to make sure. "I don't know how but... but they just can't. If you break down the barricade, they'll be able to get at the rest of you."

"We're not just gonna leave you down here," said Cyborg. "We know how to handle a coupla - "

"No, look..." David fished for what he wanted to say. "I can... I can get out of here myself if I have to. You guys still have to find that... 'gem' thing, right? You guys can't hit the ghosts, and... I guess I can but I don't know how. If you let 'em through, even if you fight them off, how are you gonna find the gem?"

All this logic seemed to be coming out of nowhere, indeed it was all an excuse, and David knew it. Even if he hadn't been thinking when he collapsed the ceiling, he knew for a _fact_ that he did not want the barrier he had made undone. Not with the spirits still running around, and himself the only one proof against their assaults. It wasn't courage, it was just elementary concern for his friends.

Whether or not the other Titans picked up on that was moot though, and Cyborg reluctantly turned away from his wrist-mounted communicator to ask the others what they thought. David caught only whispers of the heated argument that was no doubt ensuing, but a minute or so later, when Cyborg turned back, he knew that Robin's sense of duty to the mission had won out, as it always did.

"Anything happens, man," said Cyborg, "_anything_ happens, and you hit the panic button, got it? I don't care if what we have to take on to do it, we'll be there in no-time, all right?"

Having won the point, David was already regretting his objection, but it was too late for that now. "Yeah," he said. "I got it."

"Hey," said Cyborg sharply, focusing David's attention. "We'll see you topside man."

David slowly nodded. "Right," he said. "See you."

Cyborg signed off, and the screen went dark, and David turned back up towards the assembled ghosts.

"All right," he said to them. "So... now what?"

He hadn't expected an answer, but before his eyes, the ghosts seemed to shimmer, and slowly began to withdraw down the hallway away from him, finally vanishing in the gloom ahead. David couldn't say why, but this seemed almost _more_ ominous than if they had remained behind, and yet there was nothing for it. He allowed the flames on his baton to grow enough for him to see by, at least out a dozen yards or so, and slowly began to make his way back up the hall. He could of course have shifted to his molecular vision, and thereby cared nothing for the absence of light, but then he'd be unable to see the ghosts if they returned.

For several minutes he made his way back, down hallways and around corners, and through rooms where he relied on his memory to guide him back to the master stairwell. Perhaps his memory was faulty, he'd not exactly been in the best of mindsets while fleeing after all, or perhaps there was some dark work being done here and the hallways had shifted around, but no matter how much he backtracked or searched, he couldn't seem to find his way back to the stairs. Either the ghosts or something else had disturbed the dust, eradicating all of the footprints, and every turn and door led him only to yet another chamber with cruel, monstrous statues leering down at him from cornices and wall sconces.

It reminded him of what Beast Boy had told him was in Raven's room.

His headache had subsided for the moment, but stubbornly refused to go away, and so he kept one hand on his temple and the other holding his baton out like a torch. The only sounds were of his own footsteps and breathing, and occasionally a distant echo from somewhere else. Gradually, he worked his way towards areas that appeared familiar, but every time he found his path suddenly blocked by a rock barrier that he was almost _certain _had not been there when first he arrived. He might have chanced blasting through one, but he felt disinclined to disturb this place more than he had to, and so he followed what passages were open to him, unable to shake the feeling that there was _something_ out there guiding him towards wherever he was going.

And he doubted it was friendly.

Finally, the hallway he was following emerged into a _huge_ open chamber, round and faced with bricks of limestone. It was shaped almost like an arena, with a low wall running around the base of the chamber, topped by staggered terraces that might have been giant-sized stairs, or perhaps benches to sit upon. The air was musty and cold, and the light of his baton was not enough to reach across the floor of the chamber, and see what awaited him on the other side. Still, it was either go in or go back. He didn't even think much about the answer. Whether or not he wanted to go into the chamber (and he absolutely did not), it was becoming more and more clear to him that this was the only way. The _purpose_ pervading this place was almost oppressive, and going back would lead to more dead ends, convenient rockfalls, and eventually, right back here. He knew it without having to ask himself how.

He stepped into the chamber, half-expecting a gate to slam shut behind him, though none did, and walked towards the center of it. It was a good hundred feet across, and when he got near to the center, he stopped, looking around at the silent architecture, the granite-hewn gargoyles perched in silent vigil on the wall around the chamber floor, the huge limestone blocks that formed the floor itself, and waited just a few moments for what he knew instinctively was coming.

Sure enough, he heard footsteps.

The footsteps were light, even but slow, the person emitting them taking their time walking over the cobbled ground. They were coming from up ahead, but instead of switching to molecular vision, instead of commanding his baton to put out more light, he actually lowered the baton and dropped his gaze to the floor, falling silent himself as the lone figure approached. The shadows cast by the flickering flames danced over the floor and walls as the person slowly moved into view, stopping just short of being fully visible, a half-hidden presence on the edge of his circle of vision.

But it didn't matter. He already knew who it was.

"Hello, David," came a voice, quiet and guarded, almost a whisper, but loud enough in the circumstances to be easily heard.

He took one more breath, long and slow, inhaling, pausing, and exhaling, like a sprinter preparing for a race, or a soldier for war. And only then did he raise his eyes, letting the baton's light spill out just far enough so that he could make out his counterpart's features, and perceive the dim golden glow that surrounded them.

"Hello, Terra," he said.

**O-O-O**

"It was an act of desperation,"

Raven stood, leaning against the banister, as Devastator, once again in the form of David, sat on the stairs and spoke at the rich velvet carpets that covered the floor of the volcanic tower, paying neither her nor the other Davids any mind as they stood or sat, scattered around the vast atrium, listening with various expressions, as though they possessed a memory to recall what he was telling them.

"This is not the first time Trigon has sought to lay claim to a world," said Devastator. "Nor even the fiftieth. He is... evil incarnate, perhaps literally, I don't know. Since before I came into being, he has tormented the universe ceaselessly, and for all I know he will still be doing so when the universe ends."

"But... for all his timelessness, Trigon has learned a few things over the millennia. He has become more cunning, more... subtle. He uses pawns such as Slade, or... tools such as you." He glanced up at Raven who steadfastly refused to show any reaction to being called Trigon's tool. She knew he was looking for an excuse not to continue, and would not afford him one.

"Long ago though, he was far more... direct... than he is today. When he sought to destroy a world, he made open assault upon it, and nothing, not the strongest weapons nor the most powerful magics, could force him back. He laid waste to everything he touched, for the sport of it as far as I know. He did so directly, manifesting in a world and consuming it to ash, drinking up the suffering of its inhabitants like a fine wine."

"I know all this," said Raven. "He's my father, remember?"

"... of course," said Devastator. "In any event, every world Trigon assaulted was... afforded some time to prepare. He would announce his intent, and then wait, attacking only after a stated time had passed. It was no nobility that led him to do this, he wanted the inhabitants to feel fear, to watch as doom crept up on them inexorably, to see their societies dissolve into panic and chaos, before he finally consumed their souls with fire. This is why he permitted the prophecies concerning him to spread, including the prophecy of the Gem... of you. Such was his contempt for any resistance that might be offered."

Now they were getting to it. "So then some people _did_ resist him?"

Devastator nodded. "Usually to no effect at all, for Trigon is and was a being of cosmic power. You cannot slay him with a singularity or defeat him with a battlefleet. But... there was one group, on one of the worlds he assaulted, who believed that he _could_ be defeated, if only they found the right weapons to use against him."

Raven raised an eyebrow. "You mean _you_."

Devastator shook his head. "Not just me..."

The world flashed white for an instant, and suddenly Devastator and Raven were back atop the enormous tower that stretch high above the burning city below, the seven-pointed star inscribed in the marble floor as immaculate as ever.

"They have no name in any of your tongues, and though no doubt humans would call them walking lizards, they were anything but. They were a proud, cultured civilization, with a rich history and heritage, revered in their day across the galaxy for the depth and breadth of their learning. No doubt that is why Trigon elected to destroy them. He gave them warning in the form of portents and heralds, as was his custom, and watched as their society collapsed into anarchy and fear."

Raven chanced a look off the edge of the tower at the burning city below, which stretched as far as the eye could see. "But not all of them panicked, did they?"

"No," confirmed Devastator. "Their most revered scholars and magicians devised a plan. No mortal weapon could harm Trigon, no matter how strong, so they sought instead for a _cosmic_ weapon."

Devastator gestured at the starburst pattern in the floor. "The universe is governed by fundamental forces, forces that govern the workings of all life, all matter, all energy, everything. Some are physical: gravity, magnetism, the laws of nuclear physics... but the most powerful of all these forces are more philosophical in nature than physical. Gravity controls how a planet forms... but why does it form? What purpose does it serve? They are the underpinnings of everything in the universe, every physical law, every being, every spell cast or machine built, the prime movers of all that _is_. They control not just the behavior of objects, but the reasons that those objects exist. They are so pervasive in the universe that nobody even considers them. They simply are. Some systems of thought group them all together under the heading of 'God'. Others divide them into a pantheon of hundreds of individual forces."

Devastator sighed. "These people believed there were seven."

Raven nodded. Seven was a very powerful number insofar as magic was concerned, but then so were about half the numbers between 1 and 20, for a variety of reasons.

"They gathered together their strongest sorcerers and sages, and with the assistance of untold sacrifice and toil, they bypassed all of the so-called 'fundamental' forces of the universe, and managed to forge seven... entities, empowered by what they believed were the root forces, not just of the physical universe, but of everything. They believed that by employing weapons that drew their power from existence itself, they actually stood a chance of defeating Trigon."

Raven took a second to absorb all this before speaking up. "So... you're one of these weapons?"

"Yes," said Devastator. "I am the weaponized embodiment of Destruction itself."

"Then... that means David is - "

"A normal, human child," said Devastator. "Or at least as normal as humans ever get. That's why his powers do not work the way you assumed they ought. His powers may resemble a kineticist's, but they have nothing whatsoever to do with real kinetics. He has no supernatural powers of his own. He has only me."

Raven closed her eyes and clenched her teeth. "Okay," she finally said. "I don't even know where to _begin_ here. You're telling me that you're a cosmic-level superweapon built to kill my father?"

"That is... a simplification," said Devastator, "but accurate on the face."

"You expect me to believe that?" she asked

"Not really," he replied with perfect aplomb. "In fact right now, I would imagine you are pondering certain questions, such as why this is the first time you have ever heard of me, why I have not communicated with you earlier, how I came to be here in the first place, or perhaps how it is that David is scarcely capable of detonating an automobile, when I claim to be able to tear the stars from the heavens with but a glance.

Raven had significantly more questions than that, but they would do for a start. "I'm listening," she said.

A chair materialized behind Devastator, and he sat.

"You have to understand," said Devastator, "you and I can sit here and converse, and I can speak, reason, and express opinion, just as you can... but when I say that I am a weapon, I am not speaking in metaphor. I am not _alive_, not in the strict sense of the word."

"You look alive enough to me," commented Raven.

"Yes, I do," said Devastator, "but I lack something."

"What?"

"_Will._"

Raven frowned. "Will?"

Devastator leaned forward. "When the seven of us were created, we were not envisioned as being wholly independent champions, that our makers would send out to fight Trigon directly. Even if they had been capable of creating such things, they feared that to create new life and imbue it with the very forces of the universe would just be to create _more_ Trigons, who might turn against them or others, and lay waste to the galaxy. Instead, we were tools, conduits to be precise, mental gateways that granted control over the physical underpinnings of reality. They wished us to be of as much value as we could, so they gave us intelligence, reason, even the ability to desire things, but they intentionally gave us no will of our own. For that, we needed another."

"What do you mean they gave you 'no will'?"

"We cannot act on our own, of our own desire. Not at _all_. I have within me the power to destroy you so completely that your very existence would be forgotten by the universe, but I cannot do it myself. I lack the _will_ to act against you. That is why I couldn't kill you before. All I could do was hope you might become frightened enough to leave on your own volition." Devastator smirked. "You don't frighten easily."

Raven ignored the remark. "So then if you can't act, how were you supposed to fight Trigon?"

"We weren't," replied Devastator. "Our hosts were."

Raven's eyes widened. "You're a _parasite_?"

Devastator sighed and shook his head. "No. A parasite drains life from its host. We empower ours with gifts they never could attain themselves. I prefer the term 'symbiont'. However... if you wish to be literal, I am indeed an energy parasite, though I assure you, David has come to no harm from me."

"That's _very_ debatable," said Raven darkly, but she left it at that. "So who were these hosts?"

"Warriors," said Devastator. "The most expertly-trained warriors that their civilization possessed. You would have called them heroes, perhaps even superheroes, given the powers we granted them. They were the elite, the mightiest soldiers of their entire planet. And we were each joined with them, in preparation for Trigon's arrival. We provided the raw power, and they provided the wills to shape it. Through practice and training, they learned to deploy _staggering_ power, many many times that of all of you put together. For a time, all of us, host and parasite alike, believed it might be enough."

"But it wasn't?"

Devastator shook his head. "No," he said. "It wasn't." He stood up, and slowly walked over to the edge of the atrium, peering down at the burning city below. "Trigon came... and we fought him with all the powers of the universe. We scoured cities and boiled oceans and lit the skies with flame. I was in the forefront, 'destruction' lacks the... subtleties of some of the other forces in the universe, and I watched as everything we did, and everything we tried, turned to ashes around us. Trigon was simply unstoppable, and one by one, all seven of the chosen warriors fell before him. And one by one, all seven weapons simply vanished into the ether."

"So what happened to you?"

Devastator sighed. "I don't know,"

Raven said nothing, waiting for him to elaborate, and a few minutes later, he did.

"When the others died, their... parasites, simply dissolved back into the cosmos, I presume from whence they came. We had been bonded to our hosts by incalculably strong magics, and without those bonds, we could not maintain our existence. But when my host died... I found that I remained, invisible, unable to act or fight or do anything but watch as Trigon devoured all life on the planet, and left it a sterile, burnt wasteland. I do not know why I remained, while all of the others simply vanished, but finally I simply left the planet."

"How?"

Devastator shrugged. "I have no physical form," he said. "Not even an energy form. I exist on a level different than that of the reality you are accustomed to. I simply moved elsewhere. I wandered the cosmos for ages, with no real purpose in mind, until one day I came across a planet full of other beings, and descended onto it. There, I encountered a young girl, playing in a river. She could not sense that I was present, but... largely to see if I could, I entered her mind, and she became my new host."

Devastator turned back to Raven and smirked. "They called her 'The Queen of Fire'," he said. "She raised an army, as soon as she was old enough, and overthrew the empire that had been oppressing her people. She founded a new dynasty on her world, that may well reign to this day for all I know. And when she died, of old age, in her palace, I left that planet, and journeyed to another world, and chose a new host," he shook his head, "... who was burnt at the stake as a witch."

"Since then, I have traveled from planet to planet, world to world. I select a host, I bond with them, and they command me. Some hosts never know I'm there. Some use me to become warlords and tyrants. Some are noble and heroic, founding empires or protecting their people. Some simply employ me for their own personal gain, and some refuse ever to employ me at all. They each wield raw destruction, though every host's personality tailors the style in which my powers are made manifest. David, for example, has something of a... methodical, observational bent, and so his powers are manifest in molecular composition and temperature transference. Some are pyrogenic, some warp gravity or other physical forces, and some simply seize the physical structures their enemies are comprised of, and divide them. It all depends on my host. They command me, utterly and fully, by will alone."

Raven listened carefully. Of all the things she had expected Devastator to tell her, this story was not one of them. But then she had long-since stopped expecting to be able to guess where this insane quest of hers would lead.

"How do you choose your hosts?" she asked.

Devastator shrugged. "Sometimes I select randomly. Sometimes I watch a person carefully to find the 'trait' I have in mind at the moment. Sometimes I choose an adult, and see how they cope with their newfound abilities. Sometimes it is a child, who then grows up endowed with great powers. My preferences change with the centuries, and besides that, I have no say over how my hosts employ me. I am a weapon. I do as I am commanded by the will who commands."

"So then if you're so powerful, how come David doesn't have 'cosmic power'? He can barely destroy a car."

"Well, to begin with, he's still quite young," said Devastator, "but... essentially, because he is a human. Humans are frail creatures, as I'm sure you already know. Channeling the raw forces of the universe is not a stress-free act. There is a physical limit to the energies his body can manifest, as there was for all my hosts. And should he exceed that limit - "

"His headaches," said Raven, suddenly putting the pieces together.

Devastator nodded grimly. "The stresses manifest themselves in his circulatory system. If he managed somehow to harness even a fraction of my full power, his heart would simply explode. The lower scale effects resemble migraines."

Raven nodded and changed tacks for a moment. "So let me get this straight," she said, "you _chose_ David, right?"

"Yes," nodded Devastator.

"Why?"

Devastator smiled. "I'm afraid _that_, if not the rest, is _none _of your business," he said. "Suffice to say I chose him. Even if you _are_ Trigon's enemy, and David's friend, why I chose him is something I will reveal to him alone, should somehow he come to ask me."

"Fine," said Raven. Even she had to admit that was fair enough. "So then how about something that _is_ my business?"

"Such as?"

"Why did you attack me when I came inside his head?"

Devastator sighed. "Consider my perspective for a moment," he said. "I chose David many many years ago, when he was very young. I had my reasons. I watched him grow up, largely alone, in these... institutions your people use for caring for orphans. I watched him discover his powers, and choose not to use them. I was with him when he was attacked by surprise, and when you five took him into your tower. And I was happy to see it too. He's... always been very limited in his friendships, and I thought what better friends could he find than the five of you..."

The cosmic weapon raised its head, and its voice sharpened considerably as it addressed Raven.

"And then what do I find, but to my surprise, one of his brand new friends turns out to be the daughter of _Trigon the Terrible_ himself. And not just his daughter, but the Gem, the one prophesied to bring him back into the world, and to destroy it. There are nine hundred million _trillion _sentient beings in this galaxy alone. The odds that I should happen to choose as my host, one who happens to make the acquaintance of the Gem of Trigon, are simply not credible. You are a follower of Azar's, I believe, yes? If so, then you are no doubt familiar with the phrase 'there is no such thing as coincidence'? I don't know if I believe that or not, but you and David meeting is either the greatest coincidence in the history of the universe, or it is something else."

Raven narrowed her eyes. "You think someone's setting us up?"

"Yes," said Devastator. "And I'm not yet certain it isn't _you_."

"Well assume for a second that it isn't. Why would they do that?"

"Someone has endeavored to arrange things such that David will be present with or near you when you fulfill your destiny and summon your father to destroy the Earth," said Devastator. "If I had to take a guess, I would say that that person was either Trigon himself, or one of his agents, and while I _did_ have reasons for choosing David as my host, I suspect whoever it is has no direct interest in David. More likely, they have some business with _me_."

"Cinderblock called him 'Devastator'..." said Raven suddenly. "He couldn't have known that name unless..."

"Unless someone told him the name," said the living weapon, "someone who knew I existed, and that I was incarnated within David. Perhaps that someone was Slade, but perhaps not. Either way, it's... worrisome."

"You think Trigon's out to get _you_?"

"I think Trigon is, as always, out to cause suffering and pain on as wide a scale as he can manage," said Devastator. "But I cannot believe that my presence here, as the prophecy is about to be fulfilled, is all a matter of chance. I don't know if he chose Earth because of me, or if I am merely a side-objective of his, but I do believe Trigon has a reason for wanting my host present when he manifests."

"And what reason is that?"

Devastator shook his head. "I don't know," he said. "But any reason Trigon has will be to the detriment of the universe at large, not to mention your immediate friends."

Raven nodded, and walked over towards Devastator, who watched her approach in silence.

"Then we have to stop my father before he manifests."

Devastator groaned and laid his head in one hand. "I told you already, you _cannot_ stop Trigon from manifesting. His prophecy is absolute. He _will _manifest, and there is nothing you can do to stop him. I _tried_ once, remember?"

"But you _said_ there was a way I could stop my father!" insisted Raven. "Is there or isn't there? Make up your mind!"

"There..." said Devastator, and his voice sounded pained. "There's... a way you can upset his plans, yes."

"Well? What is it?"

"Trigon clearly intends for me to be present when he returns. Since you cannot stop him from returning, you have to ensure I am not there when he does."

Raven paused, confused. "How do I do that?" she asked. "Take David to another planet?"

"No," said Devastator. "Trigon knows the identity of my host. Physical distance is no barrier to him. He would track David down the instant he appeared. The only option is for me to be joined with a different host, one he doesn't know the identity of."

Raven sensed that she was missing something. "So then... go for it," she said. "If you can just pick one, go ahead and pick."

Once again, Devastator shook his head. "I cannot leave my host voluntarily," he said. "Once I have selected one, I am bound to him for the rest of his life, whether he uses me or not. I cannot leave. Not without your help."

"What are you saying...?" asked Raven hesitantly, "is there some ritual you need me to perform?"

"I'm afraid," said Devastator, "it's much... simpler than that."

"What do you mean?" she asked, though in the back of her mind, she feared she already knew what Devastator was going to say.

"Raven," said Devastator quietly, "if you want to save the universe from your father, then you have to _kill _David."

* * *

**Author's Note: Thank you once more for your support in merely having read this chapter, and though I hate to impose on your time any further, I ask please that you leave a review, such that I might profit from it. I shall endeavor as always to finish the next chapter as quickly as possible, and until then, I bid you a fond farewell, with my thanks.**


	28. The Children of Fire and Gold

**Disclaimer: **Merry Christmas, happy New Year, and I don't own the Teen Titans

**Author's Note:** I hope everyone has had a very happy Holiday season, and that you all have had many happy returns. As for me, I meant to get this out before Christmas, but one thing led to another (as it always does), and I have been forced to hold off until today. Still, the chapter is now complete, for better or worse, and I submit it to you for your perusal. In terms of actual man-hours spent working on it, this is by far the most work-intensive chapter I've ever produced. Its length is only part of the question. It holds the record because I was unsatisfied with it, and re-wrote it in full twice, and in part many other times. To be perfectly forthcoming... I'm still not entirely satisfied with it, and no doubt many of you will take me to task for the liabilities taken and the decisions made. Still, I offer it in the hopes that you will all enjoy reading it. As always, I beg and plead that you please leave a review behind to document your views on the matter, as it is by those reviews alone that I am able to break myself of bad habits and inculcate myself with good ones. Thank you all once again for reading, and I shall hope and pray to see you all in the New Year for Chapter 29.

As ever, cherished readers, may you find success in every endeavor.

* * *

**Chapter 28: The Children of Fire and Gold**

_"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear."_

- Ambrose Redmoon_  
_

**O-O-O**

Chilled silence reigned within the pumice tower as Raven stared wide-eyed at the trans-dimensional weaponized embodiment of pure destruction, manifested in the form of David, and tried to process what it had just said to her.

"... _what_?"

The statement was concise enough to have been Raven's, but Raven had not yet spoken. Indeed, only when she heard the question asked did Raven remember that she and Devastator were not alone in this mindspace. But once she had, it took no empathy to determine what the reaction of the others present was going to be.

"You _backstabbing _son of a _bitch_! _I'll kill you!_"

Devastator merely closed his eyes and sighed as the Ice-David lunged at him with a frozen fist encrusted with icicles like a spiked pair of brass knuckles, making no move to evade or defend himself. Raven knew why, and the Ice-David discovered why soon enough, for fist and arm shattered like glass against Devastator's head, sending fragments of ice flying in every direction. Hail pelted Raven's cloak and scattered about the room, sending the Smoke-David scurrying back a half-dozen paces, perforating the Water-David, who was standing motionless in horrified shock, and pinging off of the Iron-David, whose fists were clenched tightly as he stared living daggers at Devastator. But Devastator himself took no notice of the others, or of the Ice-David's assault, and simply opened his eyes once again to look at Raven.

Raven too had no attention to spare for the others though, for she was still trying to decide if this was some kind of bad metaphor, or if Devastator could possibly have meant -

"I take no pleasure in the suggestion," said Devastator, as though reading her mind, "but I make it genuinely, I assure you."

"You want me to... _kill_ David?" asked Raven hoarsely. She found to her surprise that she was shocked, _genuinely_ shocked, not so much at the suggestion, but at who had just suggested it.

"What I want, and for that matter what _you_ want, have no bearing on the matter," said Devastator, stepping forward. "You claim that you do not want to be the Gem of Trigon. I do not want to be the catalyst for David's death, but whether or not either of us like that we are these things, we are them."

"Stop it," said Raven, and she backed up a pace. "This is... some kind of trick or something. You're trying to get me to -"

"I am trying to get you to see _reason_!" shouted Devastator, loud enough that the walls rang with his voice and even the Ice-David drew back. "I am trying to save the entire universe from Trigon the Terrible! It is _he_ that is coming, not some criminal in a spandex costume! Do you not see? The _end of all things_ is imminent."

Devastator walked towards Raven, eyes unwavering, hands at his sides, and all four Davids followed him with their eyes. "You claimed a moment ago that you loathed your father. That you would be his enemy. That you would fight him in any way you could. Was that a lie? Or were you telling the truth?"

Raven felt her back hit a wall, though she had not noticed herself backing up. Her mind refused to focus, and she stared mutely back at Devastator.

"Answer me!" demanded Devastator. "Are you Trigon's enemy or - "

"_Yes!_" yelped Raven reflexively.

Devastator folded his arms. "Then tell me, Gem, what are you prepared to do to stop him?"

"This is _insane_," said the Iron-David suddenly, and Raven looked over and saw all four Davids watching them, the Smoke hiding behind the Water, while the Iron held the remaining hand of the Ice, restraining it from leaping at either Devastator or Raven and tearing them to pieces.

"She can't stop Trigon," said Smoke-David hesitantly, "even by... doing this! You... you said... said so yourself!"

"You're a _traitor_," snarled Ice-David, in a broken, pained voice, like the ones she imagined her friends using whenever she had nightmares of them finding out the truth about her.

"No, he's a coward," said Iron-David, his voice much more calm, but all the more disturbing for it. "He knows this enemy of his is coming, so he wants to cut and run, even if he has to kill us all to do it."

"You do not know the first thing of which you are speaking," replied Devastator dismissively without turning his head. "But I believe you _do, _don't you, Raven?" He gestured back with one arm to the assembled Davids. "Do you want to tell them? Can you describe it better than I?"

"We _know_ what's coming!" insisted Iron-David, for the Ice was too livid for words, and the other two not speaking. "Fire, brimstone, the end of the world, you _told_ us already!"

"No," said Devastator, but he made no effort to direct his words towards David's alter-egos, instead stepping up in front of Raven, looking up at her in perfect calm. "You do not."

It was as though his words were some kind of curse, for Raven's nightmarish memories all came back to her in a rush. The lakes of fire, the ash-dusted statues, the endless forest of ruins that had once been Jump City, _her_ city, still distinctive despite the smoke and flames, all of it flashed before her eyes like a repressed memory coming to the surface, and without thinking, she clutched the sides of her head and squeezed her eyes shut, clenching her teeth and trying to _force_ down the vision, but the vision would not be forced. And through it all, she heard Devastator's voice, preternaturally calm, floating through the thick air.

"None of them understand it," said Devastator, "do they? The Titans, I mean. They hear words like 'fire' and 'demon' and 'evil', but they do not _feel_ them. No-one can feel them who has not experienced them firsthand. The depths of Trigon's cruelty... the _pain_ he embodies... to them it's all just another enemy to face. To you... it is different."

"They... they can stop him..." she said, and found her voice shaking and quiet, unconvincing, even to her own ears.

"No," said Devastator. "They cannot. You know this. Slade knows this. I know it. Nothing can stop him. He is evil made manifest. There is no stopping that. Not by any living means."

His words were soft and almost _comforting_ in their certainty, no hysteria, no anger or denunciation, no cackled laughter mocking her presumption in railing against the inevitable. Just fact. Cold, simple, emotionless fact. No blame. No fault. Things simply were.

And yet...

"You... _can't_ know that!" she insisted as she opened her eyes. "There's... gotta be _something_ else that I can do! Some way to stop him or... _anything_!"

She'd argued this before, and she half-expected, half-_wanted_ him to become angry or frustrated again, but he did not. Instead he sighed, and shook his head, slowly. "Has there?" he asked, and let the question stand a moment. "You are his _daughter_, Raven. You know him better than I ever could. Likely better than anyone. What _I_ think of Trigon is not important. It is what _you_ believe that matters. And I can see right now in your very eyes, that what I am telling you is not a surprise, is it?"

What else could she say?

"... no."

Devastator nodded. "Then you know what has to be done."

"_No_!" screamed Ice-David, and he wrenched himself free of Iron-David's grasp, his severed arm regrowing in a matter of seconds as he charged and lashed out with all the fury of an enraged berserker. Water-David merely lowered his head, and placed a hand on Smoke-David's shoulder as he looked away and cringed, while Iron-David watched impassively, as though torn over whether or not to join in. In the end it did not matter. No blow could the Ice-David inflict that so much as registered on Devastator's person, an ant beating its antennae against the Great Pyramids. Devastator himself made no move to stop Ice-David, waiting until his fury was spent, and the Ice sculpture stood doubled over, frozen tears of anger clinking to the ground from his face, his impotent rage drained away like water off the back of a duck. And when Devastator spoke, it was again to Raven.

"For what it's worth, Raven," said Devastator. "I _am_ sorry. Trigon's cruelty is unsurpassed, but it did not even cross my mind that he would make an enemy of his own daughter, and then use her as his portal into the world. I... expected that you would be a partisan of his. Though I suppose that would have made it easier."

Maybe it would have. Raven didn't know and refused to ask. It didn't matter now.

"I _don't_ want to do this..."

"As I understand it," said Devastator, "you did not wish to be the Gem of Trigon either. It gives me no pleasure to admit it, but by one means or another I have doomed David by my presence here. Whether you kill him, or Trigon does, one way or another, his days are coming to an end. None could blame you for taking what steps you deemed - "

"This isn't about _blame_!" shouted Raven, silencing Devastator, and giving several of the various David's a visible start, and she might have continued, but she silenced herself, looking away again, before she could go on to explain what it _was_ about. It didn't matter what Devastator thought of her. All that mattered was...

Was what... exactly, if not the others?

Devastator remained silent for a few moments, and when he did speak, he did not yell or try and repeat himself, but merely shook his head. "I cannot force you to act," he said, gesturing at the other Davids, "and neither can they. They don't have the power, and I don't have the will." He took a long breath, probably for effect more than need, before raising his eyes to meet hers. "But I _can _tell you this: Trigon seeks only to inflict torment and death upon all life, by any means that he is able. If you do _not_ kill David, if you leave me trapped within him to await the day of judgment, then I give you my absolute guarantee that _every_ _one_ of your friends will _die_, and they will likely be joined by the rest of the universe."

And Raven knew that he was right.

It wasn't a matter of being "convinced", it was realizing she had always known. Since before he had begun to talk. Since before she had come to this place. Since David had first arrived in the Tower. She knew that her objections were emotional, not rational. She knew that his logic was flawless, that Trigon _was_ the things Devastator claimed he was, and that his analysis of the situation was probably accurate. She could see the fear and the hesitation in Devastator, feel it, _drink_ it up practically, the fear that her decision might be other than what he hoped, the hesitation that perhaps he was wrong to confide this in her, that he was taking a terrible risk that she would turn out to be a servant of her father's, but there was no obfuscation, no lie. The energy being that was the source of David's powers, that had chosen him to be endowed with the energies of the cosmos, believed _without question_, that there was no solution but David's death.

The _certainty_ in Devastator's eyes was terrible to behold.

"We all must make hard choices," said Devastator, as the other Davids looked on helplessly, their faces in various permutations of disbelief, horror, and dull shock. "I... regret that my decisions have placed you in this position. But you are the _only_ one who can stop Trigon's plan." He thought about his words for a moment, and ended with a simple, final appeal. "I leave it in your hands..."

"That's _it..._" hissed the Ice-David, slowly standing back up, his voice as sharp as a stiletto. "I've heard _enough_ out of _this bastard_! I want him _silenced_, and her _evicted_! _NOW!_"

Devastator merely lowered his eyes, but did not turn around as the other three Davids looked to one another and back to the Ice-David, who took their hesitation as a mortal insult. "What the _hell_ are you all waiting for?" he screamed back at them, and this time there were _real_ tears in his eyes, half-frozen slush, his entire frame shaking as he shouted at the others in a quivering voice, one that plainly could simply not take any more. "He wants to _kill us_! And she's gonna _do it_! I say we throw her out and let her try! Her powers don't work on us!"

"The Devastator is commanded by will alone," said Devastator, eyes downcast, and his voice sounded like he was quoting some forgotten scripture. "She cannot _harm_ David through malice or hate. It was a protection laid against Trigon's minions. But there are other means, as she well knows," he raised his eyes to meet hers, "Her healing and sensory magic works well enough in general, but in this place, the protections are bypassed. Strike to kill from within here, and it will suffice."

Ice-David could not reply in words, indeed his pained shriek of impotent rage was enough to shake the walls, and he collapsed to the ground, beating his fist against the floor hard enough to gouge divots in it and freeze the rock solid within ten feet. As Raven watched, Water-David walked to him and knelt at his side, placing a hand on his shoulder as though in some attempt at succor, while Iron-David stepped around them both, planting his feet and folding his arms, and staring at her and Devastator with an unwavering gaze, as though wordlessly demanding to know how they could countenance reducing his icy counterpart to such a state.

"Get them... _out of here_..." snarled Ice-David, barely able to speak.

"H... how...?" asked the Smoke-David. "I mean... _him_, sure, but... what about..."

"Have him _kill her_!" screamed Ice-David. "Don't you _see_? She's trying to help him kill _us_! _Get rid of her_!"

"We... I mean... we can't just..." stammered Smoke-David, looking to the others one at a time. "She's... she's a - "

"I agree with him," said Iron-David, ruthlessly quiet. "I change my vote. Kill her."

The Smoke-David hesitated, and in that moment's hesitation, Raven knew she should act, that if they _did_ order Devastator to kill her, she would likely not be able to fight it off. But she had no idea what she could do here, unless...

Devastator was staring her in the face, but said nothing, his face a blank mask.

Smoke-David shuddered, visibly shuddered, and could not seem to force words out of his mouth, until Iron-David turned to him. No words were exchanged, but Raven saw the hesitation in Smoke's eyes, and caught the ever-so-slight nod that Iron gave him, a nod clearly filled with wordless meaning. Smoke closed his own eyes and breathed out a puff of haze which danced into the air above him. "D.. do it.." he said, and turned away. "Do it... quick..."

She could not leave, not quickly enough at least, but that wasn't what crossed her mind, for there _was_ another option for her to forestall Devastator's attack, and looking at him, she knew that Devastator himself knew it. She was in David's _mind_, past his subconscious defenses, past whatever physical barriers he might erect or throw into her path. The rules of what one could and could not do inside the mind of another were many and ironclad, for good reason. Deviating from them _seriously _endangered the mind in question.

And yet until now, it had simply never occurred to Raven that one might... _intentionally_ deviate.

Water remained crouched next to Ice, who was staring at him half-expectantly, half-desperately. Unlike Smoke, he did face Raven, and his expression was almost mournful. Slowly he lowered his head, took yet another deep breath, and speaking in a voice that was tinged with regret, simply nodded his assent.

"All right..." he said, and she saw his grip on Ice's shoulder tighten.

David's entire mind was here. Defenseless, unprotected by any mechanism or power, save for Devastator, and Devastator had just told her how to circumvent his protections. She turned back to him, and saw the expectation in his eyes, the flashes of urgency. He could not delay for much longer.

"I require unanimity," said Devastator without turning his head. "A decision, please."

He already had it, but he was going through the formalities, such as they were, delaying until the last possible minute. She knew it, and so did Iron and Ice, at least. Without even thinking about it, she felt her own fingers tracing the appropriate designs in the air, felt herself marshaling the energy necessary. The spell was so simple it had no name, a simple burst of psychic power, a fraction of what she could unleash, would suffice. From here, she could liquefy David's consciousness and leave him dead on the spot without so much as a whimper. He would feel nothing, no pain, no surprise, it would be over in an instant...

"Do it," snarled Ice, "_Do it_, goddamn you! I vote _kill her_!"

"Agreed," said Iron. "I vote kill her as well,"

"S... so do I..." said Smoke.

"I'm... sorry," said Water, and he sounded it, but he did not hesitate further. "Me too."

Devastator said nothing, but opened his hand, and the flaming sword re-appeared within it, downsized to match David's smaller form. Raven could sense the power in that sword, and it pushed her along, mentally, half of her horrified at what she was preparing to do, and the other half cognizant that there was literally no choice. She was caught between Trigon and Devastator, and if one did not kill her, then the other would, and without making any conscious choice, she prepared the spell for launch. Again and again the images of her friends' burnt and frozen corpses, the ones that haunted her dreams and now even her waking hours, flashed through her head. Even now she could see them, fallen in various poses, their faces contorted with pain, their hands outstretched as if in supplication for aid. One by one they appeared to her. Robin. Cyborg. Starfire.

Beast Boy.

Her throat caught as the image of Beast Boy merged with that of Devastator, striding towards her with sword upraised. And yet her eyes could focus on nothing but the sight of Beast Boy dying, _screaming_, his emerald eyes torn out, his green skin scorched black, blood that was all too red coursing from half a dozen hideous wounds. And all she could make out of whatever words he was screaming to the darkness was his demand to know why, when she had the chance, she had chosen not to save him.

And then Raven took a breath with which to scream the word of power that would tear David's mind apart.

"_No!_"

The image shattered, and the spell died in her throat as Devastator stopped short, sword still held high above her head, ready to be brought down like a meteor. Both Raven and Devastator stared at one another, and then slowly turned their heads towards the entrance to the tower, from whence the shout had come.

In the doorway stood a fifth David, though what he was made of, Raven could not tell. He seemed to be solid, though small and slightly misshapen, if his silhouette was accurate, and yet at the very sight of him, Devastator seemed to stiffen, and lowered his sword, and Ice stood back up along with Water, and Smoke blinked and turned back to the others, and Iron folded his arms once again, as though curious to see what this might bring. And as the others watched, the fifth David, smaller than the other four, walked slowly into the atrium itself, and from where she stood, Raven could see that he was made entirely of a yellow metal that warped and shifted like clay as he walked.

It took her a moment to realize that it was gold.

"I veto the motion," said the Gold-David, in what was unquestionably David's voice, more similar to his own than the others were, save only that it lacked the hesitation always lurking behind the real thing.

"You can't..." said Ice in disbelief, even as smoke drew nearer to him. "You _can't_! You _heard her,_ didn't you!"

"This is hardly the time," added Iron, "for a bunch of sentimental - "

"I said _no_," said Gold. "Not now, not ever. Step back, Devastator." And at his words, Devastator turned back to Raven, and slowly lowered the sword, stepping back several paces.

"_NO!_" screamed Ice, and before anyone could stop him he lunged for Gold, charging him and diving atop him, sending both of them crashing to the floor. A moment later and he was sitting atop Gold, beating him savagely with both fists, screaming incoherent cries of rage and frustration. Smoke yelped and flew back, and Iron groaned and shook his head, but Water rushed forward and dragged Ice off of Gold, even as Ice shoved Water away and attacked again and again, beating huge dents and divots into the statue's face and body. And yet when Ice was finally spent, and Water had managed to drag him away, and Gold slowly and painfully picked himself up off the ground. His features damaged, his body twisted and bent backwards, he sat up and spoke clearly enough to be understood.

"I _forbid_ it," he said. "No matter what happens. I forbid it." And at that pronouncement Ice screamed anew and tried to push past Water, and Smoke shivered and withdrew to the side of the atrium, and Iron simply hung his head as though in defeat, and at that instant, Raven knew that it no longer mattered what the other Davids thought.

"Besides," coughed Gold. "We've actually got bigger problems right now."

A hush fell over the atrium as he said that, even Ice instantly calming down, and it seemed as though the light in the tower dimmed slightly. All four elements besides Gold raised their heads, as though sniffing the wind, and Ice and Iron looked at one another with wholly changed expressions. Iron was frowning now, upset about something, though she could not tell what, and Ice looked... almost _happy_.

"I don't _believe it_..." said Ice, as Iron walked over to him. "I don't _fucking believe it_!"

"_I_ do," said Iron, and his voice was a low growl. "Come on..." And without a flash or any evidence of any magic at work, suddenly Iron and Ice were both gone, vanished without a trace.

"Wh... what's happening?" asked Smoke, though who he was asking was unclear. Raven was wondering the same thing, but had not asked. It did not seem prudent.

Fortunately, Water remained behind, shaking his head slowly with a smile of disbelief on his face. "I think we're about to have a fight," he said.

"What?" asked Smoke, genuinely horrified, by the sound of it. "With... _why_?"

Water did not answer directly, glancing back at Gold and at Devastator. When he did finally speak, he simply laughed a mirthless laugh, at the state of the universe for all Raven could tell.

"She's baaaaaack..."

**O-O-O**

What little light there was, was mingled gold and red.

The stone amphitheater was dark and cold, ringed by lifeless gargoyles watching over the two teenagers standing in the center of it, their eyes locked on one another. Hundreds of feet underground, far from electric lights and the warmth of the sun, the only light to be seen was being emitted by both metahumans. Terra's hands were sheathed in an energy field of shining gold, whose light was cast dimly around her side of the chamber. David himself emitted nothing, but the baton in his right hand flickered and danced with a heatless red flame, which rose and fell in intensity rhythmically, sometimes mere smoldering embers, sometimes flaming high enough to encase his entire hand.

They stood there for one of the longest seconds in recorded history, neither one saying anything, betraying anything with their expressions or actions. Terra's hands were relaxed at her sides, and David's baton did not so much as twitch. They just stared at one another, each apparently waiting for the other to break the silence, or so it might have appeared. As it was, Terra was the one to speak first.

"I know you're... probably guessing why I'm here."

If David was surprised by the casual expression, he gave utterly no sign of it. And when he replied, his voice was utterly devoid of emotion of any sort.

"Not really."

Terra blinked once or twice. "David," she said, "I - "

"I _know_ you're here to kill me," said David. He might have been reciting a lesson in school for all the emphasis he gave the words. "I don't know why. Honestly, I don't see how it matters."

"I'm not here to kill you."

The words produced no reaction whatsoever, and the chamber fell back into silence. Terra seemed to wait for David to say something, and when he did not, she ventured a comment herself.

"You don't believe me?"

"There are _very _few things you could say right now that I'd believe, Terra," replied David.

She swallowed. There was no point trying to beat around it. "Look," she said, "there's a lot going on here you don't understand. I'm here to talk, not to fight."

"Well that's really too bad, isn't it?" replied David, "because I'm really not here to do either. But if I have to pick, I'll take fighting over talking right now."

"You told me once that you didn't like fighting."

"I don't," he replied, "but this has been a really strange day. And if you think I'm gonna stand here and listen to you tell me another bunch of lies, then you're crazier than I thought you were."

She shut her eyes and took a deep breath, preparing to start over, but he forestalled her.

"Besides," he said, "you're wrong."

Terra paused and opened her eyes. "What?"

David balled his hands into fists. "You _are_ here to kill me," he repeated, again in the same dangerously calm tone. "Whether or not you want to talk first, that's what you're here to do. And I'd _really_ appreciate it if we could just stop lying about everything right now."

"What are you talking about?"

"One of us is going to kill the other before we leave this room. I know that and so do you."

David's stare was unwavering, a unique enough trait from him to give Terra pause. She visibly hesitated, and then carefully moved towards David, one hand held up in a gesture of peace.

"David, please, you've got to listen to - "

"I swear to _God_, Terra," said David without moving a muscle, his voice now barely controlled, even as the baton in his hand brightened like a road flare. "If you take one more step, I will _implode _your skull, and splatter your _guts _all over the walls." He very slowly raised his baton to shoulder-height. "And if you don't think I can do that, then step forward and find out."

Terra had heard many a threat before, including some she had not expected to hear, but this one was delivered with such... absolute certainty to the words, such a depth of anger welling up behind them, that before she could even consider what to do, she had stopped. From this distance, she could see him literally quivering, and not with fear. She had not known David for too long of course, but she had certainly never seen him like this.

She wondered for a moment if the other Titans ever had.

She wondered if _he_ ever had.

"You seem to have this idea, Terra," said David, "that I care what you think, or have to say, or why you came here." He opened his eyes again, and his stare was as direct as a mining laser. "Let me make this _really_ clear, okay? I am _through_ being played by you, for answers or any other reason!"

"David, I'm not trying to play you!" insisted Terra urgently. "We don't - "

"_Bullshit_!" shouted David, and the walls echoed with his voice. "_Bullshit_! That's what you do! That's _all_ you do! You play people! You lie to their faces and then turn around and stab them in the back! That's _all you do_!"

Terra fell quiet again before David's outburst, and could only watch as a torrent of words spilled out of him like a burst dam.

"You think I'm stupid?" he asked, actually stepping towards _her_, and despite the fact that he was the smaller of the two of them and that she had beaten him once before, she had the unmistakable urge to back up. She suppressed it, but he scarcely seemed to notice. "You think I don't know what you did back there in the park? That little pep talk you gave me about what the Titans would think if they knew I'd been hanging out with you? You read me like a _book_, I guess it's what you're good at. Got me all scared and angry until I had one of those stroke things, right? You think I'm gonna sit here and let you talk me into another one?"

"David - "

"How _did_ you find out about those?" he asked, refusing to permit her a word. "Those little 'episodes' I get whenever I overdo it? For that matter, how did you find out that I was leaving the Tower that day Adonis attacked us? Did Slade tell you, or Cinderblock? Or maybe you did some research by yourself, huh?"

"David, _please_!" shouted Terra, the only way she could get a sentence in. "I _understand_ you're angry with me, I really do, but we've got bigger things to deal with here, okay? This isn't about you and me."

To her surprise, David seemed to pause, and then, of all things, started to laugh, lowering his head until his forehead was resting in one hand and laughing uncontrollably, an ironic, bitter laugh that, if anything, was even more unsettling than having him scream at her.

"... what?" she asked, unsure of what else to say.

Slowly David lifted his head. "You think I'm mad at you because you tried to kill _me_?" he asked, and let her stew in silence for a few seconds before continuing. "You think _that's_ what this is about?" He shook his head slowly. "No, Terra. Slade tried to kill me. "Adonis tried to kill me. Cinderblock tried to kill me. A lot of people try to kill me, Terra. I've almost gotten used to it. You were half-right before. This isn't about me. But it _is _about you. And them."

By now, Terra wasn't sure what sort of a conversation she was having here. "What about them?"

David waited just for a beat, and then said something she had not expected to hear.

"'I wanted to annihilate you and your pathetic friends.'"

Terra froze solid, the aura around her hands flickering on and off at those words, but David did not even seem to notice, staring at her with a gaze like a basilisk. The words had been deadpan, calm, emotionless, and yet they had struck with the power of a wrecking ball.

"Where the _hell _did you hear that?"

"You're not the only one who did some research."

"Did... Robin told - ?"

"Told me what you said?" asked David as if the question was some kind of absurdity. Perhaps it was. "Are you _kidding_? Robin didn't tell me _anything_ about you. None of them did! I didn't even know you _existed _until that night in the park. I had to look it up myself. I had a lot of time on my hands after you nearly beat me to death. There was a surveillance camera on you when you told him that. No sound of course, but Robin had an audio recorder on him. I got to hear everything."

"What do you mean 'everything'?"

"'We had to find some way to coax you cowards out of hiding?'" said David. "'Hope you're not expecting a goodbye kiss?' Do any of those sound _familiar _to you?"

"How did you even _find _all that?" asked Terra, incredulous.

"This city is full of cameras," explained David, "especially when you start a fight in a government research lab or on a major street. Robin had it all cataloged under your name. All I had to do was watch. I had a feeling you and I might run into each other again, so I thought it might be a good idea to see what I could find." He narrowed his eyes. "Guess what I found?"

"Look, you weren't there," said Terra, more curtly than she intended. "You don't... you don't understand what happened."

"Oh, _this_ ought to be good," said David, rolling his eyes. "Let me guess? They were mean to you? They didn't understand you? They were so cruel that you just had _no choice_ but to go make a deal for ultimate power with a guy who might _actually_ be the devil himself? Remember, I _have_ been living with these people for the last six months. At least _try_ to make the lies sound good, okay?"

This was just too much. "Oh, _fuck you_!" exploded Terra, paying no attention to the flair of yellow light and the tremors that shot through the room as she shouted back. "I don't have to explain myself to you!"

David didn't skip a beat either. With his free hand he reached down to his belt and pulled off the yellow and black communicator held there. "Do you know what this means?" he asked her, holding it up like a magic talisman. "I hope so, you _had _one once. It means I'm a _Titan_. It means you _do_ have to explain yourself to me, whether I was there or not. And right now, I _really_ need an explanation, because you're right, Terra. I _don't_ understand. I _really_ don't understand how _anybody_ could take everything they had, everything the Titans gave them, and just _throw _it all away like that. Because that's _exactly_ what you did. I _was_ mad at you, after you tried to murder me. I was upset that you'd been lying to me the entire time. But then I found out about all _this_, Terra." He shook his head. "And this goes way, _way_ beyond just trying to kill me."

"It _wasn't that_ _simple_!"

"Wasn't it?" he demanded, relentlessly, "You had _everything_ I have now. Everything! And you threw it away like it was nothing! They gave you a home, friends, a life, and you threw it all back in their faces and then stabbed them in the back while they were wiping it out of their eyes! And you think you don't have to answer for that just because _I_ wasn't there? I owe the Titans _everything_, Terra. Do you understand me? _Everything I have_! More than I will _ever _be able to repay. You think I'm not gonna _care_ that you did that to them? You think everyone just uses their friends like you do?"

"I wasn't using them!" protested Terra, and her voice caught as she said so. Scrambling for something to say, some actual justification to give, she hit upon the mother lode. "I... I _saved_ the Titans. The whole city! I _died _saving them!"

"Yeah, except, _here you are_," said David. "_Alive_. And working for Slade _again_, by the way. How convenient..."

Despite everything, despite knowing that the reason she had come here was far more important than this dredging up of old wounds and crimes, despite the fact that David had his baton in-hand, and now, if not before, the will to use it, Terra could not stop herself from shutting her eyes tightly and turning her head away, her teeth clenched shut as she fought to control herself, fought to push back the memories of the Titans' faces staring up at her, and the cold grip of Slade's all-embracing control clouding her thoughts and urging her on to finish the 'jobs', one after the next.

"What you did to me," came David's voice, filtering through her memories like an alarm clock, "is _nothing_ compared to that." She opened her eyes again to find him still staring at her. "And you're right, Terra. I don't understand. I don't understand how _anyone_ could do what you did." He shook his head slowly. "I hope I _never _understand."

"You don't know what it's like!" blurted out Terra. "Having powers that just... just _go off_ whenever! Yours just do whatever you want! You have no idea what that's like, what you'd do just to make it stop! You don't have any right to judge me!"

"Maybe not," said David, "but I bet Raven does. And besides that, Terra, it doesn't _matter_ what it's like, or how bad your powers got. There are some things you just _don't do_." He paused for a second. "Even the Hive knows that. And here you are, still doing it."

Her eyes opened wide. "I went after _you_, not the others!"

"Right, you just left them to get killed by Slade, because _that's_ so much better. Just like you left Beast Boy to go running around the entire state searching for you."

"I couldn't let him know where I was!" insisted Terra. "It would have ruined everything!"

"Oh well we _can't_ let that happen, now can we?" asked David. "What _is_ this brilliant plan of yours that requires you to betray the others and kill me?"

"I'm trying to stop the world from ending!"

That at least was _so_ outlandish that it gave David pause. "What?"

"You heard me," she said. Having finally found an opening, she was not going to relinquish it. "I don't know all the details, David, but... there's something _inside_ you."

"I know that."

"No, you don't. You don't understand what it is."

"Oh, and you do?"

"No," said Terra. "But Slade does."

David's eyes widened. "You _cannot_ be serious. You don't actually think I'm gonna believe - "

"Just _listen to me_!" shouted Terra. "Slade's... he's not what you think he is."

A flash of anger, punctuated by David's baton which flared up like a bonfire for a second before returning to normal, keyed Terra to the fact that this might have been the wrong way to put it. "Slade just _killed _two dozen people!" snapped David, "I _watched him do it_, Terra!"

"I... I know!" she said. "Just... please..."

David opened his mouth to shout again, but appeared to think better of it, and stopped. They stared at one another for a second, before David slowly lowered his baton half an inch or so. Not enough to represent any kind of reduction in his defenses, but enough to signal an opening.

"You want to talk?" he asked. "Talk. _No _lies, _no _crap, okay? You tell me what's going on here. Right now."

"I don't... I don't know all the details."

"Then what _do_ you know?"

Terra took a deep breath. "There's something inside you," she repeated. "Something _very_ dangerous."

"I _know that _already!"

"It's worse than you think," she said. "A lot worse."

He didn't respond, and she elaborated. "This thing in you, I don't know if it's like a parasite or a ghost or something else, but it's... _living _inside you. Right now. It's what gives you your powers. And it's really_, really_ powerful."

"How powerful?" asked David, and his voice was quieted. That something was inside him was not a surprise, she could tell. But clearly he didn't know much beyond that.

She did not let up. "More powerful than me. More powerful than Slade even. Way more powerful than you. You just get to use a little fraction of its power. The rest of it just sits there. Waiting."

"Waiting for what?"

"I don't know," said Terra. "Maybe for nothing. But _Trigon _is after it."

The word elicited no flash of recognition from David, Terra could tell, but he lowered his baton some more, and asked the obvious question.

"Who's Trigon?"

Terra shook her head and shuddered. "I don't know who he is exactly," she said. "I've never met him in person. But I think... I think he might be the _Devil_."

She knew that she had overdone it the instant the word left her lips. "Oh, for _God's sake_, Terra!" shouted David angrily. "You think I'm gonna believe that? From you?"

There was no course now but to lay it all out. "David, he _brought me back to life_!"

_That_ shut David up.

"I was a _statue_, David, _dead_, but Slade asked him to bring me back, and he turned me into a human again. _That's_ how I'm here. He brought Slade back too, and gave him all those fire powers. I've never met him in person, I don't _know_ who he is or what he is, but he talks to you out of the darkness and you feel like you want to just die or something. Maybe he's not the devil, but he's the closest thing I've ever run into, okay?"

The desperation, the sincerity in Terra's words clearly had an effect, and rather than scream or accuse her of further deceptions, David remained quiet. His baton fell back to his side, and she saw real fear starting to creep over his face. Fear that she might actually be telling some approximation of the truth this time. And she knew that he would never ever have believed such a thing, not from her, unless what she was saying hadn't coincided with some of the deeper fears he had been harboring about this very issue.

"And... this Trigon wants to kill me?"

Terra shook her head. "No," she said. "Trigon doesn't want to kill you, David. He wants to keep you alive, and with the other Titans."

"Why?"

"He's coming. To Earth. I don't know how, or when, but it's happening very soon. And when he comes, he wants you here. With the others. And then..." she trailed off for a moment before jumping back on track. "... I don't know what happens then," she admitted. "But he wants to destroy the world. And you're part of how he does it. Or that thing inside you is."

David looked rather like someone was explaining to him that black was white. "Wait a minute," he said. "If... this Trigon guy wants me to be here when he shows up, why does he keep sending people to _kill_ me?"

"He's not," said Terra, and she lowered her eyes. "Slade is."

"But... Slade's working for Trigon, right? He brought him back and gave him all those powers?"

"That's what Trigon thinks," said Terra. "Slade's trying to stop him."

Plainly, this was making less and less sense to David. "Why would _Slade_ want to stop Trigon?"

"Look, you don't know Slade, okay?"

"And what, you do?"

"Better than _you _do. Better than the others too. Maybe even better than Robin. Slade's a bad guy, I'm not saying he isn't. But if Trigon destroys the world, then he'll die too, and he knows it. Trigon had Slade send Cinderblock to destroy that orphanage you were in, to make the Titans take you, and he sent him in again to scare you into staying there. But after Slade figured out what was going on, he had me lure you out of the Tower, and sent Cinderblock to kill you."

"Then..." said David, his head almost visibly spinning from all of this. "Then _Slade_ killed Cinderblock after I beat him? Then _he_ was the one who broke into the jail?"

Terra could only shake her head. "No, David," she said. "Slade didn't kill Cinderblock. _I_ did."

David recoiled a step, as though struck. "What? _Why_?"

"Because if I hadn't, Trigon would have found out what Slade was up to, and would have stopped him. And then there'd be no stopping the end of the world."

"Then... then you..."

"After Cinderblock failed, Slade told me I had to kill you instead. There was nobody else he could trust to do it." She sighed. "Do you remember what I told you right at the end of the fight?"

It took him a second, but the memory returned. "You said you were sorry..."

"I _was _sorry. I'm _still _sorry, David, but I _had_ to do it. But... something stopped me. I think something Raven did, I still don't know what it was. And now it's nearly too late."

"Hang on a minute," said David, raising one hand. "If Slade wanted to kill me, why didn't he do it himself? He's indestructible, he's got demon powers or whatever, right? And he could have done it in that church after you beat me half to death! Why didn't he just kill me then?"

"Because Trigon's watching him, David," said Terra. "Trigon brought Slade back to be his servant, he's keeping a close eye on him. Trigon has this whole ritual he needs to do before he can show up, it takes weeks. That's what Slade's doing now, it's why he destroyed all those buildings and why he attacked Raven and you guys in that church. He has to, I don't know, _announce_ Trigon's coming or something. I don't understand how it works. But if Trigon ever figured out that Slade's actually trying to kill you, he'd take all of Slade's powers away, and probably kill him."

"So he just doesn't mind _you_ doing it?"

"He doesn't _know_ I'm doing it," said Terra. "That's why Slade used me. Trigon's not on Earth yet, he can only watch what Slade is doing, so Slade convinced him to bring me back to 'help' him get everything ready. Trigon doesn't know why I'm really here, but even so I have to be careful."

"Why?" asked David.

"Because Trigon's got other servants besides Slade. Ones who _do_ want him to succeed. And if they find out what Slade and I are doing, they'll tell Trigon."

"Well you can't be _too_ worried about them if you were willing to start a fight in public like that!"

"That was a _last resort_, David!" insisted Terra. "You were _supposed_ to die when Cinderblock attacked us! I was just supposed to make sure you were in the right place for it, I wasn't ever supposed to get involved _myself_."

"So then why did you?" he demanded. "Why is it so important that I get killed?"

"I _told_ you already, Trigon's going to - "

" - end the world, I heard you the first time," said David. "But is killing me supposed to stop him from showing up or something?"

"No," said Terra. "He's coming anyway. Something to do with Raven, I don't really understand how it works. But Slade says that if you're not there, if Trigon can't get what he wants from inside you, then the other Titans have a chance of stopping him."

"A _chance_?"

"A _good_ chance. That's what Slade thinks at least, and whatever you think about Slade, he usually knows what he's talking about with this sort of thing. But if you're there, and Trigon does whatever he's planning to do, then they have _no_ chance. Trigon'll destroy the entire world, maybe the whole universe. He says it's an absolute _certainty_, David. _That's_ why we had to send Cinderblock to kill you."

David fell silent, and Terra shook her head and continued. "But... Robin trained you better than we thought, or maybe you were just stronger than we expected, and you crippled Cinderblock instead." She sighed. "I... probably should've just finished it there, but I... didn't. And then it was too late. You were still alive, Trigon was getting closer, we had to do _something_."

"But that _something _didn't work either?"

"No," she said. "It didn't. And now we're here."

David visibly braced himself. "So is this where you try to kill me again?"

Terra took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "No," she said. "Not unless I have to."

"And what exactly is _that_ supposed to mean?"

"It means that I don't know if I _can_ kill you, okay?" said Terra. "It was closer that it looked last time, and I _know_ you've been practicing since then, right? Probably practicing with rocks?" It took only a glance at David's face to confirm her suspicions. "I got you to overload yourself last time, and you already admitted you realized that. In a straight-up fight... I don't know."

"So then what are you _doing _here, Terra?" asked David. "Did you come all this way just to explain yourself to me?"

Terra took another breath. "No," she whispered. "I came to convince you to come with me."

"Come with you? To where?"

"To meet with Slade."

Genuine shock registered on David's face as he blinked, twice, and stared at Terra like she had just grown another head.

"_What_?"

"I _know_!" protested Terra pre-emptively, raising a hand. "I know, but _please,_ you've gotta... I need you to come with me to meet with Slade because he might be able to find a way to stop this without having to kill you."

"I thought you said Slade couldn't do _anything _without Trigon finding out?"

"I _did_," insisted Terra, "but we don't have a lot of _options _now, David! We have to try _something_, and _fast_ or else Trigon's gonna end the world. I know you're not just gonna let me kill you, and I don't know if I can kill you myself, so this is your only choice."

David was looking more and more bewildered. "You... you want me to come with you to meet Slade?"

"Yes."

"And he's got some way of ending this without having to kill me?"

"He _might_. I don't know for certain, David. This is like Plan Z."

"Well he must have told you _something_ if he sent you to - "

"He didn't send me."

David stopped dead, blinking in shock for a second time. Terra could only shake her head. "He doesn't even know I'm here."

"But... then..."

"If we go to Slade, he _might_ be able to find some other way, David. That's the best I can offer."

"And if he can't?"

"Then... I don't know, David," admitted Terra. "Then we try something else, then we go _somewhere _else, take your pick, okay? I don't know. All I know right now, David, is you don't have a choice."

"How do you figure that?" asked David. She saw his baton begining to burn with more intensity again, but took no notice of it as she looked him in the eye.

"Because, David," she said. "Whether or not you come with me, Slade has one more backup plan that he's gonna try."

"And what's that?"

"He's gonna tell your friends everything I just told you."

David blinked once or twice, not in shock but in confusion. Clearly this was not the threat to life and limb he had expected. "I don't get it," he said.

"Slade's with the others right now," explained Terra. "Something he has to do for Trigon. He's trying to flush Raven out of wherever she's gone to hide. Since Cinderblock couldn't kill you, and I couldn't... he's gonna make the others do it instead."

"_What_?"

"He's gonna tell them everything. About Trigon, and you, and Raven, everything. Stuff even I don't know. He's gonna explain how the whole thing works, he says he's got a way to do it without alerting Trigon. And once they realize that the only chance for them to save the entire _universe_ is to kill you, David, what do you think they're gonna do?"

"That's _insane_," said David, no longer even attempting a pretense of holding his baton up and ready. "The others wouldn't believe Slade if he told them water was _wet_! You think they're just gonna take his word for something like this?"

"David, don't you _see_?" insisted Terra. "They don't have to take his _word_ for anything, he's telling the truth! They'll be able to see it for themselves once they know what to look for! If Raven doesn't know what's going on already, what Slade tells them will be enough for her to figure it out. And they're gonna come to the same conclusion Slade did. Slade doesn't want to kill you because he's a bad guy, he wants to do it because there's _no other way_. Not that he can find, and not that they can."

David's face slowly fell as the brutal, simple logic of what Terra was saying sank in visibly. His baton was held limp at his side now, the aura faded to nothing. His mouth was hanging slightly open, in shock perhaps, in disbelief of course, but more and more, in silent recognition of what was happening.

"They're not gonna want to do it, David," said Terra. "You know that. They're not gonna like it. But they're gonna have the choice of letting the _entire world_ die, or killing you. They're superheroes. What do you think they're gonna choose?"

She chanced a step towards him, and when he did not react, she slowly approached. He made no move to stop her or even retreat, indeed she doubted he even noticed what she was doing. She walked straight up to him, speaking evenly and quietly.

"And that's why you have to come with me, David," she said. "We can go to Slade, let him learn more about what that thing inside you is, see if he can find a way to stop whatever Trigon plans to do with it. I know it doesn't sound like a lot, but it's the only way you _might_ survive this. Even if we fight, and it turns out I _can't_ kill you, the others will have to. They won't have a choice."

David seemed almost to be staring through her, and his voice was almost whisper-quiet when he responded.

"Like me?"

Terra smiled, despite herself. "Yeah," she said. "Just like you." This close, she could see tears welling up in David's eyes, of what she had no idea, and he shut his eyes and clenched them tight to force them back, with the result that when he opened them again they were ringed with damp redness. His hands were shaking, she could see the baton trembling against his leg as he held it at his side, dark and cold. No more bluster or threat or angry denunciations. He looked scared, small, alone. A combination she remembered all too well.

Slowly, Terra extended a hand towards him.

"So please..." she said in the most reasonable tone she could muster, a tone that promised help, succor, deliverance, "... David... will you come with me to meet Slade?"

David took a ragged, nervous breath, and raised his eyes slowly to meet hers. He remained there for several moments, before quietly whispering a single word in reply.

"No."

**O-O-O**

And just like that, Devastator was gone.

He did not blink out of existence with a flash or a pop, or even through simply disappearing. Raven did not see him leave. She merely was conscious that one moment he was here, and the next one he was not. And as though in mimicry, all of the remaining elements had vanished off to wherever they had been preparing to go, leaving Raven alone to do as she would.

All, that is, save one.

The golden statue was absolutely lifelike, just like the others, save of course that it had suffered terrible damage in the Ice-David's attack. One side of its face was beaten almost out of recognition, and its body was pitted with puncture and bludgeoning wounds that leaked liquid gold down onto the floor in small, silent streams. Yet the statue did not complain or whimper, but stood still, watching her much like a scientist observing the antics of some test specimen, a sort of detached gaze that spoke volumes by itself.

"So," it said, "here we are."

Perhaps it didn't know what to say, but Raven certainly had an idea. "Why'd you do that?" she asked.

The golden figure shrugged. "Why else?" he said. "Because I didn't want Devastator to kill you."

"Do you know what I was about to do?"

"More or less," said the golden figure.

"And you didn't want to stop me? Or talk me out of it?"

The figure seemed to consider that for a moment. "That wasn't really in question," he finally said.

Raven blinked. "What are you, his suicidal side?"

The golden figure laughed. "No," he said, "no, I'm just..." He trailed off for a minute. "I'm Gold," he finally said, as though that answered everything.

"And what's Gold supposed to represent?"

"It's not supposed to _represent_ anything," said Gold passively. "It's just... gold." He seemed to read Raven's confusion (it wasn't hard), and explained further. "This place is... a combination of your expectations and David's perceptions. You're used to a fragmented mindscape where emotions sit in little cubbyholes decorated and color-coded, and fight with one another for dominance, and you brought that with you when you came here. But David isn't like you. He doesn't have that dissonance that you have. He's not at war with himself."

"Is that why the Ice sculpture tried to rip your head off?" asked Raven, unimpressed, "because you all play nice with each other?"

Gold simply smiled. "You'll notice, he failed."

She looked him over. "Not by much."

"By enough."

Raven let it go, watching the gold statue passively, before finally asking a question.

"So if you knew what I was doing, why did you make Devastator stop?"

"Because I chose not to," said Gold, which did not exactly clear the matter up. "We are whatever we choose to be. You taught us that."

Raven raised an eyebrow. "I did?"

"Well not _you_ specifically, but all of you did, yes."

"That doesn't really sound like something David would say," said Raven.

"I'm not David," answered Gold. "I'm just a figment of his imagination shaped by yours. And you only think that because you don't understand what he chooses to be. Which is fine, because he doesn't either."

The metaphysics of this situation were starting to make Raven's brain hurt. "Are you supposed to be his intellect? Or his subconscious?"

Gold merely chuckled and shook his head. "You're thinking of it wrong," he said. "We're _all_ David's intellect. We're all his subconscious. We're all his emotions. We're all him. And he is each of us, by turns and by degrees. He is iron, and ice, and smoke, and water, and gold too, and a hundred other elements. So are you, even if your mixture is different. So is everyone."

"Are you being literal or figurative?"

"Both," said Gold with a smile, and for the first time he seemed to acknowledge his injuries, lowering one hand to his side and holding it over the largest puncture wound. Liquid gold seeped through his fingers and ran down his arm, and he seemed to wince.

"You er... you wanna come see something?" he asked her casually. "There's a great spot for it nearby."

Raven thought about it for a moment. "What are we gonna go see?"

"Well," said Gold, "there's some things going on right now that I thought you'd want to be aware of, and... besides... I sort of figure you've got a bit of deciding to do for yourself, right? I know how the others can be when you're trying to think clearly..."

The reminder brought Raven back around to the task at hand. "I sort of already made my decision," she said.

Gold seemed unperturbed. "Well even so, come along anyway. You look like you could use some fresh air..."

He walked slowly over to her and offered his hand, still wet with the liquid gold he had been trying to stem the flow of. She took it hesitantly, less because she was afraid of the Golden statue of David, and more because, given what she knew she was going to have to do, it seemed... needlessly cruel to humor him further. Even if he wasn't real.

The world shifted around her, and suddenly she was in open air.

She turned around to find herself standing on the very top of another tower, shaped identically to the one she had been in a moment ago, but she knew instantly it was different, for the roof beneath her feet was not made of stone. Instead, it seemed to have been carved from a skyscraper-sized block of vulcanized rubber. It dimpled and bent and wobbled treacherously under her feet, and yet it seemed as stable overall as the one she had left a moment ago, like an inflatable castle for little children. It took her a second to recover her balance, and when she did, she stood up and looked around.

All around her was spread the landscape of David's mind, the forest unending of verdant green, enveloping the entire area, bounded in the far distance, she could see, by snow-capped mountains barely perceptible on the horizon. Below and to her right, there sat the shining golden sphere that led to Devastator's realm, rippling in the soft breeze. And spread around the sphere there sat the five Towers, steel and wood and crystal and rubber and volcanic stone. She had assumed from ground level that the towers were arranged evenly around the sphere, but now she saw that it was not so. Some other pattern was at work here. Here, atop the tower of rubber, the closest one was the tower she had just left, that of stone. Across the way, past the sphere, opposite these two, there was steel and crystal. And mid-way between them, off-centered by the sphere, anchoring the semi-circle they were built in, there was the tower of wood.

She knew this arrangement had a purpose, but she did not presume to guess what it was.

Gold was standing a few paces away. Apparently _he_ was having no trouble keeping his balance.

"What are we doing here?" asked Raven.

"Just... watching," said Gold nonchalantly, as he walked over to the edge of the Tower and sat down, hanging his legs over the side of the Tower, and apparently staring off into space. He made no further comment, leaving Raven to interpret this however she liked.

"Uh..." said Raven, "I'll bite. What are we watching?"

"Hrm?" Gold turned his head, looking puzzled, then his eyes widened and he slapped his forehead. "I'm sorry, I forgot," he said. "We're not exactly used to visitors..."

He turned back, raised one hand, and slowly swept it from side to side, and at his command, the sky in front of him seemed to open up, like snow being cleared off a windshield by wipers. Before Raven now stretched an enormous blank opening in the sky, black as pitch, which only slowly began to resolve itself into an image, like an enormous television screen. And on the screen, she slowly made out the image of someone standing there, staring at the screen. The image was very dark, illuminated only by a red and golden light emitting from somewhere, and yet as Raven shaded her eyes and squinted and tried to make out the picture against the bright background of the sky, she thought she knew that person from...

... the person stepped closer, and her face became visible, and Raven gasped and took a step back.

"_Terra_?"

"She can't hear you," said Gold, watching impassively, "or see you. It's just an image."

"But... where is she?"

"The same place David is, some damned pit underneath the old library. At least I _think _we're still under the library. He got a bit turned around in the fall."

Icy chains wrapped themselves around Raven's heart. "How long have I been in here?"

"Couple of hours," said Gold. "The alert came in about ten minutes after you got here. An important one, or they'd have gone looking for you instead, I imagine."

Raven suppressed the urge to scream. Why hadn't she thought of this? And even as she asked the question, she knew the answer. She hadn't thought of this because she hadn't been thinking of _anything_ except getting the answers she needed to avert the apocalypse she was scheduled to participate in shortly. Nothing else had mattered, certainly not the consequences of whatever actions she took to avert it.

Given what actions she was about to take, that much was coming into stark relief.

"The others can handle it," said Gold, as though reading her mind.

"Are they all right?"

"Last we saw of them, yes, they were fine," said Gold. "Though obviously we got separated..."

Raven looked back up at the silent image of Terra speaking. The camera seemed to shake and move almost imperceptibly, like a camcorder held by an amateur.

"Is that happening... right now?" she asked.

"Yes," said Gold. "A live broadcast, so to speak."

Standing there, watching Terra, Raven suddenly felt the strength go out of her legs, and she flopped down onto the rubber rooftop, which bounced and undulated beneath her like a waterbed. The strain of simply being on a razor's edge for so long, seeking desperate answers to desperate questions that all pointed to the same place, of wondering who among your friends you were going to murder, and how, and in what order, was one that could only be borne for so long, and the massive miscalculation she now realized she had made by staying in here too long just overloaded her. Only so many threats and contingencies could she juggle without assistance. Only so many life and death decisions could she make. She collapsed onto the quivering tower and sat there with her head bowed, trying not to let her emotions overcome her, for there was no telling what might happen if they did.

A little while passed before Gold spoke. "Are you okay?"

She did not look up, perhaps she couldn't, and by reflex she started to say yes, but stopped herself. Here, in this place that did not exist, talking to a figment of her own imagination, what was the purpose of maintaining the lie that was ripping her apart.

"No," she said, and her voice faltered. "No, I'm not."

No immediate reply was forthcoming in words, but she felt a metallic hand gently pat her on the shoulder, no doubt smearing liquid gold on her cloak, but that was hardly important now. The gesture was supposed to be re-assuring, she could tell, and yet given the circumstances, it was anything but.

"Seems to me," said Gold, "that you're carrying a hell of a lot right now."

She raised her head to find him watching her with the same expression David had whenever he was staring right through a metal container or visualizing the molecules in a plank of wood. "What, are you offering to help?"

"I can't help," said Gold with a hint of sadness. "You know that already. Not with this. I'm just saying. You look like a toy wound up too tight. Like you're ready to fly apart."

She certainly _felt_ like one. "And I suppose you know what that's like?"

"Not a clue," said Gold. "But I have a vivid imagination. And I'm sorry."

She stared at him in something like disbelief. "_You're_ sorry? Do you have any idea what I have to do?"

"I can guess."

"I have to _kill_ you!" she shouted suddenly, and her voice echoed across the forest. "I have to burn this whole place to the ground! I have to _kill David_, do you _get that_? That's what I'm gonna do!"

"You've decided then?" he asked in a conversational tone

"I _have to_!" She yelled at him. "If I don't do it, everybody _dies_, don't you see? I don't have a choice!"

She _wanted _him to yell at her. She wanted him to get _angry_, as Ice had. She wanted him to curse her and call her a demon and a traitor and a coward for doing such a thing, but he did not. He simply sighed softly and shook his head. "That does seem to be a theme right about now," he said.

She could not believe what she was hearing. "What the hell is _wrong_ with you?" she demanded. "Are you his _Death drive_ or something? Did you even hear what I just said?"

"I heard every word," said Gold evenly. "And before you ask, yes, I believe you, yes, I understand your reasons, and yes, I think Devastator was telling the truth. I'm neither ignorant nor suicidal, and I understand exactly the implications of everything that you are talking about. And now I'm asking you to accept that _even though _I understand perfectly what the situation is here, I'm not screaming or attacking or running for cover, and I am not going to do any of those things. Whatever you decide you have to do, Raven, I just want to sit here for a little while, and I would be very grateful if you'd care to do the same, though as always, it's up to you."

Raven found she had absolutely no idea what to say, but Gold seemed to take her non-answer for an answer, and smiled, and turned back to the screen, where Terra seemed to be delivering some kind of impassioned plea to the camera in question. After a minute or so, Raven did the same, sitting down next to Gold, and just watching the silent proceedings, her mind struggling to even accept what was happening.

"Hey er... you want to listen in to what they're saying?" asked Gold suddenly, turning his head back to her. "We get sound on this thing."

"Uh..." she had no idea how to answer. Indeed she barely had understood the question. And as before, Gold simply smiled.

"I really don't think he'd mind this time. They're um... well you might just find it interesting."

She was fairly certain that normally she would have found reasons to object, but she wasn't really thinking clearly right now, and obviously Gold had his mind already made up on the subject. He pointed his hand towards the floating screen as though aiming an invisible remote control, and "clicked" a button on it, even making a little clicking noise with his mouth.

"... will you come with me to meet Slade?"

Terra's voice boomed out from the screen like a loudspeaker, filling the entire area with noise. It was the same voice, the same inflections in it, that Raven remembered from all those months ago, and the memory flushed much of the confusion out of her addled mind, and focused her attention on what she was seeing and hearing. From somewhere down below, she heard a chorus of answers being shouted out in different permutations of David's voice. "Yes!", came the shouts, "All right!", "Over my dead body!", and countless others too soft or too distant to make out, as though children were shouting instructions to a character on a movie screen. And yet the real reply drowned them all out, despite being pitched softly, more a whisper than a defiant cry, but a whisper broadcast through amplifiers the size of a building. And when it did come, it was not the same as any of the chorus of suggestions, save the one Raven heard the Gold statue next to her softly whisper back.

"No."

Terra looked like someone had slapped her across the face. Her voice cracked and stammered, her train of thought having clearly just derailed on her. "What?" she said, a question that appeared to be circling around a lot today, but judging from what came next, one David had expected.

"I'm not going with you," came David's voice, and this time there was enough of his speech for Raven to catch the fear in it, but no hesitation, no pause, no equivocation. His voice indicated that he was saying something fraught with awesome significance, personal or otherwise, but he did not prevaricate even slightly. "Not now, not ever."

"They're going to _kill_ you, David," came Terra's reply, and Raven, who had no clear idea what they were talking about, felt her blood turn to ice regardless as she realized she didn't need to know the context to know who Terra was talking about. "Did you miss that part? They're going to kill you if you don't come with me."

"Maybe," was all David said.

"_No_," spat Terra back at the screen. "Not _maybe_, David, _definitely_. One way or another they are going to _have_ to kill you."

"Fine," said David. "Then that's how it's gonna be."

Terra looked as though she was watching the laws of the universe shatter in front of her. "David, you don't understand! This is not - "

"No, Terra," said David, "I think _you_ don't understand." Terra stopped in mid-sentence as David slowly explained in an even, quiet voice, that almost succeeded in masking the trepidation he must have been feeling. "You say they're gonna kill me? They're not gonna have a choice? They're gonna have to? I believe you. I understand you. And I am not going to _lift a finger_ to stop it."

The floating picture began to blur, and Raven squinted unconsciously to focus the image until she realized that the effect was due to _tears_ welling up in David's eyes. And yet David's voice remained almost preternaturally calm, as though held there by force. It probably was. "If they wind up having to concoct some insane plan to kill me, then I guess it's gonna succeed, because I'm not going to stop it. If that's really the only way out of the apocalypse, and they wind up having to do that, then that's what's gonna happen." He paused for a moment to let that sink in. "Am I being clear enough, Terra?"

His voice was starting to waver by now, but Raven doubted seriously that Terra noticed, occupied as she was in staring at David like a deer in headlights. "You're... you're gonna _let them_ kill you?"

The 'camera' moved forward just a little bit. Likely David had leaned forward. "_Yes_," he said, deliberately loading the word with all the finality he could muster. "That's _exactly_ what I'm gonna do. I'm going to _let it happen_. Do you understand, Terra? I'm gonna _let_ them do whatever it is they think they have to do. Period."

"Even if it means they kill you?"

"Absolutely," said David, and Raven could almost _feel_ the strange cathartic relief David had to be feeling to have up and said such things. The camera shifted again, David had taken a step towards Terra. "But do you know what I'm _not_ gonna do?" he asked her. "I'm not gonna go hiding out somewhere underground with Slade or you or whoever else, to try and stop it from happening. Even if it _is_ the only way to stop it. I'm not gonna do that."

Terra's head shook slowly, almost of it's own accord. "David..."

"_No_, Terra," he said. "I've heard what you said, I _believe_ what you said, I _understand_ what you said, and I'm _not going with you_."

"Have you lost your _mind_?" asked Terra in stupefied disbelief. "You _have_ to come with me, you don't have a choice!"

"I think you'll find I do have a choice," said David. "And I probably _have_ lost my mind, but that doesn't change anything." He seemed to be finding his footing now, and his voice grew, not in volume but in certainty. "And I know you like to reduce everything to not having a choice," he said. "I do it too. I _hate _having a choice, usually. I just want to... do what I'm supposed to do, the way I'm supposed to do it, not have to worry about having to choose the right thing to do. Choices scare the hell out of me. If you can choose, that means you can screw up, and pick the wrong one, and it's all on your head."

The 'camera' shook slowly from side to side, focussing on the floor for a moment before David's voice continued. "But we _always_ have a choice, Terra, even when we don't want one, even when it only looks like we don't because of one the choices looks crazy." Terra's face began to slowly fall as David finished. "And I think you can guess who taught me that."

Terra lowered her eyes. "I'm... not asking you to _betray_ the other Titans, David."

"No," came the answer, "but you _are _asking me to walk away from them, and go join Slade. And we can stand here and tell each other that I don't have a choice, but we both know that I do, just like you did. Just like we both chose to become Titans, even if I didn't realize I was doing it. Just like the others chose to bring us in, even after what you did. And I can't tell if that meant nothing to you, or just not enough, but you chose to walk out on them." The camera shook slowly side to side again. "I don't know why. Maybe you were scared or angry or maybe you thought it was the best thing to do, or maybe you convinced yourself that you didn't have a choice to begin with. It doesn't really matter. You chose to do that." The camera rose and fell slightly and a puff of steam indicated that David had just taken a deep breath. "I'm not."

"So... then what _are _you gonna do?" asked Terra.

Another deep breath. "I'm gonna go find the others," said David, "and I'm gonna go home. Because right now I _really, really_ want to go home. And I don't care how corny that sounds." The camera tilted down a bit, and shook, as though David were chuckling. "I never even knew what that _was_," he said. "I thought it was something people said when they didn't know what else to say, or put in TV shows because it sounded good." He shook his head. "It's real. It's actually real. I want to go home. And I don't care if they drop an _axe_ on my head the instant I step through the door. I'm not leaving them. Not ever."

The look in Terra's eyes told Raven that she knew she had lost. Her plans had come straight to a dead end, and she now had no direction as to what to do. And perhaps David could also see that, judging from what he said next.

"So you go ahead, and pull those rocks out of the wall," he said, "and do whatever you think you have to do with them." She saw him raise his baton into the ready position he had learned from Robin, and then suddenly the picture seemed to snow over like a television turned to static, a riot of colored dots that danced across it for a moment or so before suddenly clearing away and resolving into...

Raven gasped involuntarily.

... into an ocean of lights.

It was like a satellite image of the Earth at night, a mosaic of millions and billions and _trillions_ of tiny points of light, red, green, blue, yellow, orange, purple, every shade and every color, and all of them _alive_. Humming in place, zipping back and forth like shooting stars, so many distinct points of light that it should by rights have dissolved all into one solid mass, and yet it did not. And though Raven had not the first idea how to tell what any of these points were, she saw instantly the patterns in them, the order that they fell into, hundreds of thousands of trillions of them, each in their places to form shapes that were distantly familiar. She could not have described how it was possible, but staring at the fresco of lights, she could both see every single one of them individually, and see the outlines of the form they took on when combined in their trillions and thousands of trillions, all at the same time.

"Is that - "

"Yes," answered Gold, without needing her to finish. "That's what it looks like."

The image remained steady, for to David this was clearly nothing new or special, and Raven saw a mass of solid red dots rise slowly into view, studded regularly with emerald and sapphire points like a jeweled sceptre. And as she realized what that was, she heard David say his last words.

"Make your choice," said David to the mass of scintillating particles that Raven knew intellectually represented Terra, "because I've already made mine."

Terra stared silently at David, her hands still held at her sides, and Raven could read nothing into her gaze, not when her face was made of sparkling diamonds and a thousand other specks of Technicolor light. Ten seconds went by in silence, as they faced one another, before Terra nodded almost imperceptibly.

"All right," she said hollowly.

And then there was a bright flash, and the screen went dark.

Raven blinked silently in surprise, but the image did not return, and all that could be heard was the soft breeze whistling around the rubber tower. She half expected thunder and lightning, hurricane winds, or perhaps something even less explicable, but there was nothing, no change in the landscape before her to indicate what she knew must now be going on outside.

And where did that leave her?

The golden statue next to her was watching her expectantly, and she raised an eyebrow. "Shouldn't you be helping him?" she asked.

Gold shook his head and smiled. "This is a job for Devastator," he said. "Maybe one or two of the others. The day he needs _me_ for one of these things will be an interesting day..."

She nodded. "So was this some plan to get me to change my mind?"

Another shake of the head. "No," said Gold. "At least not the way you think. Honestly, I just thought you might want to see it."

Her eyes narrowed skeptically. "Really?"

To her surprise, Gold looked almost offended by the question. "_Yes_, really, Raven. I'm not trying to convince you of anything here. Of _course_ I'd prefer it if you didn't blow us all apart, I'm not suicidal, and neither is David. But I don't _know_ what's going on here. I don't know what you should or shouldn't do, I don't understand what's happening. Neither does anybody, not David certainly, and not the others, and probably not even you. I didn't bring you here to talk you out of killing us. You and Devastator say that you might have to, and I don't know enough to disagree. And if it comes down to that, then... then that's what it comes down to." He turned away for a second and grimaced as he held one hand over the injuries in his side again, as droplets of liquid gold rolled down his leg and dripped off the side of the tower. "I just thought you might want to see it," he said. "I figured David could say it better than I could. I wanted to make sure the others didn't sic Devastator on you, because I know he could crack you like a walnut if we ordered him to. But mostly..." he sighed and lowered his head. "Mostly I just wanted to talk."

Raven shook her head uncomprehendingly. "Why?" she asked.

Gold raised his eyes and looked back at her. "Because I wish we knew you better."

The simple sincerity of this admission was enough that Raven lost all sense of what she was going to say, and left her silent, which Gold seemed to take as an invitation to continue.

"We don't... _know_ anything about you. Maybe the others do, they've known you for longer after all, but I doubt it. And, look, there's nothing wrong with that. Whatever's happening here is something really personal for you, I understand that, and I'm not trying to say you owe us any explanations. David wouldn't ever say this, but he's not here right now, so I will. We understand you're just doing what you think is best for everybody. I know that, so does he, but..." he trailed off, apparently unsure of how to say what he was trying to say.

"But?" she prompted.

"But you're lost in the _woods _right now," he said finally. "_Everyone_ can see it. I'm not even a whole person, and _I_ can see it. You're so... _obsessed_ with making sure nobody finds out what's happening that you've completely missed the fact that there's five people out there who only want to know what's going on so that they can help you deal with it. Whatever you are, whatever your thing with this 'Trigon' guy is, they aren't gonna do whatever you're so afraid they're gonna do to you. And you'd know that already if you weren't so scared of what's going on here."

As if in reflex, she opened her mouth to protest that she wasn't scared, but a single glance at Gold told her that this would be wasting her breath. "Look," he said, "I'm sure you're right to be scared. We've all seen enough to know that. And maybe I'm wrong, and you've got other reasons for not telling everybody. That's fine too. I'm not trying to get you to 'open up' or something, I know better than that. It's not about facts and numbers and where you went to third grade. It's not about knowing _things _about you. You know all sorts of _things_ about David, especially now, but..." He trailed off in a manner very reminiscent of David, boiling his thoughts down before speaking again. "But," he said finally, "I just wish... that you guys knew each other better."

She let that sit for a little while before softly adding her own comment.

"So do I."

They sat in silence for a few moments.

"For whatever it's worth though," said Gold, "even with everything that's happened or going to happen... I'm still glad he met you."

"Yeah," said Raven, "but is he?"

"Well, I can't speak for him," said Gold with a shrug. He glanced back at the blank screen for a moment. "But what do you think?"

Raven didn't reply.

There were no birds here, no insects, no sounds of animals, just the wind distantly blowing through the trees, and the soft moaning sounds of the rubber tower beneath her as it swayed and bent like a ponderous willow tree. And she sat quietly and listened to the wind, Raven could hear voices, all David's of course, but each one subtly different. Unconsciously she sought out the sounds, and a moment later spotted their sources. Below her and across from the tower she was sitting on, affixed to the side of the tower of stone, there was a small balcony upon which were arrayed a quartet of figures of Ice and Smoke and Iron and Water. Too far away for their words to be made out, they seemed to be talking to one another, while each stared off over the balcony's railing and into what appeared to be empty space.

"They're watching it," said Gold. "We like to watch them together. It makes it easier..."

At this distance, she could see plainly as Ice clenched the railing as if ready to vault over it, restrained only by the hand of Iron on his shoulder. She could see Iron speaking to Ice, though not what words they were using, his expression careful and collected, even as Ice gripped the stone railing hard enough to carve gouges into it with his fingers, and occasionally snapped a no-doubt caustic comment back at Iron, though Raven noted he made no effort to shake off his counterpart's hand. And next to them stood Water, leaning carefully against the railing as he stared up into the open air half in anticipation, half in dread of what he was seeing there, one arm draped around the shoulders of Smoke, who seemed ready to melt into the floor or dissolve into thin air, but who still periodically found it within himself to look up and contribute a comment, sometimes only to wince and shy away again, and sometimes to chance a careful smile. And as Raven watched, Water turned to smoke and said something to him, gesturing with his head towards Ice, and Smoke nodded and turned, and edged over to where Ice was standing, and spoke soft words of some sort, and ventured to lay a hand on his other shoulder. Ice reared around and snapped something at Smoke, and glared daggers at him, but instead of flying at Smoke and dispersing him with a wave of his hand, he seemed, after a moment, to master himself, and turned back to the railing with an audible growl. Hesitant though he was, Smoke nevertheless edged in next to him to do the same, and Water slid over to flank him, patting Smoke gently on the shoulder in unmistakable imitation of a parent telling a child that everything was going to be all right.

And whether or not all of these versions of David were just figments of her imagination, it did not escape Raven that, no matter the situation or circumstance, there was utterly no way that any of her incarnated emotions would ever do the same thing for one another.

"So, have you decided what to do?" asked Gold.

Raven didn't look up, just closed her eyes and nodded.

"Yes."

He didn't make a sound, or at least not much of one, and when she looked up, she could read the nervousness on his damaged face as clearly as if he'd had it stenciled on his forehead. Yet he did not pry or demand to know what her intentions were. No doubt they would soon become clear.

"I do want to know something though, before..."

He blinked. "What's that?"

"What are you," she asked. "Really?"

He smiled. "I told you already, I'm Gold."

"So, what?" she asked, "you're rare and valuable?"

Gold simply shook his head with a soft laugh. "You're thinking about it wrong," he said. "I'm not represented by Gold. I _am_ Gold. I'm a metal, a soft metal at that. I can be beaten into whatever shape people think is most convenient," he gestured at his ruptured stomach, "or ripped apart by anything harder than glass. I bend, I tear, I melt, I boil. You can pound me into gold leaf or melt me down into bars if you want. I'm not much use, I'm no good as a sword or a shield or a tool, I don't have practical purpose all, and I can't be relied on to stay in the same shape."

He took a deep breath, looked up at her, and smiled.

"But," he said, "I never tarnish. I never rust. I don't oxidize or burn or dissolve in acid. You can boil me to vapor or freeze me in outer space, and I'll never change chemically. I'll mix with anything, heat and electricity go right through me, and you can fire me, soak me, or bury me in the dirt for a hundred million years, and at the end of it, I'll still be Gold. I'm hard to find, especially pure, and I'm not _completely _indestructible, but there's almost nothing you can do to get rid of me that isn't gonna destroy your entire world. And despite the fact that I'm pretty much useless, and can't keep you alive if you're in imminent danger, everyone agrees that I'm one of the most valuable things in the world."

Raven considered all this for a time. "I wish I was that lucky," she said.

Gold smirked. "Raven, you wouldn't be sitting here if you didn't have any Gold yourself."

And strangely enough, she felt a little better.

She stood up slowly, it wasn't the easiest thing to do with a Tower that wobbled and bent under your feet, and Gold did the same, watching her as if looking for a sign. She didn't know what to say or do, still not utterly confident he wasn't about to attempt some last-minute desperation move.

"It's a nice spot up here," she said.

Gold nodded and turned to look out over the emerald forest, and the carved obsidian spire of pumice stone that emerged from it nearby. "Yeah," he said. "But that's more your doing than his."

Raven half-turned her head and raised an eyebrow questioningly, and Gold laughed.

"You didn't think we put this tower next to yours by _accident_, did you?"

Raven couldn't help, despite the circumstances and what she was about to do, but to laugh herself, and when she had finished, she took a deep breath, and said the words she had subconsciously set to be the queue for her powers.

"Goodbye, David," she said.

Gold lowered his head carefully, a nod of recognition of what had always, Raven realized, been inevitable.

"Good luck, Raven," he said.

Gold stood impassively and watched as Raven's image slowly faded out into nothingness, leaving him standing alone atop the tower of rubber. He sighed, quietly, and turned back to the edge, looking down at all the others, at Ice holding the stone railing for dear life, and Iron holding his shoulder for the same, at Smoke nervously glancing over at his frozen counterpart and whispering nervous words of calm and reassurance, and Water standing next to Smoke, and doing for him what he was doing for Ice. And despite everything, Gold smiled.

And then, as he felt the foundations of the tower beneath him begin to shake and heard the rumblings that heralded Raven's powers, Gold lifted his head and stepped off of the Tower into empty space, letting the wind rush around him as he plunged down towards the ground, his injured side leaving a trail behind him of golden droplets, glistening in the crisp air, and sparkling like falling stars...

**O-O-O**

The only warning Terra received was David's scream.

It was piercing, it was unexpected, it was sudden, and it was genuine beyond all doubt. One moment, David had been standing before her, eyes locked, baton flaring, and the next moment he collapsed like he'd been shot. His baton clattered to the ground, extinguished as though plunged into a bucket of icewater, and he fell to his hands and knees, forgetting Terra or everything else. So stark was the shift that Terra froze in astonishment. Not even when she had overloaded David's powers had he reacted like this, and he had, as yet, not made any real use of them.

She had no idea what was happening to him, likely he didn't either, but regardless of the reasons why, she knew what she had to do. She raised one hand, and at her silent command, a polished rock the size of a motorcycle rose from the stone-paved ground, sheathed in an unearthly yellow glow. David was too engrossed in whatever appeared to be assailing him that he did not even seem to notice, and Terra waited only long enough to shake her head in silence, before clenching her fist and sending the massive rock flying at David like a meteor, with sufficient weight and force to crush him to paste.

And no doubt it would have, had not a coal-black energy shield materialized out of nowhere surrounding David like a protective bubble a millisecond after she commanded the rock to hurl itself at him, against which the stone shattered like a Christmas ornament.

Terra stood before the crumpled form of David as though rooted to the ground, her brain unable to process what had just happened. Other rocks remained all about her, hundreds and thousands of them, silently awaiting their orders, but she could not muster the wherewithall to call upon them. And instead she watched in mounting horror as, before her very eyes, David suddenly convulsed, threw his head back and screamed again.

Silently.

His mouth opened, his breath came, but no sound emitted, or rather none he was capable of making. Instead, there was a cold, _ripping_ sound, and suddenly black tendrils of energy exploded from his eyes and nose and mouth, and as he reared back up on his knees and screamed silently at the ceiling, the energy coursed out of him into the air, where it swirled and danced and then finally coalesced together into a single black mass that settled down onto the ground between Terra and David, shrank into a humanoid shape, and then finally resolved into...

Terra's breath choked off as she took two large steps back, and whispered the only word she could manage right now.

"No..."

Raven stood in the center of the room, her cloak wrapped around her body, her arms at her sides, her eyes shut, and only after a moment did she lift her head, open her eyes, and fix them solidly on Terra. Her voice was calm, collected, and cold as ice.

"Hello, Terra."

Behind Raven, David lay collapsed on the ground, moaning softly, yet slowly he appeared to regain awareness of his surroundings, and managed to prop himself up on one hand, rubbing at the side of his head. It was several moments before he realized that he and Terra were no longer alone.

"... _Raven_?"

Raven paid him no mind, save to wave her hand, and slide him, shield and all, across the floor to the side of the room, clearing herself space with which to operate.

"Raven?" asked Terra, blinking in astonishment. "Is... what are _you_ doing here?"

"A lot of things," said Raven, her hood pulled up over her head, the hem of her cloak flapping around her ankles. "But right now," she said in savage mockery of another voice, "I'm here to deliver a message."

It did not take wild leaps of genius to determine roughly what the tone of Raven's 'message' was going to be, but Terra had little choice but to ask. "What are you talking about?"

Raven stepped forward, cloaked in a dark aura of menace. "Run back to Slade," she said, "and tell him _and_ his master that I'm gonna help bring him into the world over my own dead body."

Terra narrowed her eyes. "That can be arranged."

The ceiling collapsed.

An avalanche of rock and dirt erupted from the roof of the amphitheater and crashed down onto Raven like a landslide. Caught by surprise, she barely had time to raise a second shield to protect herself before several tons of debris smashed into it, and she was knocked over from the effort of maintaining it, landing on her side on the floor as debris and dirt rolled off the shield onto the ground.

"I don't know where you came from," said Terra, "or what you think I'm doing here, but I think you forgot something. Slade is under orders not to kill you. I'm _not_."

Raven scrambled back to her feet to find a hailstorm of rocks and accelerated debris flying at her. She shifted her shield into a conical one, and deflected most of it, gathering up a pile of rocks of her own and hurling them back at Terra, who simply raised one hand and stopped them in their tracks.

"Killing David might save the world," said Terra, "but killing _you_ will stop the Apocalypse." She smirked. "Remember what happened last time we had a little fight?"

"Don't even _try _it, Terra!" snarled Raven, and she lashed out with her powers, sending tendrils of energy crackling across the room like whips. Terra leaped backwards out of range, letting them bite into empty air.

"Or what?" she asked, "you'll get mad?" She raised one hand, and lifted enormous boulders out of the ground which began to spin around her like planets orbiting a star. "Well we wouldn't want _that_, now would we?"

Raven forced herself to stay in control, and she grabbed telekinetically at one of the enormous boulders, only to have Terra hurl it and all its fellows at her before she could get a mental hold on it, a barrage she followed up with other rocks scooped up from the floor and walls. Raven batted them aside, sending them spinning off in every direction, meeting each of Terra's motions with one of her own, preparing a counterstroke to smash the geokinetic into the nearest wall like a fly.

But she never got it off.

With one hand, Terra raised another handful of debris and dirt and hurled it at Raven, only to see it flung aside by Raven's shield, but with the other, she brought her hand around and waved it at the stone gargoyles that sat perched around the room. Visibly gritting her teeth with the effort, Terra shouted aloud as she poured her powers into them, shrouding them in yellow energy, until they quivered and shook. Raven braced herself for the attack, expecting that they would soon be hurled at her like the other boulders Terra had been employing.

She did _not_ expect them all to rise to their feet one by one, leap down into the arena, and advance to the attack.

Raven fell back desperately as two dozen gargoyles fell over themselves lunging at her. She lashed out, slicing the head off of one, which failed to arrest its advance, animated as it was by Terra's will alone. It reached out to seize her and she backed up, hurling her powers forward in an unfocused blast that tore the offending statue to pebbles and sand, but three more took its place in a heartbeat. She managed to seize one with her powers and hurl it across the room to shatter against the wall, but another struck low, tripping her with one of its granite claws, and spilling her backwards onto the ground. Its partner raised its fists and brought them down to crush her to jelly, and she threw up a shield which just barely held against its earthshattering blow. It raised its fists again, and brought them down again, this time cracking the shield, and knocking her flat onto her back. Before she could re-raise the shield, before she could conjure a single spell, the gargoyle's fists were looming over her once more, swinging down for the coup-de-gras.

It never arrived.

There was a thunderous roar, and the entire gargoyle exploded like a bomb. Fragments of rock flailed at her face and hand and cape, stinging her skin and raising welts under her uniform, but she barely noticed, for right then she spotted a flash of orange-red from beside her, and the second gargoyle, the one that had tripped her, had its arm torn off as if by a bazooka. It whirled around to face its assailant, slashing with its claws at a figure Raven could not see from where she was laying, but she raised her head up to look in time to see David ducking under the clumsy slash, and bringing his baton around in a backhand stroke that barely grazed the Gargoyle's stony skin, and yet no sooner did he do so than three tremendous blasts cleaved the hulking statue in half at the waist, and sent it crumbling to the ground.

Terra turned on David with a vengeance, hurling a barrage of loose shrapnel his way. He dove to one side to avoid the worst of it, and fired a rock from the far wall back at her with a flick of his baton, missing high, but forcing her to duck, giving himself time to get back to his feet. Two gargoyles lunged at him. One chose to telegraph its attack with a roar, and David turned on it and blasted its head into its chest before detonating its entire body like an artillery shell. But in doing so, he failed to spot the second one, which grabbed him from behind and slammed him into the far wall, before bringing its other arm around to disembowel the psychokinetic, at the very least.

Raven did not hesitate. "Azarath! Metrion! _Zinthos_!"

A tendril of black energy snaked out and grabbed the gargoyle around the waist, lifting it bodily into the air before smashing it to pieces against the ceiling. Another gargoyle lunged forward to take its place, but she snared that one too, pulling it into the air by one leg and using it as an enormous wrecking ball to scatter three more. Granted a moment's respite, David did the sane thing, and fell back towards Raven wordlessly, blotting another gargoyle that tried to intercept him out of existence and reaching her side in time for her to scramble to her feet. No words did either of them speak. They had no time, for a dozen more gargoyles quickly closed in, lunging at them with mass and numbers too great for him to destroy or her to repel. And so instead, without asking or stopping to thing, she simply grabbed him and shouted a spell to the stone-littered room, trusting to Devastator's explanation that so long as her intent was not to harm him, her magic would bypass the cosmic protections.

It did.

Raven and David both disappeared, seconds before a large pile of Gargoyles landed on the space they had been occupying. Instants later, they both re-appeared on the opposite side of the room, Raven standing defiant, David having fallen to the ground at the unexpected shock of having his atoms transported through a non-Euclidean gateway. Still, he managed to recover enough to rise to one knee, raise his head, and reverse the grip on his baton, which burnt and flared like the flaming sword of an avenging angel.

Terra shrieked in frustration and desperation, and the gargoyles responded to her unspoken command, hurling themselves after the two Titans with all the fury of enraged berserkers, but having granted the two teens range to operate in, and a few seconds to prepare, the gargoyles had no chance at all. Raven raised her hands and commanded the laws of the universe to bend to her will, and tore gargoyle after gargoyle to ribbons with the power of her mind, while David simply focused his mind on the rocks themselves, and ripped the energy forth from the stony assailants in the form of shaped charge blasts that tore them limb from limb. Distracted by the need to command her stony minions, Terra herself could contribute little more than a few desultory rocks, easily batted or blown aside by either Titan, and before long, the last remaining gargoyle was stopped dead in its tracks a few feet from Raven and David by a wall of impenetrable darkness, moments before David blew a hole through its torso the size of a cannonball, sending the debris flying at Terra like an enormous shotgun shell.

Smoke and dust covered the entire room in a thick shroud, too thick to see through. David moved as if to step forward in search of Terra, but Raven restrained him with a hand on his shoulder and a wordless shake of her head, and without protest he deferred to her, waiting with baton in hand as she cleared the dust away with a slow wave of her hand.

Terra was in the center of the chamber, doubled over onto her hands and knees, with one hand clutched over her stomach, where a dark red stain was beginning to spread over her shirt. Her breathing was labored, and each breath brought on a wince. She raised her head as the smoke cleared and managed to sit up, and Raven saw that a spine of rock was driven into her side like a nail, a piece of shrapnel no doubt from one of David's explosions, or perhaps one of her telekenetic assaults. There was no way to tell.

"You... you don't know what you're doing..." she said, gritting her teeth against the pain. "It's all gonna _end_! You're both gonna end the entire world!"

David said nothing, and Raven caught his nervous glance out of the corner of her eye, but she stepped forward. "I _won't_ let it come to that, no matter what Trigon, Slade, _or_ you do. Do you hear me?"

"You _can't_ stop it!" shouted Terra, half-blinded with pain and fear. She knew now that she had failed utterly, she was no match for both Raven and David combined, and had no more weapons but her words. "_Nothing_ can stop it, Raven, you _know_ that."

"Yes," said Raven. "I know."

The admission stunned Terra to silence, and she fell back to her hands and knees, still clutching her injured side. Behind Raven, David lowered his baton slowly in silence.

"But then..." stammered Terra, "if you... if you _know_ you can't stop it. Then..."

"Because I won't avoid my destiny by murdering my friends," she said, and as she said it, she turned her head back to face David, who was watching her like a sparrow watching an owl. "There's _always_ another way," she said. "We just have to find it."

She turned back in time to watch Terra clench her free fist and raise her head, her eyes glowing a radioactive yellow. "You're making the biggest mistake of your life, Raven," she said, "and we're all gonna die because of it." And then, before either David or Raven could make a move, the ground beneath Terra suddenly split open, and Terra plunged down out of sight into the earth, the crevasse she had used to egress slamming shut again with a thunderous 'crash', leaving the two Titans alone in an amphitheater ringed by ruined statues, and covered in a layer of debris.

David collapsed.

His legs gave out on him and he fell back against the wall and slid down onto the ground, letting his baton clatter to the floor, tucking his knees against his chest, placing his folded hands atop them, and letting his forehead rest on top. She could hear his breathing coming in ragged gasps, and feel the swirling emotions emanating from him like an aura. She let him sit there for a few minutes, before slowly walking over and crouching down herself.

"Are you okay?"

He swallowed and raised his head. His hands were shaking like loose leaves, and it took him several tries to find his voice. "I... think so," he finally managed to say. No doubt he had about a hundred million questions, but clearly he had not the wherewithall to ask them right now.

Which hopefully would give her enough time to figure out how to answer them.

She opted for the basics. "You saved my life back there," she said, and he laughed nervously.

"Yeah, well, six hundred more and we'll almost be even, I guess," he said with a weak smile. His heart wasn't in the joke, but it helped take the edge off.

She nodded silently. There was no use evading it, she supposed. "Look," she said, "David, I - "

"Do you know where the others are?" he asked, and she blinked and stopped. Searching gave her something to do, and she let her mind wander through the catacombs and tunnels they were in, until she could sense the familiar patterns.

"They're not... _too _far away," she said. "I think they're all together. There's... something with them..."

Her eyes shot open as she realized who the fifth presence was. David noticed. "What?" he asked breathlessly. "What is it?"

"_Slade_," she said in a horse whisper. She scrambled back to her feet, as did David, retrieving his baton in the process.

"Can you get us there?" he asked her.

"I think so," she said. "We'll have to teleport."

He winced visibly at the prospect, but did not protest. "All right," he said. "Let's go."

Despite everything, she felt she couldn't just... just plunge off into a new encounter without at least _trying_ to explain what she had been doing inside his head. "David, before we go, I just want to - "

"It can wait, right?" asked David a _little_ too urgently for her suspicions to not be triggered, and she realized all of a sudden that he wanted to discuss all the insanity that had transpired no more than she did. She blinked a few times before nodding silently, and he returned it. "Okay," he said. "Then let's go."

"Give me your hand," she said, as she mentally prepared the necessary spells. "I've got an idea..."

**O-O-O**

"Struggling only makes it worse, and how I _hate_ to see you suffer..."

Slade stood in the center of the enormous chamber, watching his handiwork with what passed for an expression of satisfaction on his featureless one-eyed mask. One hand was on his hip, and with the other he held four flaming tendrils that snaked and twisted about the room like enormous leashes. One by one, his cyclopean gaze fell upon one of the Titans, each one bound and tangled within a fiery tendril, and lovingly savored the sight as they writhed and cried out in pain. His second statement had been a lie of course, there were few things he enjoyed _more _than watching the Titans suffer, but the first had been entirely accurate. Indeed, he had made sure that the tendrils would have such an effect.

Robin, as always, had the biggest spark of defiance. The other three were merely concentrating on the agonizing pain shooting through their nerves, but Robin managed to weakly cough out some form of threat or defiant remark. He couldn't catch the words over the sounds of the others moaning, and so lifted Robin's tendril and brought him in closer, the better to hear whatever clever remark the Titans' leader had to say.

"You won't..." stammered Robin weakly, "won't... get away..."

Slade laughed. Had he nothing but cliches to fall back on? "There, there, Robin," said Slade as he raised his other hand, fire springing forth from it capable of melting through steel, "not to worry. This won't hurt a bit."

The wall exploded.

The blast was more sound and flash than damage, but it was powerful enough to throw enormous blocks of rock into the room, which rolled and rumbled about like enormous crushers, though none came anywhere near him, or the other Titans. He turned to see that an eight foot hole had been blasted in the wall as though a tank had fired into it, and standing in the smoke-filled entrance was a small figure in a red suit clutching a burning stick.

"This _will_."

The floor beneath Slade's feet erupted like a volcano, flinging Slade into the air like a rag doll. He dropped all four tendrils, which instantly extinguished and vanished, releasing the remaining Titans from their fiery grip. No sooner had he landed, than the floor blew up again, tossing him back into the base of the enormous hand-shaped altar that adorned this chamber. The blasts would have crippled any living man, but Slade was well past such things, and no sooner had he landed than he leapt back to his feet rolling forward to avoid a third blast, before turning back to the agent of these explosions with a snarl in his throat.

"That was an incredibly _stupid_ thing to do, David," he said, and raised one hand, letting another tendril of molten rock snake towards Devastator, intending to bind him up with it, and teach him the true meaning of pain, as he had been teaching his fellows.

Devastator did not simply break the tendril. He destroyed it in _detail._

Before the fiery tendril had gotten within ten feet of him, Devastator raised one hand and extended his fingers at Slade. One by one, each _piece_ of the tendril was blown to dust, a sequential series of explosions that left _nothing _behind but ash and tiny fragments of pumice rock. Thirty explosions at least he conjured, blasting the binding chain to bits link by link, until Slade was left holding nothing but the rump of a flame tendril in his outstretched hand, like a cartoon villain with the hilt of a broken sword.

Well _that_ hadn't gone as planned...

"You've been tormenting everybody for long enough," said Devastator, his voice dripping with bitterness, and he actually _advanced_ on Slade, his baton held out like some kind of magical ward. "I don't care _who_'s backing you. You touch any of them again, and I'm gonna make you wish you _could_ die."

"Young man," said Slade evenly, "not only have you made a _colossal _mistake in coming here at all, but you have just earned yourself the privilege of watching helplessly while I _dissect _every one of your friends before your eyes." He stepped towards Devastator as though he had not a care in the world. "I intend to make it last _days_."

"When I'm done with you, you won't be torturing anybody _ever_ again," said Devastator, in a fairly decent facsimile of someone who wasn't afraid. Slade wasn't fooled.

"You can't _physically hurt me_, boy," said Slade as he moved closer to Devastator, who for some insane reason was not retreating before him. "I am _well_ beyond the ken of you and every one of your friends."

"Wanna _bet_?" came a voice from above and behind Slade.

A block of stone the size of a small car slammed into Slade and smashed him into the far wall like a wrecking ball, powerful enough to crush him to jelly had he still been made of flesh and blood. He knew of course whose voice that had been, and inside his stone tomb he grinned. He had been _wondering_ how much pain Raven was going to permit the others to undergo before she finally came out of hiding.

A pulse of energy, and the block that had hit him exploded like a bomb, and he strode forth, fists shrouded in flame. There, in a shaft of light atop the carved altar in the center of this room, stood Raven. Her eyes were solid white, burning with power overwhelming, her fists cloaked in a living darkness, and her entire body was covered in burning red runes, as though someone had attacked her with a branding iron. The fury and hatred pouring off of her was _palpable_.

"I told you to _leave them out of this_," snarled Raven like a rabid animal.

"How sweet," said Slade. "You've finally emerged to save your friends. Unfortunately, you're only delaying their pain." He lit his hands burn with demonic fire, flaring up and scorching the air around him. "And yours," he added.

To his surprise, Raven did not attack. The desire was there, and yet instead of screaming her magic words and barraging him with projectiles and tendrils of energy, she simply landed on the ground between her friends and Slade.

"Well? What are you waiting for?" she asked, slowly approaching him with an expression and a demeanor that was utterly bereft of fear. "Aren't you going to attack? Reduce me to ashes?"

"Or did your master forbid you from hurting her?" asked Devastator.

Slade froze. Raven was one thing, but how the hell had _Devastator _found out about Trigon unless...?

Oh _Goddamnit..._

"Did he order you to keep his precious gem safe?" asked Raven, advancing to within arm's reach of Slade.

Slade didn't answer. This was _not _how he had envisioned this conversation going. He had hoped to force Raven into the light and drag a tearful confession of what her true role in this charade was out of her by force. He had hoped to induce her friends to denounce her, to curse her, or to recoil in fear. He had been _waiting_ for this!

This was _not_ how it was supposed to work!

While Raven held Slade off, Devastator had slipped around to assist the others, who were even now, picking themselves up off the ground. Cyborg (of course) couldn't help but contribute a comment. "Wait," he said, "Raven has the Gem?"

"No," said Robin, and the tone of his voice told Slade that the game was up, "Raven _is_ the Gem."

Scowling at Robin and Raven in turn, Slade realized he now had no choice. His fun was ruined, but at least the mission was complete. It was time to leave.

"I'll be sure to give him your regards," he said to Raven, and with a thought, he phased himself through the floor, leaving only a circle of fire on the ground to mark his passage. It was singularly disappointing that he had not gotten the chance to turn the others against Raven, but perhaps that would come later. In any event, he had fulfilled his orders to the letter, and would now be able to devote his time to more important pursuits.

That at least was his assumption right up until the point where something _reached through the floor_ and dragged him back up into the chamber. Before he knew what the hell was going on, he found himself staring Raven in the eye once again, his body encased in her black energy, while she hovered over him like a puppeteer controlling a marionette.

"I'm not finished yet!" she shouted at him. "This time, I have a message for _you_."

Slade knew before she acted that this was going to be unpleasant.

She slammed him up into the ceiling like a rubber ball, then down into the ground, and across the room into a pile of rubble, which she dumped unceremoniously on his head. "You tell him he'll have to _destroy_ me before I help him!" she shouted at him.

"Tell him yourself," snarled Slade back. "The hour is near."

He had nothing further he wanted to say to her, but clearly he had made her angrier than he had anticipated. In retrospect, that might not have been such a good idea...

Raven yelled a war-cry and catapulted him across the room, batting him up and down like a pinball against anything that came to hand. The other Titans, even Devastator, fell back to one side of the chamber as she laid bare her powers and let them tear into him like a voracious wolverine. Six tons of rubble flew into the air at her command and packed themselves around him like a straightjacket. He was just gathering the energy to try and blast them off of him when she let out a primal shriek and sent a massive wave of pure negative energy in the form of a cawing raven, screaming into his packed debris cluster. The entire debris field exploded with him inside it, hurtling him down to the ground like a shot bird, and scattering rubble in every direction. He landed with his head bent at an angle, his every nerve screaming in pain. Devastator himself would have been hard pressed to conjure up a better explosion than that, and yet as he looked up, he saw Raven still hovering over him, hands raised, as if ready to throw down yet more pain.

This was getting out of hand.

"I'm not afraid of you any more!" shouted Raven defiantly as Slade slowly picked himself up out of the rubble. None of the other Titans moved to interfere. Perhaps they did not dare to.

He saw his opening.

"You might not fear me," he said, resetting his neck with a sickening pop. "But look who's afraid of you."

The words had the effect he had hoped for. Her concentration, and with it, her rage, faltered. She hesitated, turned, and looked back at the other five Titans, all of whom were staring at her in various degrees of utter shock. Slade saw the light dim out of Raven's eyes, saw her rage subside as she realized what she was doing, and smirked under his mask. The truth, as always, was more damaging than any lie.

It was _long_-past time to go. He turned and phased through the wall, leaving a trace of fire in his wake. This time, nothing tried to stop him. Let her try to explain _this_ one to her friends. After seeing what they had seen, after Robin had made his realizations, Slade was fairly confident she would be lucky if they didn't try to burn her at the stake...

It was, after all, what Slade would have done in their places.

**O-O-O**

The common room of the Tower was quiet, quieter that it had ever been maybe, despite the fact that all six of them were arrayed within it. It was as though the very room itself had stilled its own systems, listening to Raven's every word with as much intensity as the other five Titans did.

She took a sip from the mug of hot tea in her hands, and spoke without looking up.

"The ancient order used the name 'Scath' to protect the identity of their master," she said. "We know him as 'Trigon'."

She heard a sharp hiss as someone caught their breath. She knew who it was without looking.

The journey home had been spent in total, abject silence, largely of Raven's own making. The others had seen her in all her rage and wrath before, that much was a caution but not a surprise. But the slow realization, if not of the full explanation of what was happening, then at least of significant pieces of it, _that _had been a much different prospect. She had expected them to demand the full story right then and there. She had at _least_ expected that they would be falling over each other to ask questions, especially Robin. And yet, perhaps the scale of the affair was so great, the questions so vast and the implications of them so terrifying, that they all resolved silently to wait until they were all back at the Tower, and could hear the matter from her laid out in one simple narrative. And so it was that, except for a few tentative questions from Beast Boy to ensure that she was actually all right, none of them had said anything at all.

None of them were hurt significantly, bruises, welts, rope burns, and other minor injuries notwithstanding, and so all of them, immediately upon arriving, had filed silently into the common room. There had been many looks and glances between the others pregnant with meaning, or perhaps she had just imagined that there were. She had spent most of the car ride with her eyes shut so as not to see the accusing looks she expected were on the others' faces. Accordingly, she did not know who it was that had spent the entire ride back with their hand gently laid on her shoulder, though in practice she could feel the thick glove through her uniform. It helped her remain calm. It helped her imagine that maybe it wasn't going to be as bad as she thought. It helped her... not to decide so much, for she already knew what she was going to do, but rather to come to terms with the decision.

And so it was, after they had all entered the common room, after Cyborg had made her a mug of herbal tea without a word, after Beast Boy had gently guided her to a couch and sat her down, sitting next to her also without a word as the others took up positions on chairs, the other couch, or just standing, so it was that Raven began to speak.

And she didn't stop.

She told them everything. _Everything_, every dream, every action, every scrap of information she knew, laying it all down without permitting herself to censor the flow. Every word was torture, every sentence had to be clawed from her unwilling throat like a rabid animal, so desperately protective had she been of this information, but she refused to stop, and slogged on, admission after admission, secret after secret. She told them about her nightmares, about the flames and the blood and the bodies petrified in the streets. She told them about Slade, about their meeting in the cathedral, about what he had said to her on the roof, about the Mark of Scath burnt into her hands and body. She told them about the prophecy, and who had spoken it, and why, and what it meant, about Azarath, about Azar and the monks of that doomed planet who had taken her in willingly, and trained her to control her emotions and wield her powers in service of Good. The others had said nothing, listening only, and as the full magnitude of what she was telling them began to sink in, she saw their expressions change slowly from concern to astonishment, and then to shock. She kept on anyway. She told them about entering David's mind for the first time, and what had happened to her there, about the shame and fear she had felt, about why she had hidden all this from them. She made no excuses, asked no forgiveness, did nothing but tell and tell and tell until the words began spilling out on their own accord, and she could not stop.

When she finally got to the events of this evening, only then did she raise her eyes, and turn to David, sitting quietly like the others in a chair, and watching her expectantly. Only then did she make eye contact as she slowly, inexorably, explained what she had done tonight. Waves of panic and fear and shame broke over her as she described how she had violated every rule of telepathic contact, broken her own restrictions on what she was allowed to do with her powers. She left nothing out. She described, in exquisite detail, how she had entered David's mind without permission, how she had fought with Devastator, what he had told her about himself, and David, and about the things to come. She explained how she had sat there and watched part of his encounter with Terra from within his own head, sparing no words for what she had done, and finally finished off by describing how it was that she had come within a hair's breadth of striking him dead from within his own mind, stating nothing but the facts, laying the cards out upon the table for everyone to see. The only things she did not tell of were the conversations she had had with Gold and the others, for those tales, if not the rest, were not hers to tell.

And when it was finally over, when the well of confessions and secrets had finally run dry, only then did Raven lift her head, to see what the reaction to all that she had told was to be. Robin was standing over her, and his face was almost blank, as though for once, he did not know what to say. No lecture or stern warning did he have to present, this was far beyond him, and he knew it. Starfire was pale, paler at least than normal, her hazel eyes filled with concern and compassion. Cyborg had stood up, he occasionally paced when he was very upset, she knew, and he had been pacing back and forth for the last half hour. Yet he did not look angry so much as worried, and every so often he would stop to lay a hand on David's shoulder, who very much appeared to need it. David was sunk over in his chair, his eyes squeezed shut, his hands trembling as he fiddled nervously with his baton like it was a set of prayer beads, and she had seen him _wincing_ periodically during her tale, yet he had not become angry and stormed out of the room, as she had half-expected he would. Likely whatever reaction he was having was simply subsumed in shock. And Beast Boy...

...

She couldn't even bear to look at Beast Boy.

He was sitting next to her, quieter than he had likely ever been in his life, and his hand was on her shoulder, and had not left it. At times his grip had tightened, at times it had relaxed, at times she wanted nothing more than to throw it off, and at other times she had wanted to grab his hand with hers and just squeeze it, but she had mastered herself and done none of those things. What his expression was, she did not know, for she could not force herself to look at him, for fear of what condemnation she might read in his emerald features and sea-green eyes.

"So," said Cyborg, "you're... sayin' that we're up against _Trigon_?" She nodded, chancing a look up, and watched as he took a deep breath and brought his hand to his forehead. "Oh man..." he said, lacking anything better to say. In the face of a flat statement like that, there was nothing _to_ say

"His cruelty is legendary, even on my world," ventured Starfire. Raven had no idea that either Cyborg or Starfire had ever heard of Trigon, but then she hadn't really asked, had she?

"So, what makes you go all glowy in the dark?"

The question was so perfectly _Beast Boy, _such an absurd thing to ask given everything she'd just said, that Raven actually turned to him in surprise before she even remembered that she was avoiding doing so. And then it was too late, she was looking straight at him, and him at her, and he looked... no different at all than he had a hundred times before. He was a little more subdued certainly, his eyes wider than usual and sparkling with concern, sitting on his heels on the couch and waiting for her to answer his inquiry, but of condemnation there was nothing, of hatred there was nothing, of _fear_ there was nothing, and the shock of realizing that choked off her reply until she had to take another sip of tea to cover. He wasn't angry, and he wasn't yelling at her, as he had in the quarry. He looked concerned, he looked worried, he looked a bit surprised certainly, but he looked just like himself.

But then, she realized, he still didn't know the biggest revelation of them all. One that she had thus far avoided, the one at the center of everything.

She tried to ease into it. "It's a warning," she said. "It means Trigon is coming, and the way he gets here is through me. I'm not just a person, I'm a portal."

Robin, alone among the other Titans, seemed to pick up on the obvious question she had been leading to. The one that explained it all.

"But, Raven," he asked, "why you?"

Raven closed her eyes. "Because," she said, "Trigon... is my father."

The silence that greeted that nuclear statement was deafening. She felt Beast Boy's hand freeze on her shoulder, she heard five teenagers' breaths all catch at once, she felt the stares, the shock, the _stigma_, through her eyelids, and yet at the same time, she felt a liberating weight fall off of her. It was all out in the open. At long last, it was all revealed.

"Bad things are going to happen soon," she said, standing up and turning away from the others to avoid their frozen stares. She walked towards the enormous windows of the common room, staring at her own reflection in them. "Really bad things. And it's gonna be my fault. I thought I could handle this alone... I tried..." She looked down at her hand, where not long before the runes of Scath had been emblazoned like scarlet letters. "But I was wrong," she said simply. It was all the explanation she could give, all the excuse she had for the deception and the concealment. No excuse at all.

Someone reached out and laid a hand on her shoulder, and when she turned around, she saw Starfire standing behind her.

"For confiding in us, we are most humbled."

Before Raven could react to this, Robin and Cyborg had joined her at the window. "I've only got one question," said the half-robotic Titan. "How do we stop him?"

Raven literally did not know what to say. "We don't," she said, still barely able to credit that they were... that they weren't _angry_. They weren't afraid. Didn't they understand?

She was about to try and force the understanding down their throats, when all of a sudden someone snuck up behind her, and slid an arm around her shoulders. She turned her head in reflexive annoyance to see Beast Boy grinning, actually _grinning_ up at her, and the incongruity was so strong it struck her dumb on the spot.

"But that doesn't mean we still can't try," said Beast Boy.

"I told you that we wouldn't let Slade get whatever he was after," said Robin. "We won't let Trigon get it either."

She felt tears coming on, and shut her eyes to block them. "You guys don't understand..." she said.

Cyborg's hard, heavy hand landed on her shoulder like a twenty pound weight. "Yeah, we do," he said, and his voice was as sure and certain as it always was, a big brother's voice, confident, calm, and clear. "We understand plenty," he said, "and we're gonna _stop _this guy, whatever it takes."

He sounded so... _certain_ of it, they all did, that she couldn't bring herself to protest any more, let alone to scream that they had to run away from her as far and as fast as possible, no matter how much she knew she knew better. She turned away so that they wouldn't see the tears leaking through her shut eyes, but Beast Boy's arm was still draped around her shoulders, and when she heard him say "Hey, look at that," she couldn't help but open her eyes, to find that the sun was rising, framing them all with golden light, as she stood there amidst her friends who, despite her best efforts to the contrary, despite the fact that she was the self-confessed living embodiment of the apocalypse, were all still willing to stay with her.

She knew they were all wrong. She knew the sunrise wasn't an omen. She knew everything was going to end, and that it was all going to be her fault, but despite all that, for one, brief moment, she believed.

**O-O-O**

Nobody had wanted this night of terror and soul-baring to end more than Raven, and yet, when Robin finally told them all to go and get some sleep, she knew there remained one thing she still had to do.

Five of them had stayed up to watch the sun rise, something Raven herself had done before of course, occasionally even in the company of Robin or Cyborg whenever they chanced to get up earlier than usual, but she couldn't remember a time when all of them had done it.

And of course, this wasn't one either, for one of them had not stayed.

He had slipped out un-detected, something he was good at and had only gotten better at as his familiarity with the other Titans grew, and theirs with him, and when they noticed that he was gone, Starfire and Beast Boy had been on the point of finding him and dragging him back up to the common room in a gesture of solidarity, but Raven had told them not to, and thankfully, Cyborg and Robin had backed her up. If David had wanted to make a fuss of himself, or even attract attention at all, he could have with a word or even a sound. He had not. And Raven could guess why.

Raven found him in the basement.

Cyborg had set up a handful of folding chairs after the last time one of them had been forced to spend the night down in the medical bay, with several of the others looking on. Now that Raven thought about it, she remembered that the person in question had been David, beaten to within an inch of his life by Terra on the day they had all been ambushed by Slade. Cyborg hadn't bothered to clear the chairs away, and David was sitting in one of them, his head bowed, his baton held in one hand. The baton was on 'fire', shimmering softly in the low light of the Tower's basement, and David had it held up in front of his face, silently watching it burn, visualizing it by means of light or molecules, she couldn't tell. The light it cast was sufficient for Raven to see that he had changed out of his uniform, back into his civilian clothes and sneakers. Despite the fact that, as it turned out, he was as deeply involved in this thing as she was, she had no idea what could possibly be going through his mind now. She at least had had her entire life to prepare herself for the fact that she was one day going to be the vessel of her father's re-animation. David had been given no such warning.

He made no sign that he noticed her presence, not even when she walked slowly towards him, her footsteps echoing through the basement. His eyes never left the steel baton in his hand, not even when she took a seat in one of the other folding chairs.

"I didn't think it would be like this," he said, after a time.

"Like what?" she asked.

He didn't answer immediately, turning the baton over in his hands. "I could see things," he said, "and break them if I wanted to. I thought it was _me_."

"Devastator picked you," said Raven. This wasn't what she had come to say, but she would play along until the time came. After everything, she owed him that much. "He wouldn't tell me why, but he picked you specifically."

"Lucky me..." said David. He shut his baton off and stared off into space, remaining quiet for a little bit, before picking at a different thread of conversation.

"So I guess," he said, "this explains why my powers don't work like other kinetics' do?"

"Yeah," she said.

"And... that's why yours don't work on me sometimes? Like in the street?"

She suppressed the urge to wince. She wasn't proud of what she had done, and he knew it. "Yeah,"

"And the ghosts in the library?"

"They were Trigon's servants. Trigon's servants can't hurt you."

"So is Slade, isn't he?"

"Slade's different," she said. She was sure of that much, even if she wasn't sure _how_ he was different.

Despite everything, a faint smile crossed David's face. "So I guess you were right," he said.

"About what?"

He turned to face her for the first time. "I _was_ sent here to kill you guys."

Maybe he hadn't meant a rebuke by it, but she felt an implied one, and lowered her eyes. "David..."

"I guess they decided that the problem with Terra was that she _knew_ she was a plant. Figured they'd get better results from somebody who didn't."

"David you're..." she had been planning to say that he wasn't a plant, save of course that he _was_ one, involuntary though that roll had been. "... you're not like Terra," she said.

"I am _exactly_ like Terra," he responded, no histrionics or shouting, he didn't even raise his voice. "In a lot of ways at least."

"That's not true."

"Yes it is," he said, "and if you don't think so, then you don't know either of us as well as you ought to."

"David, you're a Titan," said Raven. "You're one of us."

"I'm a Titan because you guys decided to make me into one, and I went along with it. That's the only reason I'm here, and it's the only reason Terra was here. It's also, by the way, the reason Terra turned into a traitor. Slade approached _her_, not the other way around, convinced her she didn't have a choice but to help him destroy you guys."

Raven didn't know what to say, and so said nothing, and let David continue. "Do you know why that worked?" he asked. "I mean _you'd_ never turn on the others whatever Slade said, right? It worked for the same reason that Robin's training worked on me. Because she didn't _want_ a choice. She wanted someone to tell her what to do. So did I. For me, it was you guys. For her, it was Slade."

She waited for him to finish the thought, not wanting to interrupt or antagonize him further, not after tonight, but he seemed to have made his point, and turned his head away again. "And you can stop looking at me like that," he said. "I'm not running off anywhere. I'm a Titan now, thanks to you guys. I couldn't stop being that even if I wanted to. I just wanted to feel... normal for a little while." He paused for a few moments. "And that stuff doesn't make what Terra did any less of her fault," he said finally, turning back to Raven, "but I'm a _lot_ like Terra. A lot. And if it had been Slade or the Hive or anyone else that I'd run into instead of you guys, then I know exactly what I'd be doing right now."

"I don't believe that," said Raven.

David shook his head. "Well I'm _thrilled _to hear that..." he said more bitterly than he probably intended, for he immediately winced and clammed back up.

Raven sighed. "David," she said, "I'm... sorry."

He didn't respond immediately, and didn't turn back to her.

"Why didn't you just _ask_ me?" he asked.

She could have claimed she didn't know, or made something up, but she had resolved to be brutally honest with herself tonight, and she refused to back down now. "Because I was afraid," she said. "I was afraid you'd say no, and I was more afraid you'd say yes and ask why. I should have asked you, I should have done a lot of things, but I didn't, because all I could think about was finding a way to stop what was happening without letting everyone find out about it. And I thought Devastator might know a way, so I did it." She took a deep breath. "And none of that is an excuse for it, David. I'm just... I'm sorry. I wish I hadn't done it."

He closed his eyes. "It's all right..."

Raven was honestly stunned. "It... seriously?" she asked.

"Of _course not_," snapped David angrily. "You broke into my _mind_ and tried to kill me! Of course it's not all right, it's about as far from all right as you can _get_, Raven!" He visibly stopped himself and took a deep breath, forcing his anger back under the surface. "But," he said, "I'll get over it..."

That made a bit more sense at least. "You... don't need to get over it."

"No," he said, "I don't. And I probably shouldn't, because this sort of thing _keeps_ happening. But... I will anyway. We both know that. Probably not _tonight_, but... I'll get over it..."

She nodded. "Thanks."

"Yeah, well, expect me to remind you of it the next time I piss you off," he said, sounding more annoyed than angry, which was a tradeoff she could live with. "Is that what you came down here for? To say you were sorry?"

She shook her head. "No," she said. "I came down here to give you this."

Raven stood up produced a small box from within her cloak, unlabeled and unadorned, and handed it to David, who raised an eyebrow and took it gently. No larger than a wallet, it was nevertheless surprisingly heavy. David shook it slowly, and looked back up at Raven in puzzlement. "What's... this for?" he asked.

"It's like you said," said Raven, turning to go. "We don't know each other very well. And... I wish we did."

Despite everything, David laughed. "Raven, you just told us, like, your entire life story. And you've been inside my head twice, you probably know more things about me than _I_ do."

"Probably," said Raven, as she paused in the doorway. "But I wish I knew _you_ better."

David stared silently at her, until she finally smirked. "Get some sleep," she said, and she walked out of the door and down towards the elevator to return to the top of the Tower, leaving David behind to make what sense of it he could.

And within the room, David listened to her footsteps disappearing, and only then did he open the box slowly, stare into it for a few seconds, and slowly scratched his head as he tried to puzzle out what in the hell the meaning of _this_ could possibly be...

... for inside the box, was a small, ounce-sized bar of pure Gold.

* * *

**Author's Note:** Thank you once again for your support, inestimable readers, and pray leave behind a token of your opinion, that I might perfect the next chapter beyond what this one has been.


	29. Be All My Sins Remembered

**Disclaimer: **Even with the current economic crisis, I could not convince people to sell me the Teen Titans.

**Author's Note:** Hello once more to everyone, and I apologize for the length of time it has been since my last update. I was very badly ill for most of January, and therefore had to put off the writing of this chapter by about a month. So it goes at times, I am afraid. I wish to warn all those who read ahead, this chapter, in addition to the usual provisos for quality, is something of a departure from what has come before it. That does not mean that I wrote it differently, or that the events here were not planned out ahead of time, but merely that this will be something of a... new direction from your perspectives, I should think. I fully anticipate that not everyone will like this chapter (not that I believe everyone will like previous ones), but I wish to ask that readers bear in mind that this is a lengthy narrative arc, and I have planned this and all the following steps out in great detail. As always, all criticism, of any sort, length, or subject, is most welcome, and I beg and plead that you will find the story compelling enough to leave a review behind. My deepest hope is, as ever, that you will enjoy this chapter. Thank you very much.

* * *

**Chapter 29: Be All My Sins Remembered**

_"To be, or not to be: that is the question:  
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer  
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,  
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,  
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;  
No more; and by a sleep to say we end  
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks  
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation  
devoutly to be wish'd._

- William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene 1

**O-O-O**

In her own way, she was always floating.

It was a funny thing to realize now, but she was. Always. Even when walking on the ground, she seemed to be floating, as though temporarily conceding to gravity's laws only because it was expected of her. She moved like a dancer, like an angel, her green eyes sparkling like emeralds, her red hair framed by the sun in a halo. She was running, and yet she seemed to be moving in slow motion. Somehow, he had plenty of time to study the expression on her face, the glowing green energy around her closed hands, the deep swirling gems of onyx and obsidian adorning her bracers and gorget. A vision of light in the descending darkness, a valkyrie coming to rescue him and take him home. He wanted to reach out to her, call out to her, _something_, but his body and voice would not obey any longer. It was all he could do to force his eyes to remain open long enough for her to reach him, gathering him up in her arms, screaming his adopted name with enough force to shatter glass, though it registered as nothing more than a dull echo. The world around could fade, or burn, or crumble like stale bread, but she was here, and nothing else mattered.

A strange fate indeed, to realize it only now, when it could no longer make a difference, unless of course realizing it made all the difference in the world.

**O-O-O**

"But, Robin," said Starfire, "I do not understand. You have told me many times of the adventures you had alongside the man of bats. Surely, even if you and he are no longer teammates, he would be willing to come to our assistance?"

Robin sighed. "He probably would, Star," he said. He expected Starfire to ask the obvious question, but apparently she could tell the answer from his tone and expression.

"Except that you are not going to ask him for assistance, are you?" she said, a question that was not a question.

"It's not that simple," he replied.

Once again he expected the obvious question, and once again she was not forthcoming with it. Indeed she was quiet for long enough that he raised his head to look at her. "You don't want to know _why_ it's not that simple?"

"I know that you do not wish to speak of it," she said. It would have been a rebuke from anyone but Starfire, who followed it up with a sweet smile. "You have the look upon you."

Robin raised a mask-covered eyebrow. "Look?" he asked. "What look?"

"This look," she said, and tried to imitate an exaggerated expression of brooding concentration. So incongruous was this on her light and almost bubbly features that Robin actually laughed, which, he realized belatedly, was probably the point. A moment later, and she was laughing too, and the weight on his shoulders seemed to lift, as it always did when she laughed.

"But if you do not wish to ask the assistance of the man of bats," said Starfire, gently returning to the point, "then perhaps instead I could ask Galfore. All I need do is ask, and he would come at the head of a host of Tamaranean Warriors to fight alongside us."

Robin felt the weight return. He was still thinking of how to say what he knew he needed to say when she answered her own suggestion.

"You... do not wish for me to do this either," she said.

He didn't answer.

"Robin..."

"Star, I've been talking with Raven about this, and she doesn't think that any army or other hero we bring will help if it comes down to a fight."

A worried look briefly crossed Starfire's face. "Raven believes that there is no hope at all."

"And she's wrong about that," responded Robin, "but she's right about one thing. We can't fight Trigon directly, not even with an army of Tamaraneans."

"So then what are we to do?"

"We're not going to fight him at all. We're going to make sure he never appears. We'll build a saferoom in the Tower, use Cyborg's security systems and Raven's spells to make sure nothing gets in. When Trigon's servants come for her, we'll meet them on our own turf and stop them from using her to summon him."

It sounded so simple in theory, though both of them knew it was not, and yet Starfire penetrated, as usual, to the heart of the matter with one question.

"But surely, Robin," she asked, "the assistance of either the man of bats or the Tamaranean royal guard would be of as much assistance in fighting Trigon's minions as they would in fighting Trigon himself?"

He didn't answer.

"Robin, please," said Starfire after they had walked along another thirty feet in silence. "I simply wish to understand what your intentions are." She approached him cautiously, laying a hand on his shoulder, and he stopped. "There is no shame in asking for the help of our friends to fight against Trigon the Terrible. No one will think any less of us as heroes if we request such a thing. I know that... that you do not wish for us to be perceived as unable to protect ourselves or this city, but if you and he were truly comrades in arms, then that is not what he will - "

"I already asked him, Star," said Robin without turning around.

Starfire hesitated. "You asked for the assistance of the man of bats?"

"I tried to," said Robin. "I tried the entire Justice League. They're not available."

"Not... available?"

"Their message just said they were on some other planet dealing with an interstellar threat of some kind. It wasn't specific, except to say that they won't be back for a month or so."

"Then I will speak to Galfore," said Starfire with a nod. "If the Justice League cannot assist us, then the Tamaranean Royal Guard will."

Robin simply shook his head. "Galfore sent me a message last night."

Starfire blinked. "He sent... _you_ a message?"

"The Citadel have attacked Tamaran."

Robin winced as Starfire was struck dumb by the news, gasping in horror. "_What?_" she exclaimed. "Why did you not tell me of this immediately?"

"Because he asked me not to," said Robin as quickly as he could. "He said it was just a minor raid, so minor that he was worried that it was a plot of Blackfire's to get you to go running off to Tamaran or something. He said he couldn't figure out any other reason why the Citadel would launch an attack that the Tamaranean army will have dealt with in a couple of weeks."

The surprise on Starfire's face began to be replaced with realization. "... except," she said carefully, "that if the Tamaranean army is occupied with the Citadel for that long, they will be unable to come to our aid before Trigon is scheduled to return."

Robin nodded, exhaling slowly. "Exactly."

"And... it is the same with the others?"

Robin nodded again. "Dr. Light announced yesterday that he has a new Superweapon being built in Antarctica that he's going to use to destroy Steel City. The Titans East went down there to stop him. And all of the other honorary Titans are either busy with random attacks in their home towns, or aren't responding to their communicators."

"You believe that Trigon has arranged all this?"

"I'm _certain_ of it," said Robin. "Terra told David that Trigon has servants besides Slade, and Raven said there's an ancient order that worships him. Either he set this all in motion himself, or he used his agents to do it. Probably both."

Starfire took a deep breath. "Then," she said, "we are alone?"

Robin could only nod in reply. "It looks that way."

And to his surprise, Starfire's response was to lift her head, smile, and nearly crush the air out of his lungs with her version of a light hug.

"Then we shall emerge victorious by ourselves," she said, with perfect certainty and warmth, "and reveal to Trigon that all his efforts have been wasted."

Robin, who had been bracing for Starfire's anger rather than this, was temporarily unable to speak (partly because he could not draw breath). He had been afraid that she would either become furiously angry with him, or (perhaps worse yet), invoke the silent treatment on him, as only she could.

"But, Robin," she said with a smirk as she released him. "Regardless of what Galfore said, you _should_ have informed me of what his message contained."

Robin could only rub the back of his neck and look sheepish. "I didn't want you to worry."

"My only worry, Robin," said Starfire with another beaming smile, is that you will once again begin failing to confide in us when you know that you should. So long as you do not do that, I do not care what plans Trigon believes he has. There is no force in the universe that can stop us together." And with that, she walked on down the street, leaving Robin to wonder if the temperature had actually just increased, or if it was just his imagination...

He caught up with her after a few moments, and they walked the next few blocks in silence. Battery Street had been fully repaired since David and Cinderblock's destruction of most of the waterfront, and the sparkling white sidewalks and freshly-laid asphalt seemed to sparkle in the late summer sun. It was unseasonably good weather, and the public were out to take advantage of it, families picnicking and playing in the small park between Battery Street and the waterline, acknowledging Starfire and Robin with smiles and stares and the occasional bashful request for an autograph, but mostly minding their own affairs, content in the knowledge that they were under their protection, and that with the Titans once more on patrol, all would be well today.

Robin was grateful for the apparent break, because while he would have liked nothing more than to give them all a long rest to recover from what had happened, the alerts kept on coming in, and the patrol routes still needed to be run. Fortunately, one benefit of having six Titans, rather than five, was that they could be divided up into three different patrols without leaving anybody by themselves. And so, after a bare two days, he had ordered a resumption of their civic patrols, though this time he set aside all pretense and assigned them manually, rather than by lottery. Cyborg and David would cover downtown, he figured David was in need of a little sanity after everything that had happened, and Cyborg was the best person for that sort of level-headed assurance. Against his own best instincts, he had paired Beast Boy and Raven together to cover the suburbs. Normally that was like pouring nitroglycerin over open flames, but Beast Boy had been so... single-minded in trying to open her back up after the big revelation that he figured it was worth a shot, even if the only reaction Beast Boy got was convincing Raven to blow him up.

And of course, _just by coincidence_, that left Robin and Starfire to cover the waterfront.

"It is a beautiful day, is it not?" said Starfire.

It was, of course, a beautiful day, even considering that this was Southern California, where warm sunny days were a regular occurrence, but while Starfire was taking in every sight with the same enthralled wonder, Robin couldn't keep his eyes off of her. Star had been on Earth for several years now, had been patrolling Jump City for almost as long, and yet it was as though every time she went on patrol with him, she was seeing the city fresh, for the first time. She no longer asked him why people put hot dogs on their mustard (yes, that's right), or about the purpose of parking meters and the reason why people so diligently fed them on all days but Sunday, but she had lost none of her wonderment at the sight of the city alive with all its people, nor in her determination to make sure everyone with her felt the same wonder she did, by one means or another.

"Robin?"

Robin snapped out of his musings, suddenly realizing that Starfire had said something else that he had completely missed. "Uh... what?" he asked, flustered, but Starfire merely smiled.

"I asked if you believed that the others were managing well."

It took Robin a second to re-orient his brain around that subject. "They'd call us if anything was happening," he said.

"That was not precisely my meaning," said Starfire. "I am... worried, about Raven in particular."

Robin nodded. "Me too, Star," he said. "But I think getting out and doing something will help her take her mind off things while we get everything ready for..." he hesitated, "for whatever happens."

Starfire seemed, if not convinced, at least partly mollified. "I hope that Beast Boy is able to assist her."

"I hope we all can," said Robin, an unthinkable statement to make to the others, but with Starfire it was... different. They both knew that.

"Perhaps we should determine if their patrols have proceeded uneventfully?" asked Starfire, brightening. Robin wasn't sure if it was a good idea to disturb them or not, but Starfire was clearly worried, and even though they had all promised to alert one another at the first sign of danger, surely it couldn't hurt to check in...

"Titans, come in," said Robin as he opened his communicator. Static filled the screen for a moment before it was split in half by a black dividing line, and the faces of Cyborg and Beast Boy appeared.

"What's up?" asked Cyborg. "You guys got problems?"

"Just checking in," said Robin. "What's the situation?"

"Dude, this place is like a sitcom," said Beast Boy in what Robin hoped was mock disgust. "We haven't even had a _jaywalker_."

"Same here," said Cyborg, "even the beat cops are lookin' bored. How much longer we gonna be doin' this?"

Complaints were good, Robin reminded himself. Complaints were _normal_. "We're gonna run a _full_ patrol route," he insisted. "I want Slade and his minions to see that he hasn't scared us off, and I want the citizens to be able to relax. We'll rendezvous back at the Tower at dusk. Until then, we show the flag."

Cyborg grumbled, but oddly enough, Beast Boy did not. Indeed Robin caught him looking up from the communicator every couple seconds, as though watching something else.

Robin wasn't the only one who noticed. "Yo, BB, you got something goin' on over there?" asked Cyborg, sounding almost hopeful.

Cyborg's question jolted Beast Boy back into the conversation. "Uh, no!" he yelped. "No, it's... it's nothing." He glanced up from the communicator again, and there was a muffled crash from somewhere off-screen. "Look um... I'll call you guys back in a little bit, okay?" he said quickly, and closed the communicator once more.

Robin and Starfire shared a quick look. Star looked worried. But before he could ask Cyborg the obvious question, Cyborg answered it.

"Just leave 'em be," he said. "They'll be all right."

"Cyborg, if there's a problem..."

"Trust me," said Cyborg, in that voice of his that meant an argument was brewing if Robin chose to push it. "Y'all can help best by just stayin' back for a while. Let BB handle it."

A glance to Starfire, who gave him the slightest of nods, indicated that she concurred. "All right," he said reluctantly. "Where's David?"

"His com unit's having problems. I'm workin' on it. He's fine."

"Put him on for a second, I want to make sure - "

"_Robin,_" said Cyborg, letting the name hang for a moment to ensure he had Robin's full attention. "I got this one, okay?"

Robin and Cyborg stared at one another for a few seconds. "... fine," said Robin at last. "Check back in an hour."

"Roger that. Cyborg out."

The screen went dark, and Robin clipped his communicator back to his belt, grumbling softly to himself. The soft touch of Starfire's hand on his shoulder brought an end to that, and he turned his head to see her smiling serenely at him.

"Since the others are not in danger, Robin, and since there appears to be no crime being undertaken presently, might we not proceed to the carnival grounds?" she asked. "It is the next place we are to visit, is it not?"

It actually wasn't, and Robin knew it, and for that matter so did Starfire, but it _was_ nearby, and something about the way she said it made the prospect suddenly a tempting one. "Um... I, maybe when we're done with our route..."

"Robin," said Starfire, "surely if our intent is merely to show that we are not afraid of Slade, then there can be no harm in our expanding our patrol to include the carnival? I believe... it would be of benefit.

In the back of his mind, Robin was wondering when he had completely lost control of the team, and yet right now that didn't seem half as important a thought as it probably should have been. Right now in fact, there was very little he could think about except Starfire's sweet smile and sparkling emerald eyes as she entreated him. And before he even knew what was happening, he was walking down Battery towards the carnival, Starfire literally floating next to him. In the back of his mind he knew that he was being played by Starfire and Cyborg, if not by the others, but given the prospect of just spending the day with Starfire, he really couldn't bring himself to care.

And that's when the van exploded.

An unmarked gray van, parked on the curb, blew up with the force of an artillery shell, blossoming into a mushroom of fire and smoke, and sending a shock wave rippling up and down the street. Windows shattered, branches broke, and a hail of shrapnel rained down upon Robin and Starfire. Robin reacted by reflex, grabbing the side of his cape and swirling it around himself, the unbreakable titanium polymer weave easily repelling the bits of aluminum and steel, while Starfire raised a hand to protect her eyes, fragments bouncing off her as though she were made of cast iron.

The two heroes spared only a glance to one another to see that they were each all right, and then instantly both were off, racing towards the demolished vehicle as fast as they could. Robin had only taken half a dozen steps before he realized that something was up. The blast had been powerful, but a real car bomb, the kind used by terrorists, would have leveled half of the block. As it was, it had done nothing more than scorch the walls of the nearby buildings and smash a few windows. No civilians (thank God) had been close enough for the blast to injure them, nor had the bomber waited until he and Star were within danger range themselves. So then what could have been the purpose of -.

A prickling in the back of his neck made Robin stop in his tracks, and slowly turn around.

"Well just _look _what we got here..."

Starfire turned around and landed next to Robin, looking back up the way they had come, as one by one, a series of figures emerged from the smoke and dust. A countless army of identical teenagers filled the street from one side to the other, each one clad in a solid red jumpsuit with a black and white division sign emblazoned upon it, all of them smirking and snickering to one another.

"Looks like we got y'all outnumbered," shouted one of the dozens of identical clones. "Just two o' you, and as many o' me as y'all can handle."

"Billy Numerous," called Starfire back to the crimson duplicator, her fists igniting green as she stared him down. "For what purpose did you destroy that automated conveyance?"

"Billy didn't destroy anything," came another voice, from the other direction. Robin turned back to see four more figures advancing out of the dust, not clones this time, but individual teenagers, strutting like arena champions as they walked down the street in unison. Their leader, in the center of their line, was a pace or two ahead of the others, her cat-like eyes darting back and forth between Starfire and Robin, like a predator deciding which prey animal to eat first.

"Jinx..." said Robin, narrowing his eyes. "What's the matter? The Hive run out of parking meters to rob?"

"Oh, we're not here to steal, Robin," said Jinx. "All we want is the two of you."

"Big mistake," replied Robin, sliding around Starfire until they were standing back to back. The sea of Billy Numerouses spread into a semicircle, enclosing the two Titans in the middle of the street between themselves and the four other Hivers.

"How do you figure that, stoplight?" asked one of the Billies. "I got you a hundr'd to two right here."

"Then we'll each beat you fifty times," replied Robin. "And we'll let the others do the same when they get here."

All five Hivers exploded into laughter, the chorus of Billies drowning out the others. "You think we didn't plan this out?" asked See-More. "This here's a trap, bird-boy. The others are gettin' jumped right now, just like you."

"You two are worm-food," snickered Gizmo, practically giggling with anticipation.

"We're gonna waste you, and all four of your friends at the same time," said Mammoth, cracking his knuckles in preparation for the festivities to come.

Robin turned back to look at Starfire, who was now pressed back up against him, ready for anything. They exchanged no words, this was hardly the time for them after all, but Starfire gave him the slightest nod, and Robin took a deep breath, and turned back to face Jinx, drawing the telescoping bo staff out of his belt, and extending it to full length.

Jinx took a step or two forward, grinning evilly. "I know you Titans think you can take us all out whenever you want," she said, "but your friends aren't gonna help you this time. You really think the two of you can handle all of us at once?"

Robin's only answer was to look from one Hiver to another and back to Jinx, and then to smile.

**O-O-O**

"Roger that, Cyborg out."

Robin's face disappeared as Cyborg deactivated the communicator built into his arm. Only then did he turn back to David, who was standing some five or six feet away, in the shadow of a storefront awning, watching the older Titan carefully, and fiddling with his own communicator, presently closed and silent. "Thanks," he said almost sheepishly.

Cyborg chuckled and shook his head. "Don't mention it, man," he said. "I know how it can get."

"Yeah," said David, "I guess you do." He seemed disinclined to elaborate further, and Cyborg moved on down the street, David falling in beside him. They walked on for another half a block, taking their time. Civilians stopped, pointed, and stared, but that had long-since become normal to Cyborg, and clearly David had enough on his mind to render him completely oblivious.

"So how you holdin' up?" asked Cyborg.

David laughed, shrugging as he did so. "Honestly, I don't know."

"Your head ain't botherin' you again, right?"

"No," he replied, "it's been fine. Which is kind of weird, since it turns out there's something living inside it that wants to kill me."

"Long as he ain't gettin' in your way, and does what you tell him to do, don't much matter what he wants to do," said Cyborg. "Way Raven tells it, that thing needed her to do the dirty work."

David didn't reply, and they walked on another half a minute or so before Cyborg asked another question.

"You and her gonna be... all right?"

David didn't answer immediately, sighing softly and massaging his temples with his hand. "I don't know," he finally said. "I mean..." He trailed off and glanced up at Cyborg, who was still waiting for his answer. "I'll be okay."

"You don't gotta be okay, man," said Cyborg. "There ain't no excuse for what she did, even she knows that. You got every right to be mad."

"Yeah," he said, "but I _do_ have to get over it. And I will... eventually." He sighed again. "It just might take a while."

"You know you can just talk to her," said Cyborg. "Even get mad at her. She ain't gonna blow you up. Hell, way I hear it, she _can't_ blow you up."

"I'm not ready to test that," said David. "And besides, that's... that's just not my thing. I just want to..." he trailed off for a moment. "I don't know what I want."

Cyborg laughed. "Well until you figure it out, man," he said, "how 'bout we do what _I_ want, which is to finish this damn patrol and get back home?"

"Sure thing," said David with a laugh of his own, a bit weak, but something nonetheless. He seemed a bit less down, which was something, Cyborg supposed. Things like this didn't work themselves out overnight after all.

"Don't worry so much," said Cyborg. "We've dealt with _all kinds_ of stuff before. No matter how bad it looks, we always come out on top."

"Raven doesn't agree," said David quietly, glancing furtively up at Cyborg to see if such sentiments were all right to air between the two of them. All this time, and the kid was still watching his words like a hawk.

"Raven said the same damn thing when BB and I went into her head," said Cyborg. He wasn't about to lecture David on the need to keep up face, but they couldn't have him going around thinking they were all screwed. Robin was right about that much. "She's usually pretty calm, but any time somethin' o' hers goes wrong, you'd think the world just ended."

"It... _is _ending, at least according to her."

"It _ain't_," said Cyborg. "We ain't gonna let it, all right? None of us came this far, and kicked butt this many times just to let some four-eyed devil reject come down to wreck our shit. Don't matter _what_ it takes, we're gonna drop this guy like a sack of flour and make him wish he'd picked another planet."

David didn't say anything, closing his eyes and breathing slowly. "Hey," said Cyborg, putting a hand on his shoulder, and the psychokinetic raised his head. "He sent a goddamn _army _at us in Yellowstone, right? Look at all the good _that_ did him. He thought he'd scare Raven into workin' for him instead of trying to fight it, and just managed to get her good and pissed off. And what about you?" He smiled. "Thought you were just some kid he could push around like a chess piece right? And now look." He took a step back, as though admiring David's getup, uniform, baton, communicator, and all. "Next wannabe devil punk gets in _your _way's gonna wind up in the ER. You think that was all 'part of the plan'?"

David smiled and shook his head. "No..."

"No. That's right. He didn't think we could do that. He didn't _you _could do that, now did he?"

"No, I guess he didn't," said David.

"You don't gotta guess, he _didn't,_" said Cyborg with a grin. "So you see man, what you have to learn from this little situation is one thing. One _very_ important thing. You know what that is?"

"What?"

"You have to learn that Cyborg," said Cyborg, "is _always_ right."

David burst into laughter, which was of course partly the point. Cyborg merely widened his grin. "Oh you think that's funny?" he asked, in mock anger. "You don't believe me? Do I have to make this more clear?"

"No," said David sarcastically, still coughing down laughs. "No, I believe it."

"Say it with me then."

"You're always right," said David, managing not to roll his eyes this time.

"_Who's_ always right?"

"Cyborg's always right."

"That's right," said Cyborg, "say it again."

"Cyborg is _always _right," repeated David, a bit more clearly.

"Make me _believe_ you, man."

"_Cyborg_," said David, forcefully this time, a broad grin on his face, "is _always_ right."

"There you go!" exclaimed Cyborg theatrically, and he clapped David on the back. "Now you got it. Now you see that this ain't no thing at all, because I said so. And _why _does that make it so?"

"Because Cyborg," said David, laughing again, "is always right."

"My _man_," said Cyborg. "That's the _way_. Now come on, I wanna show you somethin'." He led David down the street, towards one of the shops ahead. Something there had caught his eye a week or so ago, but he had refrained from mentioning it until now. This seemed, to him, to be a good moment to bring it up.

The shop in question was a comic book store, one Beast Boy frequented fairly regularly. In addition to the usual comics, card games, and miniatures, the store also sold memorabilia of the various superheroes the country and the rest of the world. Being as it was located in Jump City, much of the merchandise was dedicated to the city's local protectors, the Titans, the sale of which helped the city partly recoup the cost of whatever property damage the Titans and their enemies caused whenever they fought. There were T-shirts, bobblehead dolls, framed photographs, and a hundred other items dedicated to the Titans. None of this was out of the ordinary.

"Check it out," said Cyborg.

David looked over the displayed merchandise in the window of the store and looked puzzled. "I... don't get it," he said. "What are you - "

And then he saw it.

It was hanging on the wall behind the cashier. A series of glossy posters, two feet high and photo-realistic, probably taken with a digital camera. Each poster was of one of the various Titans, caught in a combat position, the background behind them painted up to look vibrant and dramatic, color-coded for the convenience of those who could not instantly recognize which Titan was which. But it was the one nearest to the door, the one with a background of orange and red, the one that had only been there for a week or so, that David was staring at. The one that was a city-sponsored, collectible poster, of himself.

"I think they did a pretty good job, don't you?"

David was unable to answer. He was staring wide-eyed at the poster like he could not believe what he was seeing. On reflection, Cyborg wondered if that wasn't close to the truth. God-knew where the shot had come from, probably some citizen with a cell phone camera, but it was of David standing on a ruined stone staircase, flames and rubble littered all around him. His burning baton was in his right hand, held back and low, and his other hand was extended forward and up, towards some foe unseen, while his eyes had that thousand-yard-stare to them that Cyborg knew indicated that he was presently manipulating something mentally in preparation for an explosion. He looked serious, dangerous, ready-for-action, exactly the sort of thing that would sell well to the kids or whoever else frequented this shop. Not that any of those thoughts were likely passing through David's head right now. He looked like something had just broken his brain.

"You okay?"

David honestly looked like he wasn't sure himself. "I..." he stammered. "I... what the..."

"Hey, least it's a good shot. You should'a seen the first one they made of Robin." He patted David on the back a few times, as though trying to jump start him. "C'mon man, don't tell me you actually didn't expect this sorta thing."

A single look at David's thunderstruck face was enough to confirm to Cyborg that no, he hadn't. As always, the practical implications of his new role had escaped him until he found them staring him in the face.

David was spared further embarrassed sputtering by the intercession of two young kids. No more than eight or nine years old, they were exiting the store, chattering to one another, and one of them carried a rolled up copy of the very same poster David was staring at. The instant they spotted Cyborg and David they both stopped dead in their tracks, and gasped. "Whoa!" shouted one. "Cool!" the other, and then instantly they rushed over and began exclaiming as rapidly as they could, how awesome they thought it was to actually _meet_ two of the Titans, talking over one another breathlessly until Cyborg had to marvel how it was that neither of them passed out.

Cyborg took the lead in talking to the kids, he'd done this a thousand times before after all, and David needed a moment to regain the use of his vocal cords. Both kids swore to Cyborg that they already had his poster up in their bedrooms. He asked them their names, if they had a favorite Titan, the usual, and even agreed to demonstrate shifting his hand into sonic cannon and back, a trick that never failed to produce "oohs" and "aahs". By then, David had recovered enough to awkwardly contribute to the conversation. Some people _never_ got used to being the center of attention, but he was clearly doing his best, and the kids didn't notice anything wrong.

After a couple minutes, the kid with the poster asked (inevitably) if David would autograph his new acquisition. Obvious though the request was to Cyborg, it (of course) caught David by surprise, again, and he was left to sputter for a second before Cyborg providently pulled a pen out of one of his compartments and handed it to him. "Go for it man," he said. "I'm gonna get a hot dog. You want one?"

"Um... no... no thanks, Cy," said David, and when he turned his head to face Cyborg, he had a look of such astonishment in his face that Cyborg had to suppress a laugh, and yet gamely, David took the pen and turned back to the kids, asking them in they wanted him to write anything in particular, and managing, barely, to keep the shock out of his voice. Cyborg laughed and shook his head, and walked across the street to a hot dog vendor, and ordered two hot dogs anyway. If David didn't want one, then he'd have them both. After he got his hot dogs, he turned back to look, and saw that the kids had convinced David to show them his baton up close. He had 'ignited' it for them, and one was gingerly touching the business end with one finger, obviously not entirely convinced that the flames were just an effect. Cyborg chuckled and wolfed one hot dog down in two bites, and was deciding whether or not to do the same to the second one when he heard something from his left, turned to see what it was...

... and dropped the other hot dog.

Standing in the middle of the street, where Cyborg _knew_ that five seconds ago there had been nobody at all, was a young man in a massive red suit of armor, twelve or thirteen feet tall at least, and presently bent over a parked sedan, reaching underneath it. Before Cyborg's eyes, he hefted it into the air over his head as though it were a barbell, and turned towards David, still chatting amicably with the two kids, and unable to see the threat that had just... somehow _materialized_ behind him.

"_David, look out_!" shouted Cyborg at full volume, and he dropped to one knee, extended his hand, morphing it into his sonic cannon, and fired full blast at the center of the figure's chest.

Too late.

The young man grunted with the effort, and _threw_ the entire car straight at David an instant before Cyborg's shot hit him dead center and blew him off his feet, sending him flying thirty feet down the street straight into another car. But David had only a split second's warning. Turning around to see a car flying straight at his head, he did the only thing he _could_ do, and snapped his baton around like a tennis player. The car exploded like a bomb barely ten feet from David's head, and an instant later, the blossoming mushroom cloud of flames and oily smoke engulfed David, both kids, and the entire storefront, and nothing more could be discerned save for the sound of shattering glass and high pitched screams.

The man in the red armor slowly picked himself up, laughing despite the blast he had taken as he gazed at his own handiwork. "That's what you get when you mess with Adonis!" shouted the young man, grabbing a manhole cover off the ground and throwing it at Cyborg like a discus. Cyborg easily shot it out of the air, but did not pursue Adonis, instead racing back across the street, swatting the smoke out of his face, trying to find any sign of -

"Marcus..."

Cyborg stopped short, Adonis froze, and an instant later, a gust of wind blew the smoke clear, to reveal David, standing exactly where he had been a moment earlier. His baton was pointing forward like a fencing sword, crackling with red energy, and his other hand was held back towards the two little kids who were cowering on the ground together behind him. David's face and uniform were splattered with black motor oil, as were the kids. The storefront had been utterly destroyed, and pools of flaming gasoline and bits of red hot debris lay scattered about like the aftermath of a missile strike, yet neither David nor the two boys appeared to have been harmed in the least, and David was staring directly at Adonis like a rifleman staring down a mad dog.

"Marcus," said David again, and he stepped forward into the street, shaking his head slowly, his voice sounding pained and disappointed, like a teacher addressing a juvenile delinquent who had finally crossed the line. "Oh, Marcus," he repeated a third time, "that was _such_ a bad idea..."

Adonis looked, if not scared, then reasonably put out of sorts, and as the realization slowly dawned on him that he was now outnumbered by two _extremely_ irate Titans, he took a careful step backwards, even as the asphalt and concrete under his feet began to warp and shake at David's command.

A predatory grin slowly crossed Cyborg's face. He stepped into the street as well, raising his sonic cannon and slowly walking towards Adonis.

"My man..." he said, and then it began.

**O-O-O**

"Look um... I'll call you guys back in a little bit, okay?" said Beast Boy, and without waiting for Robin's inevitable objection, he closed the communicator. Immediately he ran over towards the streetlight that Raven was standing next to, carefully stepping over the broken glass from the car window she had just blown out. Raven was standing with her arms folded against the streetlight, her hood pulled up over her head, which was lowered onto her crossed arms, breathing erratically and shaking.

"Whoa, Raven," said Beast Boy, laying a hand on her shoulder. "Are you O-"

"_Don't touch me_!" screamed Raven, snapping her head around to reveal flaming red eyes. Beast Boy yelped and jumped back as the streetlight overhead exploded, raining shattered glass and carbon filament down onto Raven's head. Raven didn't even bat an eye as one of the falling fragments cut down her cheek deeply enough to draw blood, which, even as it trickled down her face, was actually _boiling_ away into steam, leaving a red smudge behind.

Beast Boy had seen Raven hurt many times, but he'd never seen _that_ before.

Slowly the fire went out of Raven's eyes, and she seemed to master herself once more. Shaking visibly, she drew her cloak around herself, sucking air in and out through clenched teeth. She looked up at Beast Boy again, but plainly didn't know what to say, and finally opted for nothing at all, turning and walking on up the street, leaving stunned civilians to stare and Beast Boy to follow or not as he wished.

Beast Boy followed her at a distance, trying to think of what to do. She'd been almost completely uncommunicative since the revelation last week, even moreso than usual, and so far nothing he'd done or said had managed anything but pissing her off. And when Raven got pissed...

But no, there was something else going on here. She hadn't blown up over the story he'd been telling her. She hadn't even been listening to it. She had just _stopped_ as the call from Robin came in, and then suddenly everything nearby started to shake or shatter. For once, it wasn't him.

The realization gave him the courage to catch up to her and fall in alongside. "Um... Raven?"

She didn't answer.

"You uh... cut yourself there..." he said, pointing to his own cheek. She turned her head slightly, and brought her hand to the side of her face. Closing her eyes, she whispered her mantra to herself, and her hand turned blue. She rubbed at her cheek for a few seconds, and when she lowered her hand, there was no sign of the cut, merely the red smudge of boiled-off blood.

"Yeah," he said. "You um... got it..."

Still she said nothing, preferring to walk on in silence. Beast Boy followed closely, racking his brain to try and figure out what to say or do. Parking meters quivered as she walked by, windows rattled in storefronts or homes, even the fire hydrants seemed to creak. It wasn't ever hard to tell when Raven was on-edge. Symptoms resembled the early stages of an earthquake. But it had been like this off and on for three days, and judging by the intensity of the tremors, it was getting worse. Beast Boy could care less about the property damage, but what it signified was troublesome enough that he knew he had to do _something_.

But what?

"So um... after we get back to the Tower," he said, largely speaking off the top of his head, "do you maybe wanna try Mega Monkeys Five? It's the sequel to that one that you and I played that one time..."

No answer was forthcoming, nor even an acknowledgment that he had spoken, and so he persisted. "Uh... well if you don't wanna do that, I could show you this cool TV show from a few years back that someone showed me. It's about these people on a spaceship, and there's horses and cowboys and zombies and everyone speaks in Chinese and - "

"Just leave me alone, Beast Boy," said Raven all of a sudden, and while this was hardly something uncommon for her to be saying, the fatigue _dripping_ from her voice stopped him short. Her voice, so tightly controlled normally, sounded like it could barely be summoned forth from her throat.

"Raven, what's _wrong_?" asked Beast Boy automatically before he could stop himself and think of a better way to put it. She didn't answer, didn't even look at him, indeed she seemed to draw her hood and cloak tighter around herself. "You can't _still _be worried about Trigon, can you?"

She turned sharply to look at him, and he gulped and took a step back. "Okay... so maybe you _can_ still be worried about him," he said, and she shook her head and walked on, leaving him to catch up.

"Seriously though, Rae, we're gonna find a way to stop him. You don't have to worry," he said, but even that didn't engender a response, not even a demand that he not call her 'Rae'. "Robin and Cyborg were saying that we can build this big room and - "

"Beast Boy, _please_," said Raven, a request that was not a request. "I _don't_ want to talk right now."

'Oh no you don't', thought Beast Boy as he crossed his arms. "Well that's too bad," he said, "because I'm not gonna stop asking you what's wrong until you tell me." Left unsaid was the second option that occurred to him: 'or you throw me into the bay'.

Fortunately, it seemed that Raven hadn't thought of that option either. She groaned softly and shook her head. "Beast Boy..."

"Raven, c'mon. It's gonna be okay. You know we're gonna do whatever we have to do to stop your dad, right? So why are you all - ?"

"Because you shouldn't _have_ to."

Beast Boy stopped. "What?"

"This was _my_ problem," said Raven. "_I_ should have dealt with it. I shouldn't have dragged you all into the middle of the apocalypse."

"But, Raven, you _did_ try to deal with it."

"And I should have _succeeded_!" she exclaimed, causing people to stop and stare and the sidewalk panels to tremble. "I've been preparing for this thing my _entire life_. All the training that the monks on Azarath gave me was so that I would be able to face this. I've been making plans about it since I was _five_! And now it's happening, and I can't do anything except force you all into it."

Beast Boy tried to mollify her. "But Rae..."

"Will you _stop calling me that_?" shouted Raven, cracking the pavement he was standing on. "I have a real name!"

He refused to be baited. "Raven, I know you didn't want to tell anyone about all this." He neglected to mention that she was now shouting about it to anyone within earshot. That much wasn't going to help. "But we _want_ to help you. You're not forcing anything on us. And we're gonna do it whether you like it or not. So _please_ stop worrying."

His words fell on deaf ears. He could tell as much the instant he said them. Raven simply pulled her hood back up over her head, retreating back into shadow. "You can't help me," she said. "None of you can stop what's coming."

"If he's anything like that guy from your head, we beat him once already," said Beast Boy, trying to sound confident.

"He's not," said Raven. "He's not like anything you've ever seen. Not like the worst villain we've ever fought. Not even Slade. He's..." her voice caught in her throat, and she had to stop walking. "He's like a plague. He's the incarnation of pure evil. And there's _nothing_ any of you can do to stop him. Anyone who's ever met him and survived can tell you that."

"Yeah?" said Beast Boy, "well he's never met anything like us either." He grinned. "You always say that there's nothing as annoying as me in the entire universe, right?"

Raven raised one corner of her hood to stare at Beast Boy with a raised eyebrow. She didn't laugh or smile, but that was all right, this was at least more like her normal reaction.

"You're not funny," she said acerbically.

His grin only broadened. "Doesn't mean I can't try to be," he said.

"No, Beast Boy, you're _really_ not funny. This isn't a laughing matter."

"Pft," scoffed Beast Boy. "Of course it is. You'll see. We're gonna build a safe room in the Tower and Cyborg's gonna - "

"This is the _end of the world_!" shouted Raven. "Don't you get it? _I'm_ the end of the world! No safe rooms, no second chances, it's all gonna end because of _me_!"

Silence fell as Raven's voice echoed over the streets full of now-frozen pedestrians, men, women, children, even pets, all staring at Raven like she'd grown a second head. Her outburst over, Raven only now seemed to realize what she'd just yelled, out loud, in public, but before she could retreat back into her hood once again, Beast Boy grabbed her wrist and, giving the astonished public a nervous smile, quickly dragged her into an alley between two apartment buildings.

"Raven," he said in an urgent near-whisper as soon as they were out of earshot and sight of the startled civilians. "Come on, even if your dad wants to destroy the world, that doesn't mean it's _your_ fault."

"It's _all_ my fault," said Raven, eyes downcast, speaking in a hollow voice that sounded almost on the verge of tears. "I should have... I should have left, or never come here in the first place. I should have found a way to stop it from happening. I had plenty of warning..."

Raven had been acting strange ever since the last encounter with Slade, but this was actually frightening. Beast Boy knew that Raven felt responsible for everything that was happening, but he'd never seen her like this before. It scared him to see her this upset, particularly this upset with herself.

"Raven - "

"Do you remember what I told Robin the first time we all met?" she asked.

He remembered it perfectly well, and furthermore she knew he did, for she didn't bother to remind him what her words had been:

_'Trust me. If you knew what I really am... you wouldn't want me around.'_

"Raven, we _know_ what you are now, and none of us _care_. You're our friend. It doesn't matter who your dad was or what some old prophecy says about you. We're all gonna get through this together. No matter what."

Even as Beast Boy was speaking though, he could see that it wasn't working. Raven raised her head slightly, and there were tears running down the sides of her face, though these at least weren't boiling. "Beast Boy, I'm a _monster_," she spat angrily. "I'm half-demon! Daughter of Trigon the Terrible! Don't you _see_? I'm a _nightmare_, Beast Boy!"

The words poured out of her like water from a breached dam, angry words, bitter words, savage, biting, bladed words, all directed at herself. He didn't know if she couldn't stop them or didn't want to, if she was trying somehow to scourge herself enough with this torrent self-hatred to purge away the guilt she quite obviously felt in buckets. People occasionally lashed out at one of the Titans in word or print, castigating one or more of them for all manner of crimes or moral turpitudes. More often than not, their target was Raven, for she was an easy target to pin the ills of society on. And yet never had Beast Boy read or heard or _seen_ anyone attack Raven with as much violence, as much hatred, as much _loathing_ to their words, than Raven herself was doing now.

He wanted her to stop. He wanted her to hear what he was trying to say, that they couldn't care less what she was, that they never had cared about that, that what was happening wasn't her fault. And yet she couldn't. The feelings of guilt and presumed sin was just too much. Whether or not he believed a word of it, she plainly did. He wondered for a second if she always had.

It didn't matter. She was wrong. She was _so_ wrong that to hear these terrible things being said about her, even from her own voice, was enough to drive him mad. He wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her, scream even, _something_ to knock the sense back into her, something that would let her see herself the way he saw her. She was the strongest person he'd ever met, the tower of strength and assurance that had dragged him back from the depths that Terra's death and return had dropped him. She was brilliant, she was caring, she was _scary_ yes, but they _all _were in some way. And on top of everything she was beautiful. He didn't mean she looked beautiful, though... she did. He meant 'filled with beauty'. In every sense. He wanted to make her see that. He wanted to tell her that.

But Beast Boy wasn't good with words, and didn't know how say any of what he was thinking, and so when he stepped forward to try and think of something to do or say to stop her, instinct or something else took over, and he leaned in and kissed her.

... and... well... it worked.

He was nearly as surprised as she was... well probably not... and he wasn't entirely sure of what he was doing until he did it, but then he was doing it, and even though he knew he was probably going to be electrocuted or skinned alive, he didn't want to stop. She went as rigid as a board, her tirade fell silent like a plug had been pulled, and he could hear her heart beating like a snare drum, but she didn't move to stop him, didn't move at all even, until finally he drew back, hot blood rushing to his face, as it was to hers. The thousand terrible fates that were probably in store for him now raced through his mind, and yet he didn't feel an urge to run or shift into a paramecium. She looked... well she looked _stunned_. The torrent of words that had been pouring so freely was utterly staunched, indeed she looked like she had forgotten how to speak. Her mouth moved, but no sounds emerged, and he knew he probably should be taking this opportunity to either explain himself or beg for mercy, but instead he took a deep breath, and just waited for her to say something.

"W... Why did you do that?" she asked in a quiet, shocked voice.

He had no idea how to answer that. And so, groping about for something to say, he decided on something that he thought sounded closest to the truth.

"'Cause... I like it better when you're mad at _me_," he said.

Raven appeared to not know what to do, which made two of them at this point. Not that Beast Boy had any objection to not being vaporized, which was he assumed she would do as soon as she recovered her equilibrium. He had no idea of what else to say, and clearly neither did she, and so they stared at one another, Raven in some kind of shock, Beast Boy scrambling to find something to say to alleviate the sudden awkwardness of this situation..

A roar from out in the street, and the sound of civilians screaming in terror.

_'Oh thank god'_.

He ran out of the alley, and Raven followed him, though he could tell she was moving on autopilot. To his right, the source of the screams was instantly apparent. A huge, purple monster, vaguely bipedal, stood in the middle of the street, having torn a sewer pipe out of the ground, and was gulping the noxious effluent from it down its massive gullet. Civilians ran in every direction, abandoning their cars, but the creature took no notice of them whatsoever, its form swelling larger and larger with each successive gulp. Despite everything that had just happened, Beast Boy grimaced at the smell and sight. "Ew... _nasty!_" he said. Behind him, Raven contributed no comment. He wondered if she could.

No time to worry about that. He shifted into the form of a cape buffalo, snorted once, and charged towards Plasmus. As he ran, he saw another huge form looming up behind Plasmus, a humanoid as well, but no more human than the first monster, a sparking monolith made of ball lightning. Overload...

He couldn't abort his charge now, not with this much mass and momentum, and so he put on the accelerators, racing towards Plasmus, who noticed him coming, dropped the pipe, and roared loud enough to wake the dead. Beast Boy leaped up, planning to shift into something a dozen times more massive, a whale or elephant perhaps, but Plasmus was too fast. He lashed out with his tendrils of sludge, seized him by the horns, and slammed him into the ground like a steer wrestler, even as Overload moved around to electrocute him on the spot.

And then suddenly something went _terribly_ wrong with Overload and Plasmus' plan.

The ground heaved and kicked, and then all of a sudden a section of street fifty feet long and thirty wide uprooted itself from the ground just behind Beast Boy. Cars, fire hydrants, streetlights, even a delivery van rose into the air, and as Beast Boy turned back to look at the cause of this occurance, he saw Raven standing in the middle of the street, sheathed in black like a fountain pen, her eyes washed out white, raising the entire street into the air with one hand stretched into the air. As he watched, the massive divot of earth and asphalt floated over past Beast Boy, and tipped, dumping every single object on it onto Overload, who fell back, crushed under a hail of vehicles and municipal infrastructure. And no sooner had Raven done this, than she swept her hand around and dropped it, and the entire section of street flipped over and landed on top of Plasmus like an enormous hydraulic press, instantly smashing him to jelly.

Beast Boy resumed human form and stood back up, doing his best to wipe off the Plasmus-sludge that had been splattered all over him, and looked back at Raven. She _still_ looked like she was in shock, to be honest, but there was a _ferocity _in her stare that had not been there before. One he didn't recall having ever seen before, to be honest. And while it was certainly scary... it was also kind of cool.

It was mostly cool because she had decided to destroy someone _other_ than him, but he would take his victories where he could get them.

He smiled, broadly, even as Overload began shoving the empty vehicles off of himself, and Plasmus slowly started to re-coalesce. And as he turned back to the rising monsters, he could help but turn his smile into a feral grin as he crouched low, already deciding what to shift into next.

"Wow," he said, "did _you _guys ever pick a bad time..."

**O-O-O**

"I know you Titans think you can take us all out whenever you want," said Jinx, "but your friends aren't gonna help you this time. You really think the two of you can handle all of us at once?"

Robin's only answer was to look from one Hiver to another and back to Jinx, and then to smile.

"Watch us."

Robin jumped.

Skilled martial artists could perform amazing vertial leaps. _Very_ skilled martial artists could do so without even looking like that was what they planned to do. Robin was one of the latter, and his leap caught all five Hivers by surprise. Neither See-More nor Gizmo nor even Jinx thought to shoot him before he was up, flipping through the air, and pulling a half dozen flash bombs from his belt, even as he heard the telltale sounds of Starfire leaping into the air behind him. She knew what to do, he trusted that much implicitly. All he had to do was his own bit.

He rained the bombs down like confetti, shrouding the entire street in flashes and smoke. The majority of the flashers he threw at See-More, who withdrew several steps, his arms raised to protect his oversized eye. The residual flashes were enough to hold the other Hivers for a couple seconds, and he threw his weight to one side so as to land next to See-More. As he came down, he swept his staff around at eye level, smashing the very tip of it into See-More's visor. The lens shattered like glass, the frame crushed like a tin can, and See-More spun halfway around with the blow. A second stroke, with the butt of the staff, hit him in the back of the neck, and sent him crumpling to the ground, out like a light.

And then Robin landed.

The other Hivers stared at Robin like frozen mannequins flatly unable to believe what they had just seen him do. He planted his staff and smirked. "Had enough yet?"

"_Tear him apart!_" shouted Jinx, and Robin swept his staff up and back around to a ready position, and everything hit the fan.

Gizmo launched a barrage of rockets as a good fifty copies of Billy came charging in from all directions, several of them leaping up over the others to cut off his escape. Robin crouched low and lunged forward like a coiled spring, spearing one of the Billies in the throat with his staff and slamming him back into the ground, using him as a pivot and his staff as a vaulter's pole to crash right into and through three more Billies, titanium-soled boots first. The rockets crashed to earth behind him, knocking two dozen more copies of the copyist sprawling in all directions.

He landed and rolled, springing back to his feet, but a monumental shadow loomed over him, and he had to dive to the side to avoid Mammoth's fists. A Billy kicked at him as he rolled, and he grabbed its foot and twisted, spinning the unfortunate clone around like a glassblower, and using him as leverage to get back up. He spun around to face Mammoth, but Mammoth was no longer there. Starfire had shot him in the chest with a pair of energy beams from her eyes, and the bruiser was presently hanging half-out of a newspaper kiosk on the other side of the street, his flight path strewn with toppled Billy clones.

Starfire was up in the air, hurling Starbolts down at Jinx like a vengeful deity. Jinx skipped around the projectiles like a dancer, summoning and flinging hexes back up at Starfire, who danced around them in turn in all three dimensions. Several Billies climbed onto one another's shoulders and leaped at Starfire, three of them managing to grab onto her as she flew. They soon regretted it however, for not only could Starfire support their weight, but she used their own momentum to spin around and hurl all three into and through a storefront window, recovering fast enough to dodge Jinx' latest hex, and return a starbolt which struck the Hive leader square in the solar plexus and practically _smashed _her into the ground.

Another tide of Billies closed in, and Robin reached up and fired a grapling hook at an overhead neon sign, connecting and flying up into the air in the nick of time. One of the Billies grabbed his leg, but he kicked it in the face, and it fell away. A second later, a laser from Gizmo's harness severed the grappling cord, and Robin found himself falling again. Starfire dove to catch him, but a missile caught her first, and she was blown off course into a wall, and rolled down it to the ground. Robin tried to spin around to see where he was about to land, but before he could do so, something hit him in the side like a wrecking ball, and the next thing he knew, he was thrown bodily into a series of trash cans on the side of the street, and Mammoth, chest still smoking from where Starfire had shot him, was grinning and cracking his knuckles as he approached.

His staff was somewhere in the garbage, and he had no time to search for it, so instead he drew a pair of smaller sticks from the back of his belt. Shorter than his staff, these were Escrima sticks, retractable police batons designed to be used in one hand each. Though functionally identical to David's baton, Robin had no intention of using these as mere power props...

.. a fact he proceeded to demonstrate.

Mammoth charged him, and he spun to the side like a matador at the last moment, whirling around to strike Mammoth in the back of the knee with one stick. Mammoth gave a shout of pain as eight copies of Billy came up to support him. Robin turned on them, spinning around and lashing out with both sticks, aiming not at specific targets, but at the areas he knew from experience that his attackers would be most likely to occupy. A skilled martial artist might have tried something unexpected, but Billy was no such thing, and within seconds, four of the eight copies were sprawled out on the ground, the other four drawing back from the spinning sticks. Braver than Billy, Mammoth chose to attempt them, lunging in with an enormous fist. A serious mistake. Robin stepped into the punch and slid around it to the right, driving the tip of one of his batons into Mammoth's stomach before smashing the other one into the giant's temple. To Mammoth's credit, he did not immediately fall, though the blows would have dropped even the toughest boxer like a broken puppet. Instead he staggered back, stunned and disoriented, groping blindly for something to steady himself against. Robin charged him, dodging the clumsy swipes of several more copies of Billy, jumping up, spinning around, and slamming the heel of his boot into Mammoth's temple.

This time he fell.

The whine of machinery spinning up was all the warning Robin got before a concussion grenade hit him in the back. The polymer cloak absorbed some of the shock, and of course he knew to relax his muscles the instant the blast hit him, but the shock was still enough hurl him into a brick wall, clouding his vision and destroying his balance for several, crucial seconds. They might well have been his last, had not Starfire bodily hoisted Gizmo, harness and all, into the air a moment later. Gizmo screamed bloody murder, slashing at Starfire with his mechanical spider legs. They were bladed, but the blades might as well have been made of styrofoam for all the good they did. Starfire peremptorily smashed the blades to pieces with her fists, then ripped all four legs off of Gizmo's harness for good measure, throwing them down to the ground like toothpicks.

Understandably enough, Gizmo panicked, pressing a button on what remained of his harness, and blasting a compartment of tear gas into Starfire's face. He had chosen both wisely and poorly in selecting the gas, wisely in that Starfire was not immune to it, poorly in that she was not amused either. Coughing and retching, she nonetheless maintained enough wherewithal to blast Gizmo out of her hands with a pair of point blank starbolts, flinging the diminutive gearhead into the hood of a car hard enough to crush the windshield and rock the car on its suspension. Gizmo moaned softly and did not get up.

Two more Billy clones now got in Robin's way, obstructing his view of Starfire. One went to grab him by the throat and he folded his arm up and hit him in the throat with his elbow, dropping it instantly. The other one managed to grab his other arm, but Robin had managed to recover his balance, and stepped around him and twisted before pitching him over his shoulder in a Judo throw. He turned back, only to see dozens more Billies rushing towards him, too many even for him to handle alone, but fortunately, he wasn't alone. A green flash overhead heralded Starfire's assault, and she simply blazed a path through the crowd of Billies with starbolts flying, sending dozens of copies scattering like bowling pins. For a second, it looked as though she was going to either join Robin, or grab him by the arm to pull him to safety, but then there was another flash, pink, not green, and Starfire's flight was halted as though she had struck a brick wall. She tumbled to the ground, landing hard enough to carve a furrow in the asphalt. And behind her, Robin saw Jinx, standing with hexes in hand, just for a second, before the sea of Billies closed between them again, and Robin could see no more.

"_Starfire_!" he shouted, and without regard to his own safety or anything else, he rushed four dozen copies of Billy Numerous by himself. Billies lunged at him from every direction, caring nothing for how many of them he might clobber or beat, attempting only to bury him in bodies and drag him down by weight of numbers. He lashed out with both sticks, every swing connecting with something, and yet he simply could not advance, pressed back by the sheer number of his attackers. Falling back again, he spun and struck and spun again, laying Billy clones out by the dozen and the score. Two of them managed to uproot a mailbox and chucked it at him, but he simply slid under the throw and let it cream three more of the clones before it stopped. Two dozen more pooled their strength and managed to lift an entire car into the air, but Robin simply threw a flash bomb into their midst, distracting several of them long enough for gravity to do the rest, and pinning the lot of them beneath the dropped car. One climbed onto a restaurant's awning and leaped down onto Robin's back, but Robin ducked and slammed him down onto the ground like a throw rug, before picking him up and throwing him into his fellow clones. Around and around he spun, striking clone after clone down, until the fallen Billies were piled four feet deep in a ring around him, and the few clones remaining were unwilling to climb over the unconscious forms of their fellows to face his sticks and fists any longer.

He assumed that the clones had thinned out because not even Billy could replicate indefinitely, but when he finally turned to find Starfire, he realized what the real reason had been.

Starfire was on the ground a good fifty feet away, on her hands and knees, with an enormous mass of Billies dogpiling her, trying to force her down. Not even with thirty clones could Billy easily overcome Starfire's Tamaranean strength, and gritting her teeth, she managed to throw one arm back, tossing four of the clones into the air like dolls. It was not enough however, as the remaining clones forced her down again, and Robin saw Jinx approaching her, stepping around the fallen Billies as she raised one hand with a razor-sharp hex, and hurled it down into Starfire's upturned face. The shock was enough to make the ground itself tremble, and Starfire shuddered for a second, and then fell still, as Jinnx prepared another hex to finish the job.

That was as far as she got.

Robin raised his arm and shot a grappling hook at Jinx, catching her throwing arm and pulling as hard as he could. Jinx's hex flew off into the pile of Billies and scattered them, as she herself was dragged down onto the ground. With a cry of defiance, she severed the grappling cord with another hex and scrambled to her feet, but Robin was already on the move, clotheslining a Billy clone as he ran with one of his sticks, and stepping around another one only to backhand him in back of the neck. Both Billies fell as Robin ran on, and the look on his masked face was apparently enough to make even Jinx think twice. She fell back behind a protective screen of Billy clones, hoping thereby to delay Robin, but Robin would not be delayed. He sprang into the air, flipping over the Billies, and dropping a series of explosive bombs in his wake to scatter or disable them. Before Jinx could conjure another hex or even react, he raised one hand, and brought one of his escrima batons down on Jinx's raised arm.

He _felt_ the bone snap through his baton.

The Hive leader let out a scream that could have woken the dead, but Jinx was no civilian or novice to the arts of fighting, and even a broken arm did not dissuade her from attempting to defend herself. She brought her other arm around with a searing hex glowing in her palm, intending to throw or smash it into Robin with all the force she could muster. Too late. Robin stepped into her swing, blocked it with his own arm, seized Jinx by the collar, and spun around like a top, hoisting Jinx off of her feet and hurling her as hard as he could into the tile-covered wall of the Jump City public library. The tile facing, already weakened by the car bomb, shattered, raining bits of masonry and glazed ceramic onto the ground, as Robin completed his spin and came to a halt facing Jinx, both batons held in an automatic ready position. Jinx, covered in ceramic dust, bleeding from the head, her broken arm dangling uselessly at her side, clearly disoriented, managed to stagger back to her feet for a few seconds. She tried to conjure another hex, but plainly her fragile consciousness was no longer up to the task, and the hex sputtered out like a quenched flame moments before she pitched over and collapsed onto the ground, motionless, surrounded by the fallen bodies of her teammates.

Quiet descended on the street as Robin slowly lowered his weapons and looked around at the scene. It resembled the aftermath of some hideous massacre or brutal battlefield. Dozens of red-clad bodies lay scattered around, some folded around lampposts, some hanging halfway out of broken store windows, others littering the street and sidewalks. Dotted amongst them were the unconscious forms of the various other Hive members. And somewhere in this pile of beaten warriors was...

"Starfire!"

She was laying on the ground, half buried in Billy clones, yet even at this distance, Robin could see that she was breathing and moving slowly, stunned or unconscious, rather than dead. Robin thanked whatever lucky stars he had for that, and quickly began to rush over to her, picking his way around the dozens if not hundreds of other moaning, sleeping bodies he had to navigate to reach her, already retracting his batons and putting them away, already sliding the communicator off of his belt to call the others and see what the situation was with them, already making plans for the next step in countering whatever evil plot this was.

He never saw the Man in Gold.

**O-O-O**

The Man in Gold crouched on the rooftops, and watched as Robin and Starfire destroyed the Hive Five. He watched as Starfire's starbolts and energy beams struck down the red-suited clones in droves of tens and twenties, even as Robin dealt with each of the unique Hivers in turn, one after the next. He watched as Gizmo made an ill-fated attempt to contest with Starfire physically, and failed, and watched as Jinx managed to disable Starfire, but was herself disabled in turn by a furious Robin. He smiled at that. Ever the White Knight, Robin, reserving his greatest anger for those who harmed his precious Starfire.

Only when the fighting was finally complete, did the Man in Gold reach down to his side, and lifted a pair of thick ear protectors, which he slid over his ears carefully. He slid the pair of LCD sunglasses on his forehead down, covering his eyes, and plugging the the small cord attached to them into the massive piece of equipment next to him. He watched as the link was activated in a quarter of a second, and the equipment began feeding him data directly to his glasses, and he smiled as the telescopic lens revealed a close-up picture of Robin scrambling over the bodies of the fallen Hivers, racing to get to Starfire, to ensure that she was all right.

How perfectly typical.

He waited, he bode his time. There were precious seconds of time here that he had to savor, and savour them he did, as the EM coils cooled down and the superconductors powered themselves up. Even then he still had time, time to watch every move Robin made, time to see him slowly drawing his communicator, time to see him holster his weapons, time to watch Robin believe that he'd won.

And then... just like that... it was time.

The Man in Gold took a deep breath.

"_Grayson!_" he shouted.

Robin stumbled in mid-step, recovered his balance, and turned around to see who had shouted that name that he had believed nobody knew. He watched in slow motion as Robin's head inclined up, up, up, to the rooftops, to the figure in shining gold, outlined by the setting sun, that had not been there a minute ago, and to the blurry object next to him. The Man in Gold watched him do these things, and watched through the telecopic lens for the exact moment when the flash of recognition, impossible to mask or hide, came over Robin's features.

And then he pulled the trigger.

**O-O-O**

Adonis hit the side of the car hard enough to cave it in, and shattered glass from the window and windshield spilled all over him like a waterfall. His pitted and dented armor groaned as he slowly stood up once again, turned around, and tried to lift the car. He had not even gotten it an inch off the ground before Cyborg's sonic cannon speared him in the back, slamming his head into the crushed car door and forcing him to drop the vehicle again.

He roared in frustration and leaped up again, though what he intended to do to the two Titans standing in the middle of the street fifty feet away was unclear. As it happened, he hadn't managed more than three or four steps before David blew the ground up under his foot and flipped him four times through the air, only to dump him on the sidewalk beneath a streetlight.

"You're makin' this a lot harder than it's gotta be, man," said Cyborg. "Why don't you give it up now and we'll all go down to the jail."

"Up yours, bucket-head!" shouted Adonis. "Nobody arrests Adonis!"

"Wrong answer, Marcus," said David, and he extended his baton towards Adonis, and twisted it like a screwdriver. The piece of equipment mounted in Adonis' chest groaned, shook, and exploded outward, sending a shower of electrical components scattering over the ground. A moment later, the magnetic locks that held the various pieces of Adonis' armor together all failed at once, and the armor fell apart like a glass sculpture struck by a baseball, leaving a disheveled young man in a dark blue jump suit sitting in the middle of a pile of assorted bits of armor.

Cyborg raised his human eyebrow, and turned to David. "Now why the Hell didn't you just do that in the first place?"

"Because I didn't know what it was until just now," he responded. Cyborg crossed his arms and raised his human eyebrow, as though unconvinced. "What?" protested David. "I don't _build_ these things! I was just looking for... you know... anything strange. I figured thorium had to be the power source."

Cyborg blinked, then slowly turned his head back to Adonis. "... Thorium?"

"Yeah," said David with a smirk, "and a cast iron frame."

This time, Cyborg did a double take. "A _what_?"

"You heard me."

The half-mechanical Titan exploded into laughter. "Cast _iron_. What the _hell_ Adonis? Lookin' to join a Dickens revival or somethin'? What's the matter? Couldn't find any steel in the scrapyard?"

"Hey, _screw you_, asshole!" screamed Adonis. "None of you wimps have what it takes to fight a _real_ man, anyway!"

"Well hell, Adonis," said Cyborg with a grin as he began to walk forward. "_Find _us a real man, and we'll go fight him."

"You don't have the guts to face me for real!" repeated Adonis,turning to David, who was watching the proceedings silently. "You! 'Devastator' or whatever you call yourself these days. You're _nothin'_ without that stick and those fancy explosions. Why don't you come over here and fight me like a man?"

"What?" asked David.

"C'mon!" goaded Adonis, raising his fists towards David. "Fight me like a _man_, if you've got the guts!"

Cyborg sighed, but stopped and turned back to David to see what he wanted to do. David was standing stock still, his baton still in hand, staring at Adonis evenly, as though trying to figure out how to say what he wanted to say. Cyborg let him stare, and was about to open his mouth to tell David that this sort of thing really wasn't necessary, when David answered.

"No."

The ground under Adonis' feet burst like an overinflated balloon, sending Adonis rocketting upwards to a sudden face-first encounter with the streetlight above his head. The light shattered as his head crushed it, and Adonis got a nasty 20,000 volt shock, a moment before gravity took over and he plunged back to the ground, landing on his stomach, his hair smoldering, and coughing up smoke.

"You just tried to murder me and two little kids with a suit of power armor and a car, and you want to tell me about fighting like a man?" said David. His voice was low, but he sounded good and angry as he walked towards the downed supervillain. "You were bad enough in school, Marcus. Now you're going where you belong."

"I shoulda killed you when I had the chance, you freak! When I get back out you're dead! You hear me! _Dead_!"

"Oh, _shut up_," said David, as he knelt down over Adonis, planting one knee on Adonis' back to keep him pinned down while he slid a pair of plastic zip-cuffs off his belt and fastened them around Adonis' wrists. Only once Adonis was properly restrained did he stand up and haul Adonis to his feet. Adonis tried to shake David off, just to be defiant, but his head was still shakey from the impromptu flight he had taken, and despite the fact that David was considerably smaller than he was, he couldn't even muster the strength to do that much. Not that it would have mattered with Cyborg standing right there.

David frog-marched Adonis over to Cyborg, who was watching the proceedings with crossed arms and a broad smile. "I just _don't get you_, man," he said.

David paused as Cyborg grabbed Adonis' wrists with one massive hand. "What don't you get?"

"You do somethin' like that, and you don't see why they'd put you on a poster?"

David blinked, clearly missing something. "I... just arrested him," he said. "Isn't... that how I'm supposed to do it?"

"No, no, no, that ain't what I'm talkin' about," said Cyborg. "I'm sayin' you go out here and get it done, just like the rest of us, you gotta expect people're gonna start lookin' at you different. It comes with the territory, man."

David actually blushed, to Cyborg's amusement. "I... I know that, Cy."

Cyborg laughed and shook his head. "No, you know it, but you don't _know_ it, you follow? You keep thinking like you're some regular Joe, and then you come out here and serve it up like one of us. I just don't get it..."

David lowered his head. "Sorry," he said.

"Ain't nothin' to be 'sorry' about, man," said Cyborg with a chuckle, patting David on the shoulder with his free hand. "There's nothin' wrong with it. I just don't _get _it is all." He laughed. "I guess we all do it different. Back in the day, BB used to - "

Cyborg's story was cut off all of a sudden by a thunderous blast, coming from somewhere to the North. Cyborg dropped Adonis, who was too shocked by the sound to remember to run, as all eyes, hero, villain, or civilian, turned to the north, where a small plume of smoke seemed to be emanating from somewhere near the waterfront...

**O-O-O**

Overload's screams mixed with the sound of electrical equipment shorting out into a hideous static screech, but Beast Boy didn't let up, sucking water out of the pool formed by the ruptured hydrant, and spraying it with his trunk into the sentient electrokinetic computer. The sprayed water mixed with the puddles of slime that were splattered all over the places, forming a disgusting slurry that Beast Boy avoided stepping in, but this wouldn't take much longer in any event. Sure enough, Overload's capacity to handle the water soon gave out entirely, and his electrical frame collapsed, leaving behind a small, waterlogged circuit board.

Only once he was convinced that Overload wasn't getting back up again, did Beast Boy turn back around to ensure that Raven was still all right. She was still floating in her lotus position over the street, completely covered in Plasmus' sludge, which was dripping off her (as it was him) like sticky tar. The sleeping form of the human at the center of Plasmus was laying at her feet, laying where she had deposited him after blowing Plasmus' body to shreds with her soul-self while Beast Boy was dealing with Overload. He had not known that she was able to do that.

Add it to the list...

He reverted to his human form, and slowly approached Raven. She hadn't said a word to him since the fight began, but given the... verve... with which she had torn Plasmus to bits...

Well... it could be said that he wasn't sure what kind of a reception he was about to get.

"Um," he said, "are you... okay?"

Raven slowly lowered herself back down to the ground, and landed lightly, brushing the sludge out of her bangs absent-mindedly, and nudging Plasmus with her foot before furtively looking back up at Beast Boy. "I... think so," she said, sounding extremely unsure.

"Oh," he said. "Uh... well, good!" He rubbed the back of his neck nervously. "So... should we uh... call the others or - "

"Beast Boy," said Raven all of a sudden, and then suddenly she was staring directly at him. He couldn't tell if it was the look of a friend or a predator.

"Look, Rae... uh... Raven... I..."

"Why did you do that?" she asked. He still couldn't tell if she was going to melt him or not, but there was fear in her voice, though what she was afraid of was beyond him.

"Because I... I wanted to," he said, having considered about seven thousand other possible answers in a half-second or so and rejected them all.

"_Why_?"

That one caught him by surprise. She sounded... well to be honest he didn't know _what_ that sound in her voice was supposed to be. It might have been disbelief. Whatever it was, it drove all thoughts of joking or dodging the question out of his mind.

"Because you're not a monster," he said, as calmly and as sincerely as he could. Sincerity was not his strong suit. He preferred to dance around things like this with a joke and a smile, but he made the effort for her sake. "You're not a monster or a nightmare or any of those other things you said you were. You're... you're just _not_, okay? You're... the best person I know. I've lived with heroes my whole life, and you're the _best_ person I've ever met. Not because you're all powerful or brave or anything... but... just because you _are_. Because you put up with me even when you don't want to, and you always think about other people even though you hate other people thinking about you." He scuffed his shoe on the pavement and took a breath. "I don't... I don't know how to say this kind of stuff, and... I know you don't believe me because you think you shouldn't have come here and that all this is your fault and everything but... even if you're right, and it turns out we can't stop Trigon from doing his thing, even if that's true, which it's not, but even if it is, I'm _still_ glad you came here, and that I got to know you." He grinned sheepishly and lowered his head. "That's... why I did it."

He expected... honestly he didn't know what he expected. And apparently Raven didn't either, for she simply stood there, staring at him like he'd suddenly turned blue before his eyes. For a good half a minute, neither one of them moved or said anything, until finally, Raven's mouth trembled, and she managed to say a few words in a halting voice, tears welling up in her eyes.

"B... Beast Boy..." she said.

She got no further.

A _tremendous_ blast, like a missile strike, echoed from somewhere to the east, and as both Titans whirled around to face it, they saw a towering cloud of smoke rising from somewhere beyond the immediate skyline. Beast Boy blinked, and turned back to Raven to ask her what the hell _that_ could have been, for undoubtedly she had a better idea than he did, but no sooner did he lay eyes on her than the question died in his throat, for Raven's eyes had bolted open, her breath had frozen in her lungs, and she had a trembling hand clutched to her chest as she stared off into space. And as Beast Boy opened his mouth to ask her what was wrong, her eyes suddenly focused on him with a look of the most profound terror he had ever seen in _anyone's_ eyes, and right then he knew that something _horrible _had just happened.

But he had no idea how horrible it was...

**O-O-O**

_In her own way, she was always floating...  
_  
Starfire woke up very slowly.

Tamaraneans were not knocked unconscious lightly, but when they were, it tended to require some time for them to come around. She had no idea what had happened beyond the fact that the Billy Numerous had sent dozens of his clones to pin her down, and she had been struggling against them when Jinx had walked up and shot her in the head with one of her illuminated magical spells, like the lowly Clorbag she was. She raised her head, slowly, to try and determine where said Clorbag had run off to, or if Robin had subdued her while she was asleep, and only then did she notice that she was all but alone.

That fact pierced the slowly-clearing clouds that fogged her brain like a Wusserloop darting through the water. There had been dozens if not _hundreds_ of fallen copies of the Billy Numerous scattered about where either she or Robin had disposed of them, to say nothing of Gizmo, Mammoth, and See-More, all of whom had fallen in the battle prior to Jinx rendering her unconscious. And yet while the street bore the obvious signs of battle and destruction, there was no sign of any of their fallen assailants scattered about. And where was Robin? Had he gone in pursuit of the HIVE? Or been forced to retreat to another location? Or... or had the HIVE overcome him as well, and captured him for nefarious purposes of their own? The thought suddenly galvanized her to action, and she raised her head and shoulders up to look around, to find some sign of what might have become of Robin...

... and her heart stopped.

Robin was laying in the middle of the street, on his side, his cape crumpled and stained, his combat batons laying at his side, untouched, though only scarce inches from his hands. But from where Starfire was laying, she could see a puddle of some sort of dark fluid, dark _red_ fluid, that Robin was presently laying in.

"_Robin!_"  
_  
It was a funny thing to realize now, but she was. Always. Even when walking on the ground, she seemed to be floating, as though temporarily conceding to gravity's laws only because it was expected of her. She moved like a dancer, like an angel, her green eyes sparkling like emeralds, her red hair framed by the sun in a halo._

She was on her feet in a nanosecond, and raced to his side with such alacrity that the very laws of relativity bent around her. She knelt at his side, and gently, gently as she could, rolled him over onto his back, and when she did, a horrified gasp escaped her lips.

There was a half-inch hole drilled through his chest.

_Somehow, he had plenty of time to study the expression on her face, the glowing green energy around her closed hands, the deep swirling gems of onyx and obsidian adorning her bracers and gorget. A vision of light in the descending darkness, a valkyrie coming to rescue him and take him home._

"Robin..." she said, stunned to near-silence, and she blindly groped for her communicator, which was already soaked through with Robin's own blood. She tore it open and hit the panic button, shouting into it for the others to come, to come as quickly as they could, that Robin was hurt, and yet there were no responses, and she could not determine why. Human physiology was beyond her. She had no idea what to do, what she _could_ do, save that humans were so fragile that moving Robin would likely be instantly fatal, and so she held him in her lap, and tried desperately to staunch the flow of blood which refused to cease.

"Robin!" she shouted, screamed even, her Tamaranean vocal cords powerful enough to sunder glass at need, and yet not enough to pierce the veil descending over him. "Robin, can you hear me? Robin!"  
_  
He wanted to reach out to her, call out to her, something, but his body and voice would not obey any longer. It was all he could do to force his eyes to remain open long enough for her to reach him, gathering him up in her arms, screaming his adopted name with enough force to shatter glass, though it registered as nothing more than a dull echo. The world around could fade, or burn, or crumble like stale bread, but she was here, and nothing else mattered._

He said nothing, and moved only slightly, raised one gloved hand weakly, and she took it in hers without hesitation, squeezing him hard enough that he _had_ to have felt it, and yet he didn't react. Yet when his hand fell away, he had left behind something. Something that had been in his hands when she arrived. She glanced at the object in question, a small round disk of polished gray metal, perfectly smooth save for the fact that it had been marred by an ugly, jagged crack down the middle of it. She had no idea what this thing was, nor why Robin had just given it to her, and presently she didn't care. Where could the others be? Or the paramedical personnel that should have already been making their way towards this location as soon as hostilities began?

Robin coughed, a horrible, truncated cough that caused bubbles of red fluid to emerge from his lips, and he shuddered as his face began to pale. A small crowd had by now gathered around, and in desperation, Starfire turned her head to them. "_Please_!" she cried, "Assist us! He must be taken to a hospital!" But none of the civilians moved or stirred themselves, perhaps too deeply in shock at what had just occurred, perhaps unable to materially assist... or perhaps cognizant already that there was nothing they or anyone could do.

Robin's breathing slowed, as did the rate of blood flow, and through the tears welling in her eyes, Starfire clung to the hope that this might somehow be a good sign, that the wound was cauterizing or that he was otherwise going to get better. And yet, no matter how tightly she held him, no matter what cries she uttered in what language, there was nothing she could do but look on as Robin's body stiffened and quivered for a few moments, and then with a soft, almost inaudible sigh, his limbs went limp, the air slipped from his lungs, and then...

... and then, between one moment and the next, he was gone.

Starfire threw back her head and screamed, screamed as loud as she could, shattering windows and driving back the small crowd of onlookers. And so it was that a few minutes later, the other four Titans found her, sitting in the middle of the street, tears rolling down her face, covered in red human blood, and cradling Robin's lifeless body.  
_  
A strange fate indeed, to realize it only now, when it could no longer make a difference, unless of course realizing it made all the difference in the world..._

**O-O-O**

**Six hours later...**

"How's that feel?"

Jinx grimaced as she gently waved the cast up and down like a penguin's flipper. Her arm still throbbed relentlessly, though the painkillers had helped a bit, as had stabilizing it. And compared to what had happened to Gizmo, she supposed she should count herself lucky.

"It's okay."

See-More nodded and put the medical kit away. "So," he said. "That sucked."

Despite everything, Jinx laughed. "Yeah, didn't go so well, did it?"

"No," said See-More, though he was also smiling at the sheer absurdity of the situation. "It really didn't."

"You gonna be all right?"

"Need a new visor," he said. "And about six tons of Tylenol."

"Well don't worry," said Jinx. "That's the last of our 'special' operations."

See-More let out a sigh of relief. "Well I'm glad to hear that," he said. "I'd rather go after Fort Knox than go through _that _again."

"Well we're not gonna be doing much for a while, anyway," said Jinx, looking glumly down at her cast-encased arm.

"I think after this one, we deserve a rest, don't you?"

"Maybe," said Jinx. "Anyway, go find Mammoth and see how Gizmo's doing, will you? And remind him not to use too much - "

The entire HIVE Tower shook.

Jinx and See-More froze for a second, and then turned to look at each other. "... earthquake?" asked See-More.

Another shock tore through the tower, prolonged, and accompanied by the sound of rending metal. Definitely not earthquake sounds. Jinx and See-More had only enough time to glance at one another once again before there was an ear-splitting screech, and suddenly, something _peeled_ open one of the infirmary walls.

And one look at who it was told Jinx that this was about to become the worst day of he life.

The infirmary was at ground level, and the fall wall formed the outer wall of the HIVE Tower, twelve inches of solid titanium steel, impervious to everything from meteor strikes to tank shells. Yet before Jinx' eyes, a section of the wall eight feet long and six feet high was simply ripped open as though someone had taken a can opener to it. And there, in the resulting hole, there stood five of the six Titans, all of them but Robin, staring into the infirmary at Jinx and See-More with expressions that, for all her claims of unflappability, made her want to run screaming and hide under a bed.

Particularly Starfire's.

Starfire was glowing, literally. Her eyes and hands were encased in radioactive green energy, and her teeth were bared and snarling, like some kind of predatory animal. Next to her, Cyborg was staring daggers into Jinx' eyes, his hand in the form of his Sonic Cannon. Nothing, nothing she had ever done or seen, no event she had borne witness to, had ever inspired the look that Cyborg was giving her now, a look of absolute _rage_, one so profound it seemed to extend even to his robotic eye.

For a moment or two, the Titans and Hivers simply stared at one another, the former _seething_, the latter simply stunned. Finally, Jinx gathered enough of her wits to speak. "What the _hell_?" she said, and she conjured a hex in her good hand almost reflexively, as See-More reached for something, a weapon perhaps, or a communicator.

As it turned out, that was a _serious_ mistake.

Starfire moved so quickly that it looked to Jinx like she had just teleported. One instant she was in the impromptu doorway she had just torn open, the next she was _right_ in front of her, her hands fastened around Jinx's throat. She screamed something in another language, some guttural and violent, and lifted Jinx into the air before reversing her momentum and _slamming_ her down on her back into the medical table so hard that the table collapsed into a heap of sparks and metal panels. Meanwhile, the table See-More was reaching for was summarily vaporized as Cyborg shot it with a full-power blast of his sonic cannon. He then charged into the room like an enraged rhinoceros. See-More avoided getting his head punched clean off only by backing into a corner and raising his hands in abject surrender. Honestly, Jinx couldn't blame him.

The other three Titans entered the room after Cyborg and Starfire, and quietly took up positions on either side of the room, saying nothing, and staring at Jinx and See-More like the witnesses to an execution. A very palpable chill ran down Jinx' spine as she stared up into the merciless gaze of Starfire, who seemed to be trying to gauge whether or not to literally bite her head off.

_"Who employed you?"_

The words shot out of Starfire's mouth like cannon shells, no flowery verbiage , no comically superior register of language. She did not so much say the words as _snarled_ them at Jinx.

"What the hell are you talking about?" coughed Jinx.

Wrong answer.

Starfire shrieked some kind of war-cry-of-the-damned, and smashed Jinx headfirst into the ceiling, shattering one of the ceiling tiles and raining plaster into the room. She followed up on this by kicking the ruined medical table aside (an impressive feat, given that it was bolted to the floor), and pinning Jinx up against the wall like a tapestry.

"_Hey!_" shouted See-More. "_Leave her alone_ you bi-"

No more words did See-More get out, for Cyborg simply reached out and backhanded him in the head with an enormous metal arm, hard enough that _Jinx_ felt it. See-More collapsed like a house of cards, stunned by the enormous blow, and Jinx' eyes darted to each of the other Titans in turn. None of them seemed to be in any hurry to restrain Cyborg or Starfire. Probably for the first time _ever_, she wished Robin would show up.

"This was a setup operation," said Cyborg, his voice even despite his fuming rage. "Adonis, Plasmus, and Overload ain't part of your little club. Somebody _hired_ your asses to do this job. You're gonna tell us who it was and where we can find 'em. Right now."

"What the hell's going on in here?" Mammoth and Billy Numerous stormed into the room from opposite ends at the same time. Mammoth still had his neck brace on, and Billy was a unified whole, a rarity for him, but a necessity, considering the collective beating he'd taken.

Neither one lasted more than two seconds.

Raven turned to Mammoth and raised her hand, not even bothering to recite her magic words, and suddenly Mammoth was lifted bodily into the air, flipped over, and driven like a pile driver headfirst into the solid metal floor. Raven dropped her hand and let Mammoth fall like a dead weight to the ground, where he remained, motionless, and moaning softly.

Billy on the other hand, got a much more simple solution. Devastator took the baton from off his belt, slid it into his left hand, and the instant Billy's head appeared inside the room, he smashed it into the bridge of Billy's nose as hard as he could.

Raven's blow had been harder perhaps, but it was Devastator's that stunned Jinx, for Devastator she had actually met, spoken to, even fought alongside. She had pegged him easily as the weakest link in the Titans' chain, the one who was still holding back, afraid of violence and the consequences thereof. There was no sign of that here. Billy went down like puppet with its strings cut, his nose bleeding profusely, hollering and clutching at his face.

"You broke my goddamn nose, man!" shouted Billy through the injury. Devastator simply lowered the baton, pointing it like a sword at Billy's throat, and ignited it, his eyes never deviating one millimeter. Cyborg and Starfire turned back to Jinx and See-More.

"Who hired you?" asked Cyborg. "Tell us right now."

"After what she did to Gizmo?" spat Jinx. "I'm not telling you a damn thing!"

"Where's Gizmo?" asked Beast Boy, from behind Cyborg. He seemed to be at least slightly under control of his own faculties, at least it looked that way.

"He's in a coma," said Jinx. "Where's Robin?" To hell with appearances, this was _insane_. She needed to talk to someone who could be counted upon to be rational at least.

Starfire hoisted Jinx up and brought her fist back. "Robin is _dead_," she said.

And among the hundred thoughts that burst into Jinx' mind at that bit of news, the foremost one was the sudden realization that she was almost certainly about to die.

"For what purpose was Robin given this?" asked Starfire, and she pulled out a small disk of metal, cracked down the middle by some unknown force.

"I... I've never seen that before..." said Jinx, her eyes darting from Titan to Titan. "Look, we... we didn't kill Robin!" she said. "He beat the hell out of all of us, and when we woke up, we were back here. I swear!"

"_Do not lie to me_!" screamed Starfire so loud that the glass face on the wallclock shattered. She slammed Jinx up against the back wall again and pinned her there, pulling her other fist back as though preparing to punch Jinx' head off.

"She ain't lyin', man!" insisted See-More. "It's the truth!"

"It sure is!" chimed in Billy from where he was laying on the floor.

"Who was your employer?" demanded Starfire.

Jinx hesitated just a second too long. "We didn't have an emp-"

Starfire hit her, _hard_, right in the stomach. She felt the wind leave her lungs and gasped for air desperately, her eyes threatening to pop out of her head.

"You better tell us who hired you, Jinx, or you won't live to join Brother Blood," said Cyborg.

"I... I c... I can't..." stammered Jinx, still struggling to inhale. "I can't... I can't tell... tell you..."

"Well then you better _find a way_ to tell us," said Cyborg, "before I decide that you were behind the whole thing."

Jinx looked around the room, desperately looking for an out. None was immediately forthcoming. "I _can't_ tell you. There'd... we'd be... you don't understand!"

"No, I don't think _you_ understand, Jinx," said Cyborg. "I'm gonna have to - "

"Asian guy," blurted See-More suddenly. "Brown eyes, black hair. Maybe five-eight. Hundred forty pounds. Wore this weird-ass armor all the time..."

Everyone in the room slowly turned to look at See-More, including Jinx, who had actually just forgotten about Starfire for a moment. See-More looked around at the Titans and Jinx, and chose to address the latter. "These guys mean business, Jinx. We gotta tell 'em."

"Nevermind that," said Jinx. "How the hell do _you_ know what he looked like? How the hell do you even know he existed? I never told anybody!"

"Because I've been _spyin'_ on you, okay?" shouted See-More. "You've been actin' weird for a month solid. Ever since that diamond thing. You keep obsessing over jobs that I can't even figure out why we're doin', and runnin' off on 'errands' all the time without sayin' a word about where the hell you're goin'. You think nobody noticed?"

Jinx honestly didn't know what to think right now. "If... you saw what I was doing," she said, "then you... you know why we can't tell them what - "

"Look," said See-More, turning back to the Titans. "Like I said, this guy's kinda small, but he's got weapons all over the place. Lasers and things pop up out of his armor. And he can teleport. I dunno if he uses somethin' to do it or just 'does' it, you know, but I've seen him do it." Only then did he turn back to Jinx. "What the hell's that guy gonna do to us that these guys here ain't?" he asked her.

"You got a name?" asked Cyborg.

See-More shook his head. "I never heard it," he said.

Jinx sighed in resignation. "He never told me his name either."

The Titans glanced at one another, seeking some kind of positive identification from one of them, but none was apparently forthcoming. Jinx took the opportunity to turn back to See-More. "I can't believe you _spied_ on me."

See-More seemed to deflate, and shook his head slowly. "I was worried about you, okay? You were actin' like somethin' really big was goin' on. I just... I wanted to make sure you weren't in over your head with somethin'. None of the others knew, I didn't wanna tell 'em. But then I saw you meetin' with the gold guy and I thought - "

Jinx felt Star go rigid, and Cyborg turned back to See-More instantly. "Gold guy?" he asked.

See-More blinked his single eye. "Uh, yeah... like I said, this guy wears this armor? Well the armor's all gold-lookin'. Like polished gold. Has a helmet too."

One by one, lights of recognition appeared in each of the Titans' eyes, all except Devastator, which Jinx supposed was only to be expected. Starfire slowly let her go, and looked down at the small metal disk in her hands, and when she raised her head again, the green glow in her eyes was gone, and her rage seemed totally replaced by surprise. She turned to Cyborg, who was evidencing the same shift.

"It... it cannot be..." she said.

"I thought... he was gone," said Cyborg.

"Who?" asked Devastator, which saved Jinx from having to ask the same question.

Starfire turned to Devastator, and her voice was quiet and thin as she spoke a single, simple name.

"Warp."

The name meant nothing to Jinx, but plainly it meant plenty to the Titans, as each one save Devastator's eyes widened. Cyborg and Starfire seemed to be running the possibilities over in their minds, when Raven asked a question of her own.

"Why did you agree to do what Warp asked?"

Jinx stared at Raven contemptuously. "Isn't it obvious?" she asked. "Because this 'Warp' guy is working for Trigon."

"So you're working for Trigon then?" asked Raven. There was a hint of suppressed anger in her voice, a slight tremble that augured _very_ bad things.

"We're working for _ourselves_," replied Jinx. "He offered to arrange to spare us when the world ended if we helped him with a few jobs. We were supposed to steal that diamond for him, but _that one_," she pointed at Devastator, "switched the rocks on me." She turned back to Starfire. "So he told us to fight you and Robin. Just fight, not _kill_. He said we weren't supposed to kill anyone, but just get in your way. You guys knocked us all out, and we woke up here. Whoever killed Robin, it wasn't us."

Starfire looked like she was about to say something unkind, but she was pre-empted by Raven. "That doesn't matter," said Raven, stepping towards Jinx. "All of you are _dead_."

Even the other _Titans _seemed taken aback by this, and Jinx felt her heart leap into her throat. "You... you _can't_," she said. "We... we didn't kill anybody!"

"I don't _have _to kill you," said Raven pitilessly, her voice like the pounding of a judge's gavel. "You tried to make a deal with Trigon. Trigon _never_ keeps his promises. _Ever_. He's gotten what he wants from you, and now he's going to throw you away like any other pawn." Raven leaned forward, staring Jinx squarely in the eye. "You're all gonna burn with the rest of the world," she said. And with that, she turned around, and contemptuously floated out of the jagged hole Starfire had torn in the HIVE Tower wall. One by one, the other Titans followed, last of all Cyborg and Starfire, who released See-More and Jinx only after all the others had left. None of them said anything on the way out.

Clearly, none of them had anything to say.

Once the Titans were gone, See-More slowly limped over to Jinx. "Jinx, you all right?" he asked.

"... yeah," said Jinx noncommittally, staring at the hole that the Titans had disappeared through, her mind far away from the HIVE tower.

"Look," he said, "I... I understand if you're pissed."

"See-More, honestly, right now I don't have the juice to get mad," said Jinx.

See-More chuckled nervously. "Yeah," he said, "I know what you mean. I mean... I thought Robin was like _immortal_ or somethin'. I can't believe he's dead."

"I can," said Jinx, her eyes not moving from the hole in the wall. "Warp, or whatever his name is... left Starfire that disk thing. It was a clue to who he was. And he had to know they'd come here to ask, right?"

"Prob'ly," said See-More. "But then he won't mind if they know, right?"

"I think he wanted them to know," said Jinx. "But there's something else."

"What?"

"He teleported us all back to the Tower while we were out," said Jinx. "And I'm assuming he's the one who killed Robin, right?"

"Sounds right," said See-More. "So?"

"So," said Jinx, turning to See-More for the first time. "We knocked Starfire out before Robin took us down. So if he was there, and he killed Robin, why didn't he kill Starfire too?"

See-More thought about it for a second. "I don't know," he said. "Why wouldn't he do that?"

Jinx turned back to the hole in the wall. "Because I don't think this is about Trigon at all," she said. "This is personal."

"Somethin' between him and Robin?" asked See-More.

"No," said Jinx. "Between him and Starfire."

"Hrm..." said See-More as he considered it. "Well... whatever this thing is, Jinx, what do you think's gonna happen next?"

Jinx took a long, slow breath. "You want my opinion?" she asked.

"Yeah," said See-More. "What do you think?"

Jinx hesitated a moment before replying.

"Armageddon..."

* * *

**Author's Note:** Thank you once more to all who have read this far, and I ask once more to please leave me a token of your opinion that I might improve Chapter 30. As always, may all your endeavors know nothing but success. Good day.


	30. The One Eyed King

**Disclaimer:** There exists in the world a man who owns the Teen Titans. I am not this man.

**Author's Note:** It has become something of a habit in this story for me to apologize for the length of time taken to finish and post a chapter. In this case however, more than an apology is warranted. Briefly put, I was hospitalized for the majority of the month of March, and rendered unable to work either on this chapter, or on any other thing, and upon my release from the Hospital, I was forced to attend to many of the duties and actions I had been forced to postpone and could not further neglect. Unfortunately it meant that this chapter had to wait until the present time in order to be finished. I once more can do nothing but beg the understanding and indulgence of those who have so patiently followed this story, and hope that the chapter in question will, in some small measure, be worth the wait.

The chapter itself underwent many revisions and alterations, but as it touches on subjects that generally are dangerous ground for an author to tread, I still do not know what the result of it is. To that end, I must as usual exhort and plead for those who read it to please provide a review with which I may gauge the reaction and determine if my efforts were successful or in need of further work. In this case, I must beg ahead of time the pardon of any for whom the descriptions or actions below constitute an insult, for it was not my intention to offend anyone. All errors of fact are my own, in that I am not as well acquainted with the subjects of which I write this time as I normally try to be. I hope that it holds up to scrutiny, both of fact and of style, and most of all, that you will enjoy the time you spend reading it. To hold the attention of a reader enraptured is the greatest honor any would-be writer can aspire to, one so many of you have blessed me with over the months and years this story has run for.

Baring further bouts of ill-health, the next chapter should be completed by the beginning of next month.

* * *

**Chapter 30: The One-Eyed King**

_"Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark."_

_ - _Rabindranath Tagore

**O-O-O**

_"The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake."_

They buried Robin on a Sunday.

The whirlwind had begun within hours, as news of Robin's death spread like a fire through a dry field, whipping around the planet and beyond at the speed of light. Within a day, the New York Times was carrying it on their front page, while commentators online indulged in wild speculations, and dignified television anchors soberly repeated the same somber information to a watching public. Strange, clinical terms like "electromagnetic accelerator", "overpenetration", and "ventricular hemorrhage" served only to cushion the truth. Interviews and pundit speculation could change nothing. All that was left was the pageantry.

The flags atop city hall and the skyscrapers downtown flew at half staff, as they did on the other side of the country, in the city where Robin had first flown. The Jump City Tribune's special edition had a masthead hung with black, filled with the stories and pictures of Robin's life and deeds, and of the secondary papers, even the ones who had castigated Robin, the Titans, and all their ilk as dangerous vigilantes and disturbers of the public peace, even they turned suddenly to stories of heroism and reminiscence and a life cut tragically short as though Robin, being dead, could now be safely eulogized, that chapter of their lives finally over.

Mourners held vigil at the impromptu shrine that arose overnight at the place Robin had died, the street blocked to all traffic by a barricade of flowers, candles, and memorabilia, tied together with a thousand messages of thanks and sorrow and farewell. Meanwhile the manhunt for Robin's murder raged on like a holy crusade, as the JCPD scoured the state with the support of the state police, the California National Guard, and the FBI. Within a day however, people were saying openly that the police would find nothing. Anyone capable of slaying Robin was simply beyond the kin of normal police..

And to all appearances, the rest of the Titans agreed.

The police cordoned off Titans Tower with patrol boats and helicopters, and despite the ravenous press and the throngs of citizens and mourners who turned out on the waterfront day after day, the Titans were not there to be seen. Some whispered that without Robin, they would disintegrate, disband forever and abandon their city to criminals and the corrupt, but such people were shouted or cuffed down by their peers, for true or not, none wished to hear such sentiments spoken aloud. On the third day, the mayor of Jump City, a man who had known Robin since first he had moved to California, issued a statement on his own behalf. His relationship with Robin had not always been smooth. A civic-minded professional administrator with three children of his own, he had not welcomed the idea of teen-aged metahuman protectors in the first place, invoking constantly the notion that the Titans might inspire other children to throw themselves in harm's way. Yet when asked where the Titans were, and why they had not made statements, he spoke simply.

"Leave them be," he said. "Children don't mourn the way adults do."

And so it was that seven days after Robin's death, on a shining Sunday morning, a funeral procession half a mile long wound its way slowly down Jump City's streets. Homes and shopfronts alike were hung in black banners as the city paid final homage to its fallen protector. A riderless police horse, hooded and bridled in rich caparison, led the procession with a pair of black, metal-shod boots turned backwards in the stirrups. Behind rode limousines and police in cars, on horses, on motorcycles, on foot. The roads were lined with civilians, and the sky resounded with the sound of helicopters, police and news in equal measure, as the procession slowly made its way to the Jump cemetery.

Yet for all the ornamental reverence that Jump City could perform for its adopted son, the service was poorly attended, for the Batman was not there, and neither was Superman, nor any representative from the Justice League, all of whom were gone from Earth on some mission of terrible importance, and could not be reached for any reason or by any means. Not one of the network of allies the Titans had so painstakingly built over the course of the last two years was present either, though charitable persons admitted that they likely would have attended if they physically could. The Titans East were enmeshed in a brutal campaign in Antarctica against Doctor Light, and the others were simply scattered to the winds, embroiled in other missions, and unable to return to Jump City even if they had wanted to. Of the entire metahuman community, the five remaining Titans alone were in attendance, their every move and gesture scrutinized by the press for import and meaning.

The civilian authorities did their best to make good the lack. The Mayors of Jump and Gotham Cities were both in attendance, along with Amos Brown and James Gordon, the Police Chiefs of the respective cities, both men of long acquaintance, sometimes amicable, sometimes stormy, with the boy who had been Batman's apprentice, and became the leader of the Titans of Jump. The Governor of California was there, two US Senators, eight Congressmen split evenly from both regions, and a whole host of state and local officials and dignitaries. Marines from Camp Pendleton were there, bearing rifles with which to fire the last salute, and a flag to drape over the mahogany coffin. And besides all the officials and dignitaries, there were a handful of civilians of no particular note at all. Among them were Barbara Gordon, daughter of the Gotham City police commissioner, who had apparently known Robin from his days in Gotham City, and an elderly British gentleman that no-one seemed to know, whose reasons for being at the funeral were his own, who said very little and stood by himself with tears in his eyes, watching as the coffin was lowered into the grave. He identified himself only as 'Alfred'.

_"Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me."_

Apart from the civilians and officials, there stood all five remaining Titans, but if the populace and press thought to gauge something from their reactions, they were to be disappointed. The Titans had no reactions to gauge, no hysterics, no explosions of emotion, no fodder for the tabloids. Cyborg stood implacable in the center of the line of Titans, staring down at the grave with a dead, thousand-yard stare, like he was looking through it and off into some other place where this memorial was not happening, not necessary. Raven stood next to him, ashen-faced as she had never been, and Beast Boy next to her, for once without a joke or smile or mug for the cameras. On the far left side stood Starfire, a pace or two away from the others, and she alone showed movement, her hands clenched at her sides, shaking almost imperceptibly, save that the tremors were passing through her to the ground, and from there to the lectern where the eulogies were being read. Her eyes were closed, indeed she barely seemed to even acknowledge where she was, yet on the occasion when her eyes did open, she alone had tears in them, the others too far in shock, even now, to cry for their fallen friend.

And on the other side, also an imperceptible distance away from the others, there stood Devastator.

It was the first time David had ever been to a funeral, and he had no idea how he was supposed to behave, nor how he wanted to. The Titans, alone among the gathered mourners, were not clad in suits of black, but in their normal uniforms, this, according to Beast Boy and Cyborg at least, being the custom among metahumans. Right now, David wanted more than anything to magically be shifted into the ranks of the nameless mourners in black, to _not_ know that everyone was staring at him, waiting for him to react in some "acceptable" manner, exhibit some kind of public display of "proper" grief. His dislike of being a public spectacle had dimmed somewhat over the last couple months, but today, this place, brought it back in full force. He wanted to be back at the Tower. He wanted to be a thousand miles away from this place.

He knew he wasn't the only one.

_"Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over."_

The eulogies and speeches had gone on forever, or so it seemed, and David could only barely hear the words that the Archbishop was reciting. Even with the week that had passed, even with all this, the pageantry and speechmaking, even with the flag-draped coffin and the marble headstone, it was like something out of a bad dream, whose power to scare had evaporated because of the certainty of waking up soon. None of _this _could make it real.

What made it real was being in the Tower, and not seeing Robin there. Silence in the evidence room, in the training room, in the common room. It was the ten thousand little bits of Robin, spare masks, birdarangs, bits of a deconstructed flashbomb, spare keys to the birdcycle, the formerly mute debris, that now served as a neon sign to all of the remaining Titans. "Robin is dead," it all said. "He is _never _coming back."

A sharp cry, stifled instantly, but no less piercing for it, whipsawed David's attention down to the other end of the line, where Starfire was doubled over, one hand steadying herself, one hand clutched over her mouth like a gag, supressing whatever was trying to force its way out, be it screams in Tamaranean, or the contents of her stomach. Cyborg was by her in an instant, bent over, whispering something to her that David couldn't hear from where he was standing, but he moved around the others to help, if he could. Cyborg and Beast Boy had helped Starfire back up, and the tears were now freely streaming down her face. Raven had her fists clenched, like she was holding back the urge to incinerate the entire crowd of gawking onlookers. Several press reporters even had the temerity to snap flash photographs, an indignity David might have repayed by shattering their cameras had Raven not beaten him to it with a twitch of her finger. Murmurs ran through the crowd, but none of the Titans save David paid them any notice, as Starfire regained control of herself and looked up at Cyborg.

"Please," she said in a near-frantic whisper. "Please, I... I wish to leave..."

Cyborg simply turned his head to Raven and nodded, and Raven raised one hand, whispering a small spell. An instant later, all five Titans vanished into thin air before the eyes of the entire gathering, leaving the Archbishop to regain the crowd's attention and to finish his psalm. Right now none of them, not even David, cared in the slightest what the public might think of their precipitous flight. There would perhaps come a day when they could face the fact of Robin's death, but it was not today, not in public, not like this. Robin had been the heart and soul of the Titans, and now he was gone...

_"Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,"_ said the Archbishop, _"and I will dwell in the house of the Lord... "_

... forever.

**O-O-O**

Among the wild speculations that the media had been casting about since the news of Robin's death had broken, were two notions that seemed to be on everyone's lips. One was that without Robin, the Titans would disband forever. The other was that without Robin, Jump City would experience a crime wave of epic proportions.

David didn't presume to know much, but he knew enough to know that both of these notions were as wrong as they could be.

He hadn't been in the Tower for when Terra had betrayed them all, though from the sideways tales he'd been privy to, he didn't regret the omission. The death of Robin made up for it completely. David knew by now what no outside observer could possibly know. The Titans were not some loose coalition held together only by the efforts of one leader. They were a thing unto themselves, a coral reef, a collection of planetary bodies bound to one another by their own gravity. None of them had anywhere to go, anything to _be_, anything at all save one another. David knew that even if they didn't. For them to separate now was an impossibility. Faced with the sudden loss of Robin, not one of them could have brought themselves to lose the others.

The Titans did not fall apart. The Titans fell together. So much so in fact that David, as he had all those long months ago when first he arrived at the Tower, found himself once again separated from the other Titans by an invisible wall. Not of power or gratitude, but of simple sorrow.

And it was no easier to bear now than it had been then.

Robin had been his trainer, his mentor, his friend. The news, the _shock_ of Robin's death had been as profound as anything he had ever felt in his life, a numbing, deadening feeling that washed out the rest of the world and left him staggering in disbelief. And yet for all that, David was still the newcomer to the Titans. Moreso than any of the other Titans, moreso even than Beast Boy, who secretly and openly idolized Robin by turns, David was simply set below Robin, as though it had been ordained by some governing force that Robin should have wisdom, and David should receive it. Robin was the leader of the Titans of course, he gave orders to all of them, and was (mostly) obeyed, but David, as the latecomer, and as the one Robin had trained up from nothing at all, was forever separated from Robin by a degree of formality that simply was not there for the other Titans.

David had lost his teacher and friend, and he was badly shaken, stunned, and hurt. The other Titans however had lost something infinitely worse. They had lost their brother, their surrogate parent in his own strange way, and they were simply _crushed_. And worse even than watching them go through it, was the knowledge that he should by rights have been going through it too, and that he was not. Despite what he might have wished, he had not known Robin as the others had, his ties to Robin had not, in the final tally, been as strong as the others. Whether or not that was to be expected, which it was, whether or not the others resented it, which they didn't_, David _resented the hell out of it. It felt like the final betrayal, that Robin should die, and David alone should be able to carry on as though he had not. He cursed himself blue for his own callousness, but all the curses in the world could not change a thing, and all that was left for him to do was to do what little he could to help the others, who were suffering through a hell unimaginable.

Starfire took it the worst of all. Tamaraneans were not restrained in their emotional reaction to anything, let alone to something like this. David saw her but seldom, her eyes stained a permanent red with tears, unable to fly, head constantly bent down as though oppressed for the first time by the weight of gravity. And yet horrible as it was, Starfire's sorrow wasn't what scared David. What scared him was her _rage_.

The crime wave that the papers had so confidently predicted failed to materialize. It did so because, while the uninitiated might have thought that the criminals of Jump City would leap at the chance to commit crimes with Robin out of the picture, the fact of the matter was that Robin and the Titans had trained the criminal element of Jump City well. A handful of dim bulbs, vandals, miscreants, petty thugs who could not be bothered to think, behaved as though given free license to steal and murder. The majority however, whether metahuman or mundane, knew better. They had not survived in Jump City this long by being stupid, and as soon as Robin's death was made known to them, they all curtailed their activities, battened their hatches and hid. They knew what was coming.

The rest were taught. _Rapidly_.

Every night, Starfire left the Tower alone. Every night, she traveled the streets of Jump City, and sought for trouble, for criminals, for _targets_, and usually she found it. Every morning the police found her chosen victims beaten senseless, wrapped around light posts or hurled through cement walls. She refused to explain herself, not to the police, not to the press, not to the other Titans. Cyborg begged and pleaded with her not to go, or at least to take someone with her, and when she refused, tried to shadow her himself or to send David or Beast Boy to do so, but none of them, not even Beast Boy, could keep up with her as she dove again and again into the most violent, dangerous parts of town and left broken criminals strewn in her wake. None of the civic authorities complained, the men she thrashed nightly were lawbreakers after all, and yet everyone could feel her newfound ferocity like a shift in the wind. Perhaps she was taking some kind of revenge, perhaps she had a death wish, or perhaps, as David thought most likely, she simply could find no other outlet to release her inconsolable rage and pain. It was as though she was daring Warp or Slade or whoever else had killed Robin to come and find her.

One more worry for Cyborg to juggle.

Cyborg had taken Robin's death no better than the others, yet he, less so even than them, had not the luxury of falling into mourning or catatonia. His was the greatest weight of all. While no chain of command had existed in the Titans save that Robin led and the others followed, by a strange sort of unspoken, unanimous agreement, it was Cyborg upon whom the responsibilities of leadership now fell. Oldest of the Titans, and the only one remaining with any experience at leadership whatsoever, he did his level best to step into shoes that he and everyone knew could never be filled, but that needed filling regardless. The challenge demanded stoicism and fortitude beyond the ken of any teenager, and in David's humble opinion, Cyborg met it as well as anyone could have expected, shouldering a burden David could scarcely even guess at with nothing but grim determination not to let his makeshift family fall apart. Robin had been working on a plan to combat the threat of Trigon and Slade when he was killed, and it now fell to Cyborg to turn the plan into a reality, as well as to oversee the protection of the city, to deal with the civic officials and the press, and to try and keep the remaining Titans together and alive. David's overriding memory of Cyborg from these days was of a hulking figure, dimly visible by the light of a desklamp, trying to make heads or tails of paperwork or notes in Robin's shaky hand, for stretches so long that more than once he ran his batteries out, and the others were forced to handcart him back to the garage to recharge.

David could only try to help in his own inadequate fashion, which meant long hours of everything from upkeeping the garage when Cyborg could not spare himself to do so, to serving as a sounding board against which Cyborg could throw ideas or theories as to how they were supposed to defend themselves against Trigon's threat. Obviously, David was not the ideal person for this job, but it was his nonetheless, for the person whose job it should have been could not do it.

Robin's death had hit Raven harder than anyone but Beast Boy knew and anyone but David suspected. Already teetering on the edge of total despair given what she knew to be coming, and possessed of some kind of mystical connection to Robin that even Beast Boy didn't know how to describe, Raven outwardly remained calm, but inside, it was like a fire had died. The Tower no longer shook to her eruptions or nightmares, something any observer would have thought a good sign, but all of the Titans knew was not. She no longer shook the Tower's foundations because she was no longer fighting herself. Robin's death had been the last straw. She had given up all hope. They were _all_ going to die. Never talkative, she now seemed only partly aware of her surroundings, responding in monotone whispers to any question, no longer reading, no longer even meditating, remaining in her room, alone, save when called for.

Beast Boy did his best to bring her back, under circumstances so trying that David wondered how he could stay sane. He was as badly hurt as the rest of them, anyone with eyes could see that in his forced smile and red eyes, and yet he plastered his smile on regardless of how forced it was, and never let any of the others see him cry or despair. Nobody even bothered to groan at his jokes any more, certainly not Raven, whom he inflicted himself on the most, as though he could snap her out of the trough she had fallen into by sheer act of will. He spent hours, talking to her, forcing her to acknowledge his presence, trying to get her to react at all, if only to blow him through the window or threaten him with the wrath of ages. David, feeling as useless as ever, could do nothing but occasionally go on a patrol with Beast Boy, during which time his job was merely to smile and pretend to laugh at Beast Boy's jokes, and try to do _something_ to take his mind off of Raven.

He failed most, if not all of the time.

Days slipped by, one after the next, with no change whatsoever to this horrible new reality the Titans had found themselves in, and every day, David felt more and more helpless in the face of this terrible pall that had descended on his friends. Criminals were fought and went to jail, patrol routes were run, if more haphazardly, Cyborg even made a gesture at restarting Robin's training regimen. But all of them were simply going through the motions, locked in their own rage, despair, or impotence in the face of everything that had happened and all that was coming. And all David could do was watch in company with the nagging voices inside his own head as the calendar marched steadily towards the appointed end, and all hope of escaping the vaguely-defined doom that faced them all drained away like an ebb tide.

**O-O-O**

Gethsemane Baptist Church, on Chestnut street in the waterfront district of Jump City, had been through a rough month.

Positioned at the crux of a T-intersection between Chestnut and Union streets, its tall spire and stained-glass rose windows normally faced down Union towards Patriot Park and Jump City Bay. 'Normally' was the operative word, for the church's window frames were empty, the colored glass still on order, while the view of Patriot Park it normally commanded was marred somewhat by the ongoing construction work in the park itself, city workers replacing shrubs, benches, paths, and even whole trees after the last 'incident'.

Overall though, Pastor Bennett was reasonably satisfied with how things had gone. The deacon had assured him that all of the construction on the church would be complete within three weeks, which, as usual, had become four and now threatened to become five. Still, the building itself was finally finished, the roof no longer admitting rain, and all that remained was the internal work, meaning the church could once more be used. He'd been holding services where he could, even bringing in an old-style traveling preacher from Arizona to hold a revival in an enormous tent, but it was good to be back in a permanent home. The Sunday service had gone well, despite the plastic sheeting over the windows and the pile of construction materials where the organ was supposed to be.

Normally, the church was supposed to be closed during off hours, but the last week's services had been so well attended, and so many neighborhood passers-by had stopped in to see how work was coming, that Pastor Bennett had decided to leave it open to the public for a week or so. The contractors had agreed to work around the church's schedule, and as today was a Monday, they normally would have been assembling the wood paneling for the north wall, save that today was also Labor Day, and thus no work was being done. Accordingly, the church was very quiet, save for a couple of members of the choir who had taken the opportunity to practice the hymns for next week's service, and nearly empty, save for a handful of onlookers who stopped in for a few minutes a piece, a pair of old women who were whispering prayers to themselves in one of the pews nearest the podium, and...

... and _him_.

From where he was sitting, Pastor Bennett could see the young man well enough, not that he needed to in order to tell what he was doing. Sitting on the outside of the rearmost pew on the right side of the church, half-hidden beneath the shadows cast by one of the support pillars, his head was bowed, but not in prayer, and his eyes were downcast and covered with one hand like a veil. He looked almost as though he had fallen asleep in his seat, save that whenever the church doors opened, he would raise his head ever so slightly to see who was entering, and slide his free hand into his jacket. It took no leaps of brilliance to tell that the young man had a concealed weapon inside his coat, but Pastor Bennett did not call the police. Instead, against his better judgment, he had let the boy remain undisturbed, and so far at least, there had been no trouble.

The boy had simply shown up one day about a week ago without so much as a word, and had been showing up periodically since then, always during off-times, never during a service or a church meeting. Sometimes he only stayed for a few minutes, sometimes he was here for hours, sitting quietly in the back, not even looking at any of the people or objects around him, save for a quick glance to ensure that they presented no immediate threat. Neither weather nor loud construction deterred him, and none of the other parishioners so much as noticed his existence, so well did he simply blend into the background.

Churches tended to attract a lot of itinerant, troubled youth, especially ones whose doors were open to the public, and it shamed Pastor Bennett to remember that this was one of the reasons why most churches were not. There was, however, something very different about this boy. He did not have the look of a runaway or delinquent to him, despite being quite obviously armed. nor did he interact with anyone at all. A single glance seemed to be enough to satisfy him as to who was and wasn't a threat, even from far away, though how he made the distinction was beyond the Pastor. For the most part, Pastor Bennett had left him alone, but today he had finished the notes for next week's sermon early, and also his letter to the Deacon, and there was no construction to supervise. He could not return home while the church was still open, and he did not wish to close it, not yet at least. Accordingly, after watching the boy simply sit for a few, quiet minutes, he slowly stood up from the desk on the side of the church and walked over to the side of his pew.

"I hope the floor is interesting, at least."

The boy started and gave a soft gasp of surprise, his free hand darting inside his jacket as he looked up. For an instant, the look in his eyes was vacant and hollow, like he was staring right through the Pastor, yet a second or so later his eyes focused, and he remembered where he was and who had spoken. He relaxed, albeit slowly, and slid his hand back out of his jacket. "Sorry," he whispered, almost too quiet to hear.

Pastor Bennett stood there for a few moments, watching him carefully. "Do you mind if I sit down?" he finally asked. The boy looked back up, puzzled, but nodded silently and slid over in the pew to permit the pastor to have a seat. From where they were sitting, the ethereal sound of the choir singers practicing in on the other side of the church floated past like the disembodied voices of ghosts or angels.

"They're wonderful, aren't they?" asked the Pastor, folding his hands atop the back of the pew in front of him and watching the choir singers practice. "Practice four times a week, after school or work. You should hear them when they're actually performing."

"I can't," whispered back the boy, without looking up.

Pastor Bennett nodded simply. "I see," he said. "Is there a reason why not?"

"Yeah," answered the boy, but he did not elaborate.

"Fair enough," said the Pastor with a shrug, turning back to the choir, watching and listen for a few moments. The boy did not contribute a further remark, and so after a little bit, Pastor Bennett tried again.

"The acoustics will be better once the construction is finished," he said, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw the boy wince subtly. "We hang wood panels over the stone to make the sound fill the room better. There was an... incident here, not long ago. The church was destroyed, and we had to rebuild it. It should be quite a sight once everything is complete."

By now the boy was looking up at him apprehensively, but Pastor Bennett didn't turn his head, waiting as the boy slowly formed words into a quiet admission.

"I was..." he said, softly, "I was one of the ones who destroyed it."

Pastor Bennett nodded slowly.

"I know."

Without turning his head, Pastor Bennett saw the boy's expression change to surprise, and he smiled. "I read the papers, son," said the Pastor, "I know who you are. It takes more than jeans and a windbreaker to disguise that. Besides," he pointed at the boy's jacket," you're not very good at hiding that."

The boy seemed to shrink back down, his hand feeling the contours of whatever was held beneath his coat as he lowered his head.

"They call you 'Devastator', right?"

"Yeah," said the boy softly.

"If I might ask, that's probably not the name your parents gave - "

"David," said the boy suddenly, looking up again. "I'm David."

Pastor Bennett turned to David with a smile and an extended hand. "Jeremiah Bennett," he said. "Pastor of Gethsemane Baptist Church." David shook the Pastor's hand weakly, then seemed to stumble for words.

"I'm... sorry I blew up your church," he said finally.

"You didn't," replied Pastor Bennett. "A church is a community of people gathered in praise of God. What you blew up was simply a building, and I... assume you had your reasons for doing it." He smiled. "But thank you."

David nodded slowly, and seemed to sigh, as though resettling an enormous weight on his shoulder. He leaned forward, laying his arms on the back of the pew ahead of him, placing his head atop his arms, and closed his eyes. Pastor Bennett let him be for a few moments, and then ventured another question.

"Something tells me you didn't come here to apologize though," he said.

"No," replied David quietly, not moving his head. Pastor Bennett nodded.

"Are you a Baptist?"

David shook his head.

"A Christian?"

"I'm not religious."

Pastor Bennett nodded slowly. "Bit of an odd venue for someone who's not religious, isn't it?"

David took a deep breath and slowly let it out. "Should... I go?" he asked.

"Of course not," said Pastor Bennett, "all are welcome here, whatever their faith or lack. I was simply curious. You've been coming here, off and on, for five days. I wondered what would bring someone like yourself to do that."

David sat in silence for a few moments before shaking his head. "I don't know," he said.

Pastor Bennett nodded. "Well then," he said, "perhaps I can help you find out."

David looked up at Pastor Bennett quizzically. "Am I supposed to confess my sins or something?

"That's the Catholics, son," said Pastor Bennett with a smile. "We do things a bit differently."

David shrugged. "I... didn't come here to convert," he said. "Or to find God."

"Maybe not," said Pastor Bennett, "but you _did _come here. And if all you're here for is to listen to the choir practice and find a quiet place to think, then you're welcome to stay and I'll leave you be. But if there's something troubling you that drove you to come here, even if you don't know why," he shrugged, "then maybe I can help."

David turned his head slightly, looking sideways at the Pastor. "Don't... take this the wrong way," he said, "but... why do you want to help me?"

Pastor Bennett folded his arms. "Well, because I'm a preacher, son," he said, "and it's my job to care for the spiritual welfare of everyone, even non-believers. And because, like it or not, you're responsible for protecting this city, and everyone in it." He paused for a moment, gauging the young man's reaction. "And... to be perfectly honest," he said with a smile, "because the last time you entered this building, you blew it up, and if that's going to happen again, I'd rather have a bit of notice."

David didn't respond, but traces of a smile appeared at the corners of his mouth as he nodded and lowered his head, resting it on his arms once again. Pastor Bennett turned back to the choir.

"I assume it's about Robin?" he asked.

To his surprise however, David shook his head. "No," he said. "It's not. It ought to be, but it's not..." He lowered his head until his forehead was resting on the back of the pew before him. Pastor Bennett waited, and when an explanation was not forthcoming, he sought for one. Directly.

"What's wrong, son?" he asked.

David's voice was practically a whisper. "We're all gonna die," he said.

Pastor Bennett did not react. "You mean the rest of the Teen Titans?"

"I mean everybody," said David, and the Pastor could see his hands gripping the wooden pew tighter as he spoke. "The whole planet. You, me, everybody."

Pastor Bennett sighed softly. "Everyone dies, David. It's the way of things. I know that - "

"The world is about to end," said David, his voice choking as he did so, and he lifted his head as though it weighed fifty pounds, revealing wet eyes ringed in red. "It's gonna end soon. Maybe a week, maybe two. Fire and brimstone, all the worst parts of the Bible. Some guy who might actually be the Devil himself is going to appear and devour it. And when he does..." David trailed off, but his meaning was clear enough.

The Pastor waited for David to recover a bit. "And you all are trying to stop him?"

"We _can't_ stop him," said David, eyes filling with tears as he looked furtively at the Pastor. "We don't know how. Maybe if... if Robin were still here he'd have some kind of plan, but none of us know what to do. And so he's going to come, and we're all going to burn. He'll turn the Earth into Hell, or worse."

Pastor Bennett considered all this for a moment, but as he was doing so, David contributed something else.

"But that's not even why I'm here," said David all of a sudden. "I mean... I don't _know_ why I'm here, I don't believe in God, and even if I did I don't know how to pray. But the world's coming to an end. Robin's dead. The others are all just... they're... _broken_ without him." He glanced back at the Pastor as though looking for agreement or understanding, and received a nod in return. "All this stuff is happening, I don't know how to fix it or help or do anything useful... and despite all that, the _only thing_ I can think about is that this guy is coming for _me_, and _I'm_ probably going to die."

Pastor Bennett ventured a word or two of advice. "Son, it's... only natural to be - "

"I don't _care_ if it's 'only natural', it's _not _all right. Not for me. Not for us. It's like you said. We're responsible for everything. But even if we weren't, they're my friends. They're my _only_ friends. And instead of helping them, I can't stop worrying about what's gonna happen to _me._

It was only then that Pastor Bennett recalled that Devastator was the newest addition to the Titans.

"I mean," said David, and Pastor Bennett wasn't sure if the young metahuman was still talking to him or simply talking out loud, "I've _never_ known what to do, and that's... that's usually okay . It used to be enough to just do whatever the others were doing and sort of use common sense for the rest, you know?" He sighed. "But now none of _them _know what to do. And I'm not even trying to find out. I'm just scared out of my skull and sitting here because..." he trailed off for a second. "Because the person I'd usually ask about this is dead."

"David," said Pastor Bennett. "Whether you think it all right or not, it is not shameful to be afraid. Even Christ was afraid when he mounted the cross, and none of us are him, not even heroes. I guarantee you that even your friends are undergoing the same fear."

"Not like this," said David. "I mean, yeah, they're all afraid, I know that much. But... Raven's a wreck because she thinks she's responsible for this. Beast Boy's a wreck because _she_ is. Starfire's a wreck because Robin's dead and Cyborg's a wreck because he has to keep us all alive somehow." He grimaced and looked back down at the floor. "And I'm just sitting here like a little kid who wants his parents to stop fighting so that everything can go back to normal."

In some ways he was right, Pastor Bennett admitted to himself. Sitting here, in the rearmost pew, he looked like a skittish runaway fleeing some kind of domestic dispute. And yet this child, he reminded himself, had destroyed Cinderblock, battled devils of steel and flame alongside his fellows, and theoretically done so on behalf of the city itself. Just like his fellows, he was endowed with power far beyond the ken of normal men, his to employ or not as he saw fit.

"You're not a little kid," said Pastor Bennett. "You're a miracle."

David barely reacted to the term, save to wilt slightly and lower his head a bit more. "I'm not a miracle," he said.

"Of _course _you are," said Pastor Bennett, and he leaned down, framing his words as carefully as he could. "I've seen what you can do with your abilities."

"I didn't get my 'abilities' from God," said David. "None of us did."

"Well of course you didn't," said the Pastor. "You got them from magic or radiation or aliens or genetics. But why that makes you think that they don't derive from God?"

"Because I _don't_ believe in God," said David.

"But you _do_ believe in the Devil, Hell, and the End of the World. And you believed that you would find the answers to those things in a Church."

David didn't answer.

Pastor Bennett sighed. "David, I'm a Minister. God is how I approach the world. I see His presence everywhere, and I'm..." he hesitated, "I'm prepared to accept that not everyone does, for one reason or another. But if I'm understanding you right, the Devil, or something like him, is about to rise over the Earth and consume it with fire, and none of us, the rest of us that is, could possibly defeat him. And yet what should appear just as he is preparing to do so but a band of heroes armed with powers far beyond the prospect of even our mightiest soldiers and leaders? Each one of them is here, and so-armed, through a series of co-incidences and circumstances so incredible, that to even consider them is to boggle the mind." He smiled. "Even nonbelievers would call that a miracle."

"It's not enough," said David softly.

"Perhaps not," said the Pastor, "but a wiser man than me once said that when you say a situation is hopeless, then you're not just denying God, you're slamming the door in his face.

"You don't understand..." said David.

"No, I don't," replied Pastor Bennett, "but I don't have to understand." He smiled. "All I need is faith."

David sighed and shook his head. "In God?"

"In God," said the Pastor, gently placing a hand on the teenager's shoulder, "and in His miracles."

David took a deep breath and let it out slowly, staring off into space as though he could see through the pew in front of him.

"Some miracle," he said quietly.

"That's not for me to judge," said Pastor Bennett. "Nor for you to judge, incidentally. But since you insist on doing so, you should know that it is neither a sin nor a crime to fear for your own life. The only sin comes from living only for yourself, and never thinking of or working for others. And I don't believe, David, that even _you _are about to sit here and insist to me that you are guilty of that. Not when you and God alone know how many lives you've saved. Not when you're willing to sit down in a church and seek a means to push past your own fear and help your friends, even though you don't believe in God."

Despite everything, that seemed to bring a small smile to the young man's face, though he did not look up, and the Pastor smiled in turn and withdrew his hand, sitting back in the pew.

"You are not betraying your friends through fear, nor through helplessness. Your friends are faced with their own roads, and you will assist them as you can. If you have no faith in God, then you shall have to have faith in yourself, and, if you'll forgive an unpardonable cliche, in your friends, whom I doubt are as irreparably broken as you think."

David took in a deep breath very slowly, and let it out at equal speed. He sat up carefully, sitting back in the pew and watching the choir as it continued to practice. He said nothing, did not smile or turn his head, but his posture seemed to be slightly lighter, and the Pastor watched him for a few moments before venturing a question.

"Was that what you were looking for?"

That drew a soft smile. "Not really," said David. "But thanks."

"You're most welcome," said the Pastor.

"I... sort of thought when you sat down that you were going to..."

"Preach?" asked Pastor Bennett. David nodded. "Well what makes you think I didn't?"

David smiled. "You know what I mean."

Pastor Bennett didn't answer immediately, inhaling and exhaling slowly as he looked past David at the old women on the other side of the church.

"Can I tell you a story?" he asked. David simply nodded.

"I knew a young man once," said the Pastor. "Knew him from when he was an infant. His mother brought him here on Sundays, like clockwork. I watched him grow up. I took his profession of faith, and baptized him myself over there." He pointed to the screen on the far left side of the church that hid the annex containing the baptismal font. "It was his mother that brought him into the church. His father wanted nothing to do with us. It's... often like that."

The Pastor took another deep breath. "When he was... I'd say about your age, he was in an accident of some sort. A terrible one, by all accounts. His mother died, he was gravely injured, would have died himself but for the grace of God and modern medicine. Afterwards he was... disabled. He had a very difficult time coming to grips with what had happened to him. I attempted to assist him, as best I knew how to." The Pastor sighed. "I failed. I... pushed him too hard, and instead of bringing him back into our fold, I drove him away. I tried to convince him that what had happened was God's will, and that he needed to accept it as such. I was unable to understand what he was undergoing, and I fear that I made things much worse. Eventually he broke all ties to the church, and left us."

David nodded, but remained silent for a little bit. "What happened to him?" he finally asked.

"He found another path. His own path," said Pastor Bennett. "One that, I believe, brought him some measure of peace. I admit that I did not approve of it. I'm not entirely certain I do now. But I learned at least my role is not always to show people the path. Sometimes I'm here to help them walk it, even if it's the wrong one."

David had nothing to say to that, and sat back in the pew, though whether he was watching the choir or staring right through them, Pastor Bennett could not say. Several minutes passed before David cleared his throat slightly, and stood up.

"I should go," he said. "I'm not supposed to be here."

Pastor Bennett simply nodded, and watched the boy turn and walk towards the entrance to the church. Only when he had neared the door did the Pastor stop him.

"David," he said, and David halted and turned back.

"Yeah?"

"Would you do me a favor?"

"Sure," said David. "What is it?"

"When next you see Victor," said the Pastor, "would you..." he hesitated. "Would you tell him that... our doors will always be open to him. Even in the face of the end of the world."

David didn't answer for a few moments. When he did, the Pastor caught what looked like surprise in his eyes, though his voice was steady as a rock.

"Yeah," he said. "I'll do that."

"Thank you," said the Pastor. "And er... David?"

"Yes?"

"Our doors are open to you as well."

But David's only answer was a soft smile as he slowly turned and walked out the door of the church, looking for all the world like just another young teenager, giving those who passed him no hint of who he actually was.

Pastor Bennett walked back through his church, across the aisle and up to the small writing desk he kept in on the side of the baptismal alcove. He had his own office in back of course, but he found at times that he preferred to work in the body of the church, with the choir and the Sunday schools and the glass stained to represent scenes of the bible.

And so, sliding the letters to the deacon and his sermon notes to one side, unobserved by the choir or the few worshipers in attendance, Pastor Jeremiah Bennett folded his hands over the bare wood of his desk, lowered his forehead until it rested upon them, and slowly began to whisper words as familiar to him as his own name.

_"Our father, who art in heaven..."_

**O-O-O**

Upon later reflection, it was the baton that gave him away.

The key to invisibility was the total absence of defining characteristics. Someone trying to go unseen always wound up drawing attention to himself, acting outside the normal bounds of common behavior, attracting the eye of every passerby. For someone to truly be invisible, the best method was to be unremarkable in the strict, literal sense. There needed to be nothing about one that could be remarked upon, no purchase for a wandering intellect to grab hold of and use as the basis of suspicion. David had sort of half-known this back when he had actually been nobody, but he had not realized just how deeply the behavior had ingrained itself into his person until he had tried going out into the world without his uniform. Despite the fact that everyone knew him now, had seen his face in newspapers and on television, he had found that, given a simple desire to go unseen, he could reliably walk through a crowd of a thousand people without ever once being recognized.

It was both a relief, and not, at the same time.

Right now he had much to think about and little desire to be interrupted, and so he blended in with the crowds of pedestrians, not glancing up, another teenager absorbed in his own selfish thoughts, plain, unspoken, and safely ignored. He glanced up only to the extent that he had to in order to avoid walking into something or someone, and otherwise was content to simply return home to the Tower.

The difficulty with this particular form of invisibility though, was that you could not absolutely rely on it. None of the parishioners of the church had known who he was, but the Pastor had, for he had inadvertently drawn the Pastor's attention by his unexplained presence in the church. And someone who was actively looking for you, particularly somebody who had the capacity to use an X-ray filter on his eyepiece-lens and see the rather large lump of metal you were carrying under your coat, could still see you plain as day.

So it proved.

One second, David was walking down the street next to a series of Brownstone town houses, and the next, he was dangling forty feet in the air, encased in some kind of spherical energy field that crackled around him like ball lightning. Ordinarily this would have been the sort of thing that people noticed, save that a split second before he was unceremoniously abducted from street level, a car on the other side of the street backfired with a sound like a canon retort, echoing down the street and instantly attracting the attention of every passerby and driver. By the time the people below had determined that it was nothing but a car exhaust, David had been hoisted over the edge of one of the rooftops and vanished from sight, having disappeared without notice or trace as though he had been vaporized.

But very little of that was crossing David's mind at the moment, for having been bodily lifted into the air and pulled onto the roof of the Brownstone, he found himself staring face to face at two people he had hoped dearly he would never see again.

Gizmo was hovering about four feet off the ground, suspended by his harness, which had a pair of small fusion rockets extended from the back on either side of him, keeping him relatively stable. On his wrist was mounted an electrical gadget that David could not have identified in thirty years, but it was visibly projecting the energy field which had encapsulated and lifted him. He kept the device pointed at David, a satisfied smirk plastered on his face, and next to him stood another green-suited Hiver, See-More, who had managed to replace the headpiece he had recently lost, and was adjusting it to bring some kind of red filter down over his cyclopean visor, one no doubt that augured no good at all.

The forcefield that had picked him up felt as solid as carved stone, enclosing him like a hamster ball, and he pressed his hands against it trying to see if he could find any weakness, but whatever was projecting it was too well-built, too strong. It was not, however, soundproof. Through the crackling of the electric field, David could hear See-More and Gizmo's voices.

"Told you it'd work," said Gizmo, but he sounded surly and annoyed. There was a white bandage taped around his head and over one of his eyes, and while David had hardly known Gizmo for any length of time, there was none of the gleeful bloodthirsty grinning or absurdly childish insults that he normally spewed liberally about on anyone nearby. He looked irritable, not nervous but aggravated, like he did not want to be here, doing this, whatsoever. Of course, if he was still recovering from the coma Robin and Starfire had knocked him into, that only made sense.

"Where do you want him?" asked Gizmo, and David half expected them to dump him unceremoniously off the roof, but See-More just nodded with his head towards a spot opposite himself. "Just leave him there," said See-More, and Gizmo obediently lowered his hand, setting the electrical bubble down on the roof as gently as a passenger elevator, and then, to David's astonishment, dispelling the field entirely with the press of a button, leaving him standing on the roof, facing the two of them in silence. And before David's mind could come up with a rational explanation for why he had done that, Gizmo turned to See-More, ignoring David completely as he muttered something angry under his breath. "Make it quick," he said to See-More, and then without a glance backwards, he turned around and floated across the roof to an open doorway in an access stairwell, moving through it and closing it behind him with a click, leaving See-More and David alone atop the roof.

David honestly would have given even money at this point that See-More was about to execute him. "Make it quick" sounded ominous enough after all, but the cyclopean Hiver did no such thing, standing stock still, staring at David with one unblinking eye like a gargoyle on some ancient cathedral. He said nothing, gave no indication of what the hell they were doing here, until finally David could stand the tension no more and reached for the baton inside his jacket.

See-More shot him.

The laser that fired out of See-More's visor was low-powered, sufficient only to burn a hole through his jacket and burn the back of David's hand. It lasted barely a microsecond, but it was enough to raise a blister and cause him to reflexively cry out and withdraw his hand, as though he had touched a hot stove.

"Don't even try it," said See-More. "You're not that fast. You reach for it again and I'll burn a hole right through you."

The pain had sharpened David's wandering mind like few things could have, and a flash of anger pulsed through him. "I don't need it to blow you off this roof," he said, already reaching out to the molecules of stone and insulation that surrounded them.

Perhaps See-More could tell, or perhaps he just guessed. "You're not a match for me, man," he said. "And even if you were, there's three hundred people in this building. What're you gonna do, blow 'em all up?"

Right now, faced with a Hiver, David was almost willing to test the first part of that statement, but the second stopped him short. He slowly let the molecules go, his vision returning to normal. "What..." he said carefully, "what do you want?"

To his surprise, See-More looked almost as nervous as he did "I want to talk," he said.

"Talk?" David could scarcely credit his own ears. "You want to _talk_? About what?"

"I want _you_ to talk," said See-More. "You can start by tellin' me what the Hell is going on here."

David blinked, considered his position, and blinked again. "Are you _kidding_ me?"

See-More looked almost offended. "What?" he asked, putting one hand to his visor. "Do I _look_ like I'm kidding you? You start talking right now or I'll burn a hole through you big enough to fit a - "

"Go fuck yourself."

See-More froze like he'd been turned to stone.

"What did you just - "

"You heard me," said David, his voice so bitter, and yet so drained of emotion that even he was surprised, though he didn't show it. He had been worried, scared, bound up as tightly as an overwound watch ever since Robin died if not before, and this... this Hiver standing here demanding _answers_ from him just capped it all off. See-More absolutely had the capacity to just kill him where he stood, he didn't doubt that for a second. He just no longer cared.

"You have ten seconds," said David, "to get out of my sight. If you don't, I swear to God, you will die right here on this roof."

"You are _not_ gonna blow this building up," said See-More, though he sounded rather unavoidably like he was trying to convince himself. "No way."

"No," said David. "I'm not. What I _am_ gonna do is push this button." Before See-More could stop him, he slipped his hand into his front pocket and drew out his palm-sized yellow communicator, one finger atop the large panic button built into the side of it. "And when I do that, the other Titans are going to come boiling down here and rip you to pieces. They won't even have to touch the building."

Despite everything, there was a hint of fear in See-More's voice as he lifted his hand to his visor again. "You'll be dead before they get here," he said.

David didn't even hesitate. "And you'll be dead as soon as they do. You got away with killing Robin. You think that means you'll get away with killing me?"

"We _didn't_ kill Robin!" snapped See-More.

"What, you were just trying to 'talk' to him too?"

See-More said nothing, as David slowly approached him.

"I don't have time to sit here and talk to you," he said, his voice monotone and shaking, but not with fear. "And even if I did, it wouldn't change anything. You guys have done enough. Leave us alone."

All capacity to regard the Hive as a serious threat had simply been burnt out of him, half-replaced by a soul-draining apathy. He knew what he should have been doing, what he should have been saying, or how he normally would react, but right now he felt so divorced from the reality he had come to know that it was like he was reading about it in a book. If See-More wanted to shoot him, then what the hell did it really matter? They were all dead anyway.

But See-More didn't shoot David as he walked by. Instead, perhaps under the impression that he was still controlling the situation, he reached out, grabbed David's arm to make him stop and do as he commanded, and thereby found out what the _other_ half of David's normal equilibrium had been replaced with...

It all happened in a flash. There was no discrete thought process, no effort put forth, just a spike of boiling, savage rage that shot through him like a cannonball, and an instant later, See-More was laying smashed against the side of the roof, his visor in pieces around him, trying to figure out what in the hell had just happened. David was turned towards him, one hand extended like a magician, having just given the best impression of one of Raven's emotion-charged explosions that he had ever performed. So fast, so _viscerally_ had he lashed out with his powers that he didn't even remember doing it. Muscle and thought memory had taken over, and See-More had not even had a chance to blink. In another time this would have scared him, shaken him even. He had been positively _dreading_ the day when he developed his powers to the point where he could do something like this, still crippled by lingering fear of his own abilities. In normal times, he'd have hesitated.

These were not normal times.

"Sonofa_bitch_!" shouted See-More, and he reached to his belt for something, a weapon maybe, or a communicator. It didn't matter. There was a sharp 'crack', followed by a hollow 'thud' as an antenna snapped off of a radio aerial mounted on the roof and flew past David, burying itself in the low wall an inch from See-More's head where it lay quivering like an arrow from a bow.

See-More gave an incoherant yelp. "_Jesus Christ_!"

"The next one goes through your _throat_!" shouted David, literally shaking with pent-up fury. "I've got all the ammo I need up here!"

See-More froze.

The the low roaring sounds of Gizmo's rocket pack as the youngest Hiver raced up the stairs to assist his teammate could be heard plainly, but David didn't even glance backwards. Raising his other hand, he extended it back towards the door to the stairwell, and jammed the hinges with a pair of micro-explosions, a moment before a three larger blasts crushed the doorframe around the door. Nothing short of a battering ram would suffice to rip it open, a fact Gizmo discovered an instant later as he slammed into the suddenly-stuck door, and began swearing and frantically beating against it, unable to budge it in the slightest. David paid neither Gizmo nor the door any more mind, reaching into his jacket and drawing out his solid metal baton in one fluid movement, flicking it out with his wrist to snap it to full length, and then pointing it straight at See-More's unblinking eye, an instant before the entire baton burst into flames like the flaming sword of an avenging angel.

"_Don't_ _ever_ touch me," said David through clenched teeth, the flames from his baton dancing in his tear-filled eyes, "or I will _rip your fucking head off._" The baton shook in his hands as he clenched tightly enough turn his knuckles white, even as the false fire flickering off of it continued to build, until it was encasing his entire hand, and his eyes seemed to be practically burning themselves. "I will blow you to _pieces_ and scatter you over the city, _do you understand me?_"

Whatever See-More had been expecting, this was clearly not it. He blinked like a deer caught in headlights at the fire-breathing monster that had appeared where he had expected to find a nervous, emotionally-damaged teenager. Unable to think of what he should do to ward David off by force, he stammered what answer he could.

"I'm... I'm not here to fight you, man!" he said. "Calm down, all right?"

"Or _what_?" shouted David, stabbing at the air with his baton. "What will you do? Kill me? Kill the others? What do you have left to threaten us with? Are you gonna end the world _twice_?"

"Nobody's ending the goddamn world, all right?" yelled See-More desperately. "I just want to know what the hell is going on. Starfire's tearing half the city apart, and the rest of you guys just disappeared."

"Go ask Warp."

"I _would_ go ask Warp, except he's gone too! Even Jinx doesn't know where he is."

"Well of course he's gone," said David. "You did what he wanted."

"For the _last goddamn time_," said See-More as he started to get up, "we _didn't kill_ - "

The roofing material beneath See-More's feet shattered and flew upwards like a miniature volcano, dumping See-More back down onto the roof.

"Don't even _try_ to sell me that crap," snarled David. "All you did for _three years_ was try to kill Robin!"

"I didn't think we'd actually _do_ it!" protested See-More. "He was _Robin_ for God's sake! Besides, it's not like we pulled the trigger or something! We were out cold when he died!"

"Which is the only reason _any _of you are still alive."

"You think I don't _know_ that?" insisted See-More. "Have you seen us runnin' around celebrating? You think any of us are about to mess with Starfire or the rest of you?"

"I think it doesn't much matter what the hell any of you do!" shouted David. "You're all complicit in _the fucking apocalypse_! Do you _get that_?"

"I don't get a _goddamn thing_," yelled See-More back. "I don't know anything except what Warp told Jinx."

"And what did he tell her?"

"That we could do whatever the hell we wanted, except we couldn't kill you, and we couldn't kill Raven. Everybody else was fair game."

Despite everything, David's wrath subsided slightly, as a thought came to him. "Is... is _that_ why Jinx let me go back at the diamond mine."

"Man, how do _I _know why Jinx does what she does? Warp sent us there to get some kind of super-diamond, but you stole it back from here down in the tunnels, and to make it up to him, we had to agree to kill Robin. If you hadn't done that, we wouldn't have gone after him."

The wrath returned with a vengeance. "Are you trying to say that it's _my_ fault?" said David, advancing towards See-More, looking like he was considering feeding the baton to him.

"No!" shouted See-More. "No, no look. All I'm saying is that we thought we were just doing another thing, and then suddenly Robin's dead, you guys are breaking the walls down to get at us, and Raven's talking about how we're all gonna burn. Jinx either doesn't know what's going on or won't say, and I'm just trying to figure out what the _hell _is going on here, all right?"

David said nothing for a moment, still holding his baton out towards See-More like a red-hot firepoker. Slowly though, the flames died and vanished altogether, and David lowered his hand to his side.

"You want to know what all this is?" he asked.

"Yeah," said See-More. "That's all I'm looking for."

David carefully leaned forward. "This is you winning," he said.

See-More plainly was expecting some other kind of explanation. "... what?" he asked, perplexed.

"You win," said David. "You guys, the Hive. You won. You beat us. We lose, you win, you follow?"

He clearly did not follow, not based on the look of total confusion that came over his face. "Look, I don't know what you're talking about, so could you just tell me what..."

"You _beat us_," said David. "You _beat _the Titans. All those times you were fighting the Titans before this, before I even showed up even, all those plans you laid that they spoiled? _This_ is what it's like for you to pull them off. This right here, this is you winning the war. You killed Robin, you did what Warp wanted you to do, you _won_. Maybe Raven's wrong, and Trigon will even spare you guys when he shows up, I don't know..."

Scared See-More might have been before, but this admission simply un-nerved him. "Who... _what_ is Trigon?" he asked.

"Didn't Jinx tell you?" asked David. "Trigon's the end of the world. He's the Devil." He wiped his eyes, and found they were wet, tears having formed from the strain of the anger and fear wrapped around his stomach like a vice. "It doesn't matter who or what he is. He's some kind of doomsday. He's the sort of thing people like the Titans are supposed to stop. And now we're not gonna be able to."

"What, you're... you're not even gonna _try_?" he asked. It no longer mattered how strange it was that a Hiver was asking a Titan a question like that. The concept was so alien to See-More that he could remark on nothing else.

"Of _course _we're gonna try," said David. "But we're gonna fail. Flat out. All those evil speeches you guys like to give about how death is inevitable and you can't be stopped? Well this time you're right. The evil plan worked, and now the world is gonna burn."

With one motion, David lightly tossed his baton down onto the roof in front of See-More. It bounced once, then rolled along the roof before coming to a halt next to See-More's boot.

"You guys won," said David. "We lost. The details don't really matter. This is what happens when we lose." Slowly, David turned away, lowering his head as he did so.

"This isn't what we wanted," said See-More.

"Yeah it is," said David. "This is exactly what you all wanted. And now you've got it." He glanced back at the Hiver, intending to give him a look of total contempt, but all he could manage was a sad, tired, frown.

"I hope you're happy", he said. And then he walked away.

**O-O-O**

He did not turn back, not for an instant. His heart was thundering in his head so loudly that he did not even know if See-More was watching him leave quietly, or he was calling down all the curses of Hell on his head and screaming for him to stop. He blew the door out of its bent hinges and crushed doorframe with a wave of his hand, and walked straight past an astonished Gizmo without so much as a word. He didn't know if Gizmo had said anything either, but neither he nor See-More had tried to stop him by force. For that he was thankful. By the time he got to street level again, tears were welling up in his eyes again.

By the time he got three blocks away, he was shaking so hard that he could no longer walk.

He collapsed into an alleyway off of Battery Street, for all he knew the same one he and Terra had used for cover from Cinderblock all those endless weeks ago. His legs gave out as he entered it, and he fell to his hands and knees on the dirty ground, his head spinning like a top. A moment later a spasm tore through his midsection, and he coughed once, twice, before suddenly expelling the entire contents of his stomach up and into the gutter next to him. The emotions swirling through his head were too great, too much for him to deal with, and no sooner had he wiped the vomit off of his mouth, and sat back against the brick wall of the deserted alleyway than he began to weep.

To say that David was not given to showy acts of emotion was an understatement. He had not cried like this since he was a very small child, not since before he had realized that he had powers, for all he could remember not since his parents had died. But now, all of a sudden, he couldn't stop it. He did not cry because of any one discrete thing. It was everything all pouring out at once. He cried because Robin was dead, and because the Titans were shattered without him. He cried because the world was coming to an end, because billions of oblivious people were about to burn, because he was going to be one of them, no matter what he did. He cried because he was useless, because he could not help his friends, nor himself, nor anyone else for that matter, because he had some integral part to play in the end of the world that he did not understand, because he was a coward and a traitor and a hundred thousand other terrible things names that he flayed himself with. He cried because he had not had the courage or foresight to even try and implement one of the crazy, half-formed plans that had been running through his head at night. He had not disappeared in the middle of the night and vanished without a trace, even to the other Titans, hiding on the other side of the world to evade Trigon's sight. He had not convinced Raven to find a way to banish him to some other dimension.

He had not stepped off the roof of the Tower and dashed himself to pieces on the rocks below, freeing Devastator to choose another host halfway across the universe.

David wasn't suicidal, not by any stretch, and indeed that was the problem, that was what Warp and Trigon were counting on, and he knew it. Yet in the bitter watches of the night, unable to sleep, a hundred crazed ideas had come to mind, and not a few of them revolved around the fact that, in the end, something in Trigon's plan called for David to be present when he arose. Escape was impossible, save for the one, sure method of making certain that he was not here when Trigon appeared.

But he hadn't done it. He couldn't have done it, he knew that much. He didn't want to die. He wanted...

What _did _he want?

He knew the answer already, even if he had never vocalized it, never even dared think it aloud. The closest he had come to saying it was to Terra, when they were alone in the dark arena beneath the library, but even then he had held back from admitting the full truth, for fear that, like a ghost, acknowledging its existence would make it even more real. Today though, with his will broken and his mind assailed on all sides by his own fears, he could no longer avert his eyes from the one, simple fact.

He wanted to stay in the Tower.

He had been in Titans Tower for eight months, three as a guest, three in training, and another two as a full-fledged Titan. He remembered quite clearly wanting to leave after barely a week, even getting into a drawn out fight with Robin over it. The others had assumed it was because of the monsters that attacked them periodically. He had even told himself that for a while. But the truth was that the monsters had nothing to do with it. He had wanted to leave because he was ashamed, and because he was afraid. Ashamed because he was interfering with the insane, unworkable, and yet somehow perfect dynamic that the five orphan teenagers had going. Afraid because he knew on some level that this was the sort of thing he could come to want for himself, and be damned to the consequences.

He had been right on both counts.

He had turned himself, or rather permitted Robin to turn him, into a hero. He had the uniform and the powers to prove it. And yet heroes were driven by a need to do good and right by the world, to protect the weak and defend the innocent, and in his heart of hearts, David had _always_ known that he was not. It wasn't that he didn't want to do those things, any moral person did. Those things were _easy_ to want. What separated a hero from a normal person was that heroes were driven by a _need _to do them, had to do them, forced themselves to do them at all costs and all prices. Robin had thrown himself at monsters fifty times his size in defense of the city because heroism was so deeply ingrained into his psyche that he could literally not do otherwise.

But to David, heroism was merely a means to an end. Amazing as it was at times, rewarding as it was at times, to him it was a job, not a driving ambition. It was a job that provided a very specific sort of payment, not fame or prestige or wealth, something more valuable to him than any of them, even if it had taken him many months to realize it, and even more to admit to it.

Being a hero permitted him to stay with the Titans.

Everything else, _everything_ else, was secondary to this. The Titans were like no other people he had ever met, like no other friends he had ever had. Why this was, he did not know how to put into words, but he knew it with greater certainty than he knew anything else in the world. Being with the Titans these last few months had been like a dream, not because of the powers or magic or fame or even the Tower and all the goods therein, but because of the Titans. Because the Titans had had a makeshift, jury-rigged family of five, and they had somehow opened a place for him in it. There was no way of describing what that was like without devolving into schmaltz and cheap sentimentality, or resorting to anecdotes of Star's cooking or Beast Boy's games or the various conspiracies always floating about designed to get them all out of Saturday morning training sessions. Family, he had found, defied description. It simply was.

And having been brought into it by the intercession of a benevolent God, or lucky stars, or simply the willing trust of five extremely unique kids, David had come to the realization that this here was what he wanted. And to stay, to remain here, with his friends, he slowly realized that he would do _anything_. Robin had asked him to become a superhero, and he had, not without copious assistance from all of the others of course, but he had still done it, because if that was the price he paid to stay here, then it was one he paid gladly. Terra had lied to him, tried to kill him, set him up for Trigon, but it wasn't until Terra threatened to turn the other Titans against him by making it appear as though he was a traitor that he had learned that there _was_ actually something he would kill for. They all knew that Terra had tried to kill him in their battle in Patriot Park. What none of the others save Starfire knew was that the attempt had been mutual. And just as he had not realized that he would kill for something until that moment, it wasn't until his long conversation with Jinx in the Diamond Mine that he realized that... given a change in circumstance, he would do almost anything else. If the Titans had been criminals, he would have willingly committed crimes just to stay with them. He would have joined the HIVE academy, served under criminal masterminds...

... maybe even made a deal with Trigon himself.

But some things could not be helped, not even with all the willingness in the world. Robin was dead. Trigon was coming. These were immutable facts that could not be negated by any means at his disposal. It didn't matter what he wanted, or what he would do to get it. They could not stop Trigon. All they could do was die in the attempt.

Pastor Bennett had spoken of the necessity of hope, but with Robin dead, and the others shattered, what hope _was_ there? Even the HIVE had noticed. See-More hadn't needed to know what exactly was coming in order to know that the wind had changed for the worse. He had been right, before, despite their 'victory', the HIVE had been as quiet as churchmice since Robin's death. Perhaps they feared Starfire's retribution, to say nothing of the others. Or perhaps Jinx knew more than she had told the others.

"You all right, son?"

David lifted his head and turned to see a man in a business suit standing in the entrance to the alleyway, a concerned look on his face. Still crouched next to a puddle of vomit, David slowly stood up, his stomach still performing calesthetics inside him. He held onto the wall for support as he shakily walked out of the alley.

"I'm okay," he said. "Just... a little sick is all."

"You need help getting home?" said the man, who clearly didn't recognize who he was talking to. "I can give you a lift if you - "

"No," said David, "thanks, it's okay. I'm not far."

The man nodded. "Well you take it easy then, son," he said, patting him gently on the back. "Gettin' home's the best cure for anything that ails you."

David hesitated only the briefest of seconds, raising his eyes to meet the man's, but only for an instant. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, it is..." And then thanking the man once more with a nod and a forced smile, he made his way off down the street, towards the hidden tunnel that led back to the Tower.

Or by another name... home.

**O-O-O**

The Tower was quiet, as ever these days. Starfire was either out or in her room somewhere, and the others were nowhere to be seen or heard. Even when things had been normal, the Tower had had quiet periods, but these were different, they were sharper, more oppressive, like orchestral music missing a vital instrument, so that the absence showed up more clearly than that which _was_ present.

But for all that, it was still home.

He took the elevator up from the basement and went to his room to change, for he'd smeared dirt and motor oil all over his jeans and jacket between his encounter with See-More and with the alleyway. He had a couple other sets of street clothes, mostly borrowed from Beast Boy, but instead of those, he changed back into his uniform, with whose reds and oranges he had never managed to be comfortable in public, but had come to represent 'normality' around the Tower. When in Rome...

He walked into the common room expecting to see nobody, but Beast Boy was there already, curled up on the couch in the form of a housecat. For a second, David thought he had to be asleep, and was going to turn and leave the room, but the sound of the door opening stirred him, and he opened an eye, saw David, raised his head, stretched in a typically feline manner, and then returned to his human form.

"Hey, dude," he said with a yawn. "Where you been?"

Despite everything, David managed a thin smile. "Just... out for a while," he said. "How's it going?"

Beast Boy shrugged. "S'okay," he said. He glanced around the room. "You uh... you wanna play some Monkey Racer?"

Beast Boy's voice betrayed that everything was not going okay, and that this request was just an attempt at a facsimile of normal life, but it was no less heartfelt for that. Beast Boy had been trying his level best, trying almost _desperately_ to return everyone to something like normal. For his sake if nothing else, David had tried to play along, and likely would have accepted the invitation had Beast Boy not pre-empted it.

"Oh, wait," he said. "I forgot. Cy said he wanted to see you when you got back. He said he'd be in the evidence room. We'll play a round after, okay?"

Right now David did _not_ want to go to the evidence room, nor any other place pervaded with Robin's missing presence, but even if Cyborg hadn't been in charge now, David would not have refused a request like that. "Sure," he said to Beast Boy. "I'll be back soon as I can."

That much was true at least.

Months ago, some wit (probably Beast Boy) had dubbed the evidence room the "Birdcave", even going to the lengths of taping up a modified Batman logo to cover the metal plate that clinically explained what every door in the Tower led to (something Cyborg had added at long last). The joke was no longer funny, but even though the paper had been taken down, the place still _felt_ like Robin's lair, wallpapered in press clippings detailing crimes of all sorts, and filled to capacity with computers, evidence lockers, forensics equipment, and all manner of other devices that defied description.

Cyborg sat in the corner, head bent over a pile of paper at least a foot deep. He too looked almost asleep, and it wasn't until David cleared his throat for the second time. Raising his head suddenly, Cyborg turned around and saw David standing there, and let out a visible sigh of relief, though for what reason, David didn't know.

"Hey, man," he said. "How you doin'?"

Right now, David wasn't sure. "I'm okay," he said, temporizing.

Perhaps Cyborg sensed it. "You sure?" he asked. "You look a little pale."

David sighed. "I'm just tired," he said. 'Tired' was the euphemism they had all seemed to collectively agree upon as the proper term for dancing around everything that was really the matter but didn't fit into words. "BB said you wanted to see me?"

"Yeah," said Cyborg, and he let a deep breath out, as though not relishing this task. "Look, man," he said. "You can't be goin' out like that by yourself anymore."

David lowered his eyes. "I had my communicator, Cy," he said. "And Starfire was out too, wasn't she?"

"Yeah," said Cyborg, "but we know they can jam the comms, and if I could stop Star from goin', I would, but she won't listen to anybody. All we need now is for Slade or whoever to get you too."

"They're not trying to kill me, Cy," said David. "They need me to be here, remember?"

"Look, we don't know what the hell they wanna do with you. And I ain't too keen on findin' out by surprise. So just... if you gotta go somewhere, take somebody with you. BB'll go with you, hell _I'll_ go with you if you want. Just... don't go alone, all right? Do me that favor."

David sighed. "Sure," he said. "I won't do anymore."

Cyborg took another deep breath and released it, deflating like an overfilled balloon as he did so. "Thanks, man," he said, and as he leaned forward and shut his human eye for a second, David noticed how utterly spent he looked. Even his robotic parts seemed dulled, bent down under the weight of trying to pick up where Robin had left off, and instantly, David regretted having made even the minor protests he had. Cyborg didn't need anything more to worry about.

"How's it coming?" he asked, trying to shift topics.

Cyborg rubbed his human eye with his robotic hand. "I don't know," he said. "I just don't know. I mean I can build that safe room Robin was talkin' about, but I cannot figure out how the hell we're supposed to keep Slade from just walkin' right in here with an army and takin' Raven and whatever else he wants with her. I mean, even _with_ Robin, this was gonna be almost impossible, but now..." he trailed off as he shifted through some of the blueprints on the desk absent-mindedly, and sighed. "I'll think of somethin'," he said unconvincingly, but David nodded anyway.

"Is there... some way I can help?" asked David.

"Not unless you got some secret weapon I don't know about," said Cyborg without looking up. A moment later he seemed to realize how that sounded. "Sorry," he said, turning back to David. "I meant that it's all right, I got this. Just uh... do me a favor, and check and see if Star's back, will ya?"

"Sure thing, Cy," said David.

"Thanks, man," said Cyborg. "Now if I could just figure out what the hell's actually gonna happen, maybe we can start doin' something about it."

Cyborg returned to his work, evidently expecting David to leave, but David did not, not immediately anyway. Something had stopped him, something that had been buzzing around in the back of his mind since this afternoon, since his talk with the Pastor, his confrontation with the Hivers, and his soul-searching in the alleyway. He hadn't even been aware of it, stewing back there, not until he had thrown up in the alley, and even then it had remained nameless, identity-less, just one of a thousand foolish ideas that he had paid no mind to.

"_All I need is faith in God_," had said the Pastor, "_and in His miracles._"

"_Thou preparest a table for me in the presence of mine enemies,_" had said the Archbishop, "_and I will fear no evil._"

"_I'm not here to fight you, man,_" had said the Criminal, "_I'm just trying to figure out what the hell is going on here, all right?_"

And then, like the answer to a long-pondered riddle striking out of nowhere the instant it had been put out of mind, all of a sudden, David knew what he had to do.

"Cy?"

Cyborg raised his head, hesitated, and turned around, obviously surprised to see David still standing there. "You sure you're okay, man?" asked Cyborg. "What's up?"

David blinked a couple times, and tried to muster the appropriate words.

"Can I make a suggestion you won't like?"

**O-O-O**

The first indication that Beast Boy had that anything had happened, was an explosion.

Explosions were not exactly rare in Titans Tower, not between Raven, Starfire, David, and the small arsenal of bombs that were lying about. Still, this one sounded _bad_, or at least loud, and in an instant he had switched to the form of a hummingbird and was flying down the halls towards the source of the blast. He was reasonably certain that he was going to find either David or Raven in the center of it. Most all of them could produce explosions at need, but Raven did so by accident, and explosions were sort of David's 'thing'.

He was right, but not in the way he'd expected.

He raced around the final corner and swerved in mid-air to avoid running straight into Raven, who was standing in the doorway of the evidence room, watching the proceedings as Cyborg stood in the center of the room and tried, through entreaties and his own physical presence, to prevent Starfire from killing David.

Or so it appeared at least.

He buzzed past Raven's ear and landed in the evidence room, instantly resuming his human form. "Dude!" he exclaimed, though even he wasn't sure who he was addressing. "What's going on?"

Starfire ignored him. Indeed Starfire looked like she had taken leave of her senses. "Perfidity! she yelled. "Faithlessness! Profanation! This is an _outrage_!"

"Star, for _God's sake_," said Cyborg, "calm down! We're just talkin', okay?"

Starfire plainly had no intention of calming down, as the green starbolts around her fists attested to. David was watching her like a swimming watching a Tiger Shark, which given the still-smoking scorch marks on the floor, was probably a good idea.

"I will _not_ countenance such a betrayal!" declared Starfire. "It is an _affront _to Robin's memory that you would suggest such a thing!"

"Star," said David, keeping back as he tried to explain itself, "we don't have a choice. There's no-one else."

His reply was in the form of a Starbolt, which smashed into a black shield that Raven conjured around David an instant before it hit. The Starbolt was not of lethal size or full power, but it still made quite a point, and David nearly fell backwards in trying to avoid it.

"Jesus, Star that's _enough_!" said Cyborg in a commanding tone, and he grabbed her wrist, not hard, but securely. For a second, Beast Boy thought that Starfire was about to pitch Cyborg over her shoulder (she could do it), but she retained enough self-control to refrain from doing so, giving Raven an opening to ask a much-needed question.

"Okay," said Raven, "what's going on here?"

"David thinks he's got a way for us to stop Slade," said Cyborg, though he did not look back at David and he did not elaborate, leaving David to explain as best he could.

"Look," he said, obviously expecting the others to react in a similar manner to Starfire. "The way I see it, even if Robin thought that we could stop Trigon's army from getting Raven when the time came, without Robin we don't have much of a shot at it. And Slade or Warp or whoever's running the show has gone to a lot of trouble to make sure that nobody can help us when the time comes. I mean we've called everyone right? The Justice League, the Doom Patrol, the Titans East, everybody's been called away."

"Yeah," said Beast Boy, "so?"

"So," said David. "There's one group of people who _could_ help us that Slade and Warp _haven't_ thought of."

Nobody said anything, so Beast Boy bit. "Who?"

It was Cyborg who answered, and the disgusted look on his face made it plain what he thought of this idea. "The Hive," he said.

Beast Boy blinked in astonishment. Even _Raven_ looked surprised. This here was a notion that had not crossed his mind in a thousand years. Indeed he _still_ could scarcely credit the suggestion. "You want us to get the _Hive_ to help us?" he asked, unable to believe the words he was saying.

"Look, I know they're criminals," said David, holding his hands up defensively to ward of argument, or perhaps attack. "But they're also the only Metahumans left in the city besides us, and Warp and Slade won't be expecting us to turn to _them _for help. If they did, they'd have made sure the Hive were on the other side of the planet or dead by now."

"Well yeah," said Beast Boy, "but, dude, they're _bad guys_, they're our enemies."

"I know," said David, "I know but, Raven..." he turned to the sorceress. "If Trigon shows up and wins, he's gonna kill them too, right?"

Raven nodded carefully. "That's right."

"So then unless the Hive all have _death wishes_," said David, "they should be willing to help us."

"But aren't they working for Warp?" asked Beast Boy.

"Jinx was the only one who knew that, and she told us herself that it was so that Trigon would spare them when he showed up. But Raven told them what Trigon's actually gonna do, and I think they believed her. See-More and Gizmo jumped me on my way back to the Tower and - "

"Whoa, _wait a minute_," said Cyborg, whirling around. "You didn't tell me nothin' about - "

"Cy, _please_," said David, almost desperately. "They jumped me because they wanted to know what was going on. They were _scared_. See-More told me that Jinx said that Warp had disappeared and Jinx didn't know where he'd gone to. He wanted to know if Raven was telling the truth. Even if they _are_ working for Warp, I think they've realized that it's not gonna save them."

Beast Boy had more questions, but he was not given a chance to ask them, for in that moment, Starfire wrenched her arm out of Cyborg's grip, walked the three paces between her and David, and before anyone could do anything, grabbed David by his collar and slammed him into the back wall, holding him up off his feet against the wall with one hand, her eyes glazed over in neon green.

"The Hive _murdered _Robin," said Starfire.

Nobody else breathed. David looked like he was staring down the barrel of a cannon, but he managed to conjure up a few words.

"Yes," he said. "They did."

"And now you would have us seek their assistance against the _rest_ of Robin's murderers?" demanded Starfire, lifting David higher off the ground. David was shaking like a leaf in the wind, but still he replied.

"Yes," he said. "I would."

"How _dare_ you!" shouted Starfire, tears streaming from her eyes as she shook David like a rag doll. "After all that Robin did for you, is _this_ how you repay him? How can you even _think_ of casting his memory aside like that! Seeking succor from his own _murderers_ when you _know_ that Robin would not have wanted us to - "

"Robin's _dead_, Star!" exploded David all of a sudden. "I don't think he wanted _that_, either!"

The sheer, stark _bluntness_ of that statement stunned Starfire, stunned _everyone_ into silence. And given his chance, David let loose a flood.

"If Trigon wins," said David, his voice cracking under the strain of his emotions, "then the whole world is gonna burn and everyone, including us, is gonna die. The way I see it, Star, _anything_ we do that doesn't end with that is a good thing because _I don't want to die_, and I don't want _you_ to die, and I don't want _any of us_ to die, and I don't think it _matters_ if that's what Robin would want us to do or not!" Tears rolled down the sides of his face, and he wiped them away with the back of his sleeve.

"And if you _do_," he said, "then that's fine, but _don't tell me_ about what Robin did for me because you have _no idea_ what I owe Robin..." He stared down into Starfire's eyes, which were slowly losing their fiery glow. "... or what I owe you."

Starfire didn't reply. Maybe she couldn't. What she did do was slowly lower David back down onto the ground, and release him, whereupon he instantly collapsed back against the wall, sliding down it until he was seated, with one hand held over his eyes. His breath came in ragged hisses, and tears stained the collar of his uniform. Beast Boy crossed over and crouched down next to him, laying a friendly hand on his shoulder as he slowly calmed down.

"BB," said Cyborg. "What do you think?"

Honestly, Beast Boy didn't know what to think, but Cy was asking him the question, and he answered as honestly as he could. "Way I see it, dude," he said, "Robin wouldn't have wanted us to die either. I say we call the Hive." Neither Starfire nor Raven nor Cyborg responded to this, but David lowered his hand and raised his eyes, as if unable to credit that he had heard him correctly.

"Raven?" asked Cyborg.

Raven had contributed barely a word to all the goings on, and now only sighed softly. "It's not gonna matter," she said. "The Hive can't stop Trigon any more than we can."

"They can't hurt," said David.

"Yeah, they _really _can," said Cyborg. "But that ain't what I asked."

But if Cyborg wanted a clear statement one way or the other, he was to be disappointed. "If you think we should do it," said Raven, "then go ahead."

Cyborg seemed to realize that this was all he was going to get from Raven, and slowly turned his head.

"Star?"

Starfire had turned away from the others, standing facing the corner with her head lowered. She did not respond to Cyborg's question immediately, but Cyborg didn't repeat it. Beast Boy and David both watched her and waited. Nearly a minute passed before she responded.

"They will not speak ill of Robin," she said, not a condition but a statement of fact, "nor will they act in a manner that would tarnish his legacy." She turned around slowly, and the others could plainly see the tears running down her face to her gorget, and her voice was pained, but left them in no doubt as to her sincerity. "If they do these things, they will be destroyed."

Slowly, all of the other Titans turned their eyes back to Cyborg, who was standing, grim-faced and silent in the middle of the room. Nobody asked the question that they were all thinking. Nobody needed to.

"All right then," said Cyborg at last. "I'll make the call."

**O-O-O**

Mammoth crossed his arms and stared down at Cyborg like he was considering which part of him tasted the best. A scowl, ugly even for Mammoth, was plastered on his face.

"You got one hell of a nerve, callin' us," said Mammoth, and the various copies of Billy Numerous nodded in agreement. "'specially after what you did."

"Boy," said Cyborg, not bothering to keep the anger out of his voice, "you don't wanna be talkin' to me about that right now." He leaned against the cabinet in front of him and stared implacably at the screen, trying to focus on Jinx, who stood in the center of her team with her arms crossed. "Way I hear it, you all did what you did 'cause you thought it would buy you a Get out of Armageddon free card. There ain't no such thing. You want to survive this, then you help us. Period. You do what we say, when we say it, and you do it with no complaints and no conditions. You break any of the rules, and I let Starfire pull your heads off."

Jinx said nothing, indeed she didn't even twitch. Whatever was running through her head was beyond Cyborg's capacity to discern, at least via video-screens. Based on what David had said after escaping the diamond mine in her company, Jinx still harbored a bitter grudge against him for the deception he had pulled on her and her friends during his infiltration of the HIVE academy, but right now he frankly had better things to worry about.

Jinx may not have made her feelings felt, but next to her, Gizmo certainly did. "Let you snot-guzzlers call the shots?" he asked, looking mortified at the very concept. "Why the hell would we agree to that?"

"Because it's your only chance of getting out of this alive. If you don't help us, and we do beat him, then Starfire's gonna celebrate by playing drum set on your ribs with a tire iron. And I'm gonna help her. And if we lose, Trigon's gonna light the whole world on fire and roast you all like marshmallows. You feel like riskin' those odds?"

"Oh screw this," said Gizmo. "This guy's your problem, we don't need to - "

"We'll do it," said Jinx.

Gizmo recoiled as though he'd been slapped in the face. "_What_?" he shouted, whirling around to face Jinx. "Are you out of your - "

"Yeah, I agree," said See-More, cutting Gizmo off. "We're in."

Gizmo blinked in pure stupification, like the world had just turned into a surreal nightmare. Cyborg had to force himself not to laugh as he blew his top, raging and screaming incoherent epithets at both Jinx and See-More. Mammoth scratched his head, looking puzzled, and Billy began an animated conversation with himself. From Jinx' expression, it appeared this was all perfectly normal.

"You keep Starfire on a leash, and make sure the police don't interfere, and we'll help you take down this demon of yours," said Jinx.

Frankly, Cyborg had expected this to take longer. Gizmo was still speculating wildly (and loudly) about Jinx having lost her mind. Cyborg suspected something else.

"How do I know you're not about to run off and tell Slade everything I just told you?"

Jinx didn't bat an eye. "You don't," she said. "How do I know this isn't just some ploy to get us out in the open so that Starfire or Batman can take a crack at us?"

There was a moment or two of silence.

"Be here at eight o'clock tomorrow," said Cyborg. "Bring _everything_ you've got. Guns, mines, rocket launchers, magic, whatever it is, you'll need it."

"We'll be there," said Jinx crisply. "And Victor?"

Cyborg did not flinch at the use of his real name, though it took physical effort not to. "Yeah?"

"If any Titans lays _one hand_ on us," said Jinx, "Trigon won't have to kill you."

Jinx had always known how to deliver a threat and make it stick, Cyborg remembered that much from the academy. But then he was no slouch either. He leaned forward slightly and smirked.

"And if any of you so much as _breathe_ wrong, especially in Starfire's direction, not even Trigon will be able to save you."

Jinx considered Cyborg's words for a moment. "See you tomorrow," she said. And an instant later the screen went black.

Standing in the middle of the darkened room, Cyborg took a deep breath and let it out all at once, slowly rubbing his human eye with his hand. "You didn't say much," he said without turning around.

"What was I gonna say?" asked David from the shadows behind. "You know them better than I do."

"You know," said Cyborg. "I didn't bring this up before, but there's something else."

"What's that?"

Cyborg turned around. "What happens if they screw us?"

"What do you mean?"

"What happens if they tell Slade or Warp all about our defenses before the day comes? Or better yet, what if they wait until Slade comes for Raven and then stab us all in the back? I wouldn't put it past any of 'em, so what happens if they do that?"

David sighed and lowered his head. "Then we all die," he said.

Now it was Cyborg's turn to sigh. "Yeah, I figured you'd say that."

"Look, Cy, I don't have a plan. I just had... an idea. I don't know what we're supposed to do, with or without the Hive. It was just some stupid - "

"It ain't a bad idea."

David hesitated. "It's not?"

"Hell no," said Cyborg. "They got no interest in seein' Trigon win, and they got enough firepower to really make a difference. If they do what they're told, it'll double our juice for the big throwdown. And they might act like a bunch of punks, but they know how to hold their own. 'Sides, it don't matter if it's a good idea or not now anyway. They're comin'. Now we just gotta hope it's enough."

"Yeah..." said David.

"Get some sleep," said Cyborg. "I gotta get ready for tomorrow. It's gonna be a looooong day..."

David, already fighting back yawns, stood up and walked over to the door. "G'night, Cy," he said.

"Night."

Punchy with fatigue, worn out by everything that had happened today, David slowly made his way back towards his room. But before he got there, he turned a corner in one of the hallways, and saw ahead of him someone waiting in the shadows, invisible save for a silhouette.

But he knew who it was instantly.

He stopped, standing in the hall like a statue, facing the obscured figure.

"Have the HIVE been summoned?"

David nodded. "Yes," he said.

"And did they accept the summons?"

"Yes," he repeated. "They'll be here tomorrow."

Slowly, Starfire stepped out of the shadows and walked towards him. David didn't know what she intended to do, but he held his ground regardless. He had no energy left to run with anyway. Star's face was streaked with tears, but she moved with precision and poise, slowly walking over to him.

"There is something I wish to say," she said.

David winced, visibly. "S... Star..." he stammered. "Please, I... I just - "

"Please," she said, "permit me to say only this." David closed his eyes and nodded.

"I simply wished to say that... while you are correct in that I do not know what debt you owe to Robin, I do not believe that you owe me one. Nor have I ever."

David began to tremble, his voice quivering as he managed only to whisper an answer. "Star..." he managed to say. "I didn't - "

"But most importantly," said Starfire, laying a hand gently on David's shoulder as he slowly opened his eyes and looked up at her, "I desired to say that I do not wish for you to die either."

The simple statement, the sincerity in Starfire's voice, simply destroyed him on the spot, and before he knew what was happening, tears were streaming down his face for the second time today. His body convulsed, and he either lost his balance or was pulled forward, for a second later his head was pressed against Starfire's shoulder, and he was quite literally crying on it. His hands shook, his entire body was racked by uncontrollable sobs, and yet he did not fall to the floor, as he otherwise assuredly would have, for Starfire reached around and gently placed her other hand on his back, and held him there effortlessly.

The reasons for crying were all the same, the troubles still as omnipresent as ever, but if there was one lesson that could be taken, it was that, no matter the circumstance, no matter the crisis, the presence of a true friend, the sort of which David had not thought existed a year ago, made everything a thousand times easier to bear.

Even if only for a little while, it was miracle enough.

* * *

**Author's Note:** If you have read this far, whether you enjoyed the chapter or not, I beg that you leave me a review, no matter how brief, to profit thereby, so that next time I may render you, my faithful readers, a chapter that is closer to the qualities you truly deserve. Thank you.


	31. Red Storm Rising

**Disclaimer:** Come Hell or High Water, I shall likely own nothing of this work. This is as it should be.

**Author's Note: **Greetings.

It has been a long, _long_ time since last we spoke, and for that I am very sorry. As always with things like this, the real world conspired to force me to abstain from this story for a time, and when I was able to write once more, the chapter itself fought long and hard with me. I will say in my own defense that the chapter never left my thoughts this whole time, even when all I could scrape together was five minutes to work at it. But finally, this past month, time was afforded me, and I have completed it.

There are no apologies I could give that would be adequate for an absence of this length, and I know it well. One reviewer (who unfortunately did so anonymously and thus I was not able to respond to him) even suggested that something might have happened to me. While I am hardly eager for such a fate, I am afraid I have no such dramatic excuse to give, nor any act of contrition to make save for the chapter below. It is my longest ever, for there was much that I wished to get into it, and I did not constrain myself in space terms of space. I am certain that many people who previously had read this story have long-since lost interest with it, and that is perfectly understandable, for it has exceeded in scope anything even I had anticipated for it. For those who still have any interest however, I beg and plead as always that you leave behind a small token in the form of a review, no matter how scathing you make it. Only through feedback can I improve it, and after all this time, it would be a shame indeed for it to not be improved at all.

I have spoken enough here, and so shall leave you all to read the chapter as you see fit. I hope sincerely that you enjoy it, for my goal throughout this entire project has never been other than to write things which people might wish to read. Thank you all once again, my abject apologies for my long (and now concluded) absence, and please, enjoy the chapter.

* * *

**Chapter 31: Red Storm Rising**

_"Do not go gentle into that good night,  
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."_

- Dylan Thomas

**O-O-O**

"I have to say, David," said Slade, "even by the standards of the Titans, your capacities for self-delusion never cease to amaze me."

Smoke wafted across David's face, even down at ground level, an acrid, bitter, brimstone-tinged smoke that forced open the sinuses and refused to let the mind focus on anything else. A smoke without fire, one that choked the air out of his lungs with just a whiff. His chest burned with each breath, and he had to fight to stay conscious. He was losing the fight and he knew it, but he had to endure, just a few moments longer.

_Concentrate_.

"This was all ordained long ago by beings mightier than you can even envision. By prophecies written in the blood of angels. Did you _actually _think you had the slightest chance in the world of stopping it? You or any of your friends?"

There was something lodged in his stomach, something hard and sharp that should not have been there, a fragment of rock or shrapnel perhaps. His entire body throbbed so badly that he couldn't feel any pain from whatever it was discretely, and his only indication that it was there was how much it generally hurt to breathe. He couldn't focus his eyes on anything, there was nothing but an indistinct red blur all around him, or at least all around the area he could see with his head laying on its side on the ground. Red was everywhere, blocking his sight, no matter what he did, or what method he used to look at the world

_Concentrate! You know what to do._

Heavy footfalls, moving towards him, pushing through the soft roar of the flames and the distant screams of the others, those who were still alive at least. He could not guess what horrors they were being subjected to, nor even identify the voices, not at this distance. Roaring flames and the guttural cries of Slade's army of fire demons blocked all attempts to locate them by sound. And yet, through it all, the damnably calm voice of Slade kept cutting right past all interference, as though he could will the words straight to David's ears.

"At a certain point," said Slade, sounding almost amused, "one realizes that there is no purpose in fighting further. I don't really care what it takes to bring you to that point, but I'd appreciate it if you'd stop wasting my time with childish gestures of defiance."

_Ignore him. Just find your focus and use it!_

David tried to answer, but nothing came of it except a soft cough and the taste of blood in his mouth. He slowly reached a trembling, shaky hand towards the baton that he knew had to be laying somewhere to his right, feeling with his fingers over the bare rocks splattered with his own blood. He had just found it, just seized it with his good hand, when Slade's foot landed right in his field of vision and he felt the heat on the back of his neck as Slade crouched down.

"Come now, David," said Slade, conversationally, "you didn't think that the pitiful resistance you could muster would actually stop this from happening, did you? You haven't the capacity to save your friends, or yourself, and you've always known it. That's why you didn't want to be here in the first place. That's why you tried to leave."

Gently, ever so gently, Slade laid a burning hand on David's shoulder, a gesture that would almost have seemed kindly had his hand not been coated in raging flames. David no longer had the energy to scream, but he writhed on the ground, clenching his eyes shut and grasping wildly for anything in reach. It was all for naught. Slade simply laughed darkly, watching the proceedings with a single, detached eye, and finally extinguished his flames, leaving David laying on the ground, whimpering softly amidst the smoking ruins.  
_  
Hold on! Don't let it slip now! You know what's at stake!_

A sudden jerk nearly ripped his mangled arm out of its socket, as Slade hauled David to his feet, his hand clamped around David's shoulder like a vice. David stumbled, no longer able to support himself on his feet, but Slade did not let him fall, instead regarding him as he might have regarded a piece of discarded garbage. "Your friends are dead," said Slade, kicking aside the charred bones at his feet, "as shall you be shortly. And as I told you when we first met, there is nothing you or anyone else could have done to stop it."

Slade released David's arm all of a sudden, and David fell to the ground, landing on his hands and knees. He could feel the very earth trembling, see the red mass of molecules of granite and limestone spread out before him, even through the residue carpet of carbon and sulfur spread over it. He used his good hand to brush some of it aside, feeling the quivering rock beneath his hands, even as footsteps indicated Slade approaching once again.

"If only you all had believed me when I first told you," said Slade, "then Robin would still be alive, as would your friends." David resisted the urge to turn around, holding his baton as tightly as he could even as his broken hand felt the ground beneath him, felt it starting to chill.

_Almost there. Not long now. Just hold on a little bit longer..._

Slade reached down and grabbed his shoulder, pulling him over onto his back where he lay like an overturned turtle, his baton held against his chest like a religious icon. His vision swam, from molecules of air and carbon to wafting clouds of flame and smoke. But through it all, there loomed Slade, towering overhead, his very gaze a mocking challenge. Flames danced around his hands, and he stared down at David like a victorious Gladiator preparing to finish off his fallen foe.

"I suppose it doesn't matter," said Slade. "They would soon be dead in any event. But have you nothing to say for _yourself_ after all this pain? Not one word of retort or prayer? Perhaps you'd like to beg for mercy? After all, these _are_ your last words..."

Only one thing came to mind at this time, and he tried to mouth it, but no sound emerged. Slade's eye narrowed, and he knelt down, grabbing David by his shoulder once more and hauling him to his feet, holding him up off the ground by one hand as he brought his head in close.

"What was that?" asked Slade, "did you have something you wanted to say, David?"

The pressure within his own head was overwhelming now, the world around him slipping away. Even his pain was fading fast. There was almost no time left. His heart thundered in his ears, and it was all he could do to whisper one, single word into Slade's ear, the only word he could think of to say in a circumstance like this. Slade heard the word, and for a second, David could tell that he didn't understand.

But the last thing David saw was Slade's eye suddenly popping open wide, as the sounds of the fire demon army behind him faded away, and a blissful warmth, not the raging flames of Slade's fire, but a warmth that comforted and succored, a warmth that wrapped around him like a warm blanket, encased him within its arms. And he lifted his eyes to the ashen-dark skies, forgetting Slade and all his works, as the world disappeared around him, and he was surrounded for one last instant by a great light that shone brighter than the invisible sun...

**O-O-O**

**Eighteen Hours Earlier**

It was a Saturday.

The mountains to the east of Jump City gleamed in the shimmering sunlight that beat back the twilight and blanketed the city and the bay in the cloak of shining blue. The stars twinkled out overhead one by one, as the sun chased them away for one more perfect, sunny day, bathing Jump City and its surrounding area in the same warm glow that it had for the last four and a half billion years.

The wind up here, thirty stories above the ground, was strong enough to blow Raven's cloak back behind her like a pennant. It blew in from the east, dry, warm, and fresh, a wind that normally augured a brilliantly sunny day, chasing the ocean-borne clouds away. Raven had never really considered the weather here. This was the only city on Earth she had ever lived in, and had nothing to compare it to save for the sterile, manicured environment of Azarath. Most of her time here had been spent in her room or at least within the Tower, shut away from everything, and the weather was no more to her than whatever climatological annoyance she had to put up with during a given patrol or fight. She knew intellectually what the weather patterns around Jump were, but not the way that Beast Boy or Starfire did, not with the passing, casual, _deep_ familiarity of those who thought nothing of dancing through the clouds on a contrail of green fire, or plunging through the waves in the form of a swordfish or dolphin. She had never actually stopped to _feel_ the wind, listen to the sounds of the city waking up, or even to watch the sun rise over the mountains.

And right now, that seemed like a great pity.

She did not greet the sunrise as a friend, with a smile or waved hand. Starfire would have, she knew, for Starfire was friend to every living thing, but she was not Starfire, and this sunrise was explicitly not her friend. She watched it rise over the hills and blanket the tower in light and warmth, and all she could see in it was a ball of fire, and its light was the same flickering, searing flamelight that she had seen so often in her dreams recently that it was beginning to appear to her even while she was awake. She knew the sun was blameless, not to mention inanimate, a star, not a living thing that would react one way or another if she was pleased to see it or not. The sun neither knew nor cared what was happening here, for the sun was not alive.

Raven looked down at the red runes that were entwined around her arms like vines, so bright now that they shone even through the indigo fabric of her uniform, and for a moment permitted herself to believe that the sun was lucky.

Nobody else was up here today. She had made sure of that, sealing the door to the roof with a spell that could not be breached with anything short of a cruise missile, not that she expected any company anyway. Robin had been in the habit of watching the sun rise of course, but Robin had possessed the capacity to go completely without sleep whenever he found it convenient. The others all believed in the virtues of sleeping late on Saturday, and from the sounds of it, so did the HIVE. Beast Boy would have joined her up here if he'd known she was awake, but she'd intentionally not warned him. She didn't want anyone else here. She didn't want to answer questions or explain her bloody thoughts. She just wanted to sleep. In a very exact sense.

She was _tired_, tired in a way she had never before imagined possible. The nightmares that had invaded her dreams and meditations and now her waking hours too were unrelenting, and the gut-wrenching suspense that accompanied them everywhere had worn her down to a nub. In a strange, perverse way, when she had woken up today and seen the marks written all over her body like iridescent tattoos, part of her had felt _relief_. 'At last,' she had thought, 'no more waiting and worrying. At last it's all going to end.'

All going to end...

The waves crashed below her against the shore of the island, four hundred feet below, far enough away that barely a whisper of sound reached her up here on the roof. She stared down at the vaguely hypnotic sight of the waves advancing and retreating, one after the next. She had no fear of heights, being able to fly tended to cure one of such things, but staring down at the jagged rocks, she felt a twinge of nerves nonetheless. It wasn't vertigo. It was a reminder of the fact that, no matter how ironclad the Prophecy was, there was always _one_ way to prevent it from coming true. All it would take was a single step forward, a few seconds of freefall, a slip in her concentration, and that would be that. Trigon could not return without his precious portal. Whatever his additional plans for David were would forever go unknown. The others might or might not understand, but they would be _alive_, as Robin would have been had she done this earlier on, or never come to Earth in the first place. The entire world would be safe. Was that not what they were all trying to do here? Save the world? How could she possibly hope to save it in a more starkly literal fashion than this? If she didn't do it, everyone, including herself, was going to die. All she would be sacrificing was a little bit of the time that she had never placed any value on anyway. It wasn't suicide, far from it. It was entirely reasonable. It was the only sane choice.

Raven took a deep breath, composed herself, and with another look up at the shining sun now rising over the mountains, stepped back from the edge of the Tower and collapsed into a heap on the roof.

The worst part, if there could be said to be a 'worst' part in this living nightmare, was that she _knew_ that Trigon was counting on her being unable to do it. He could stifle every action she might conceivably take to ward off his coming, except for this. Alone among all the possible solutions, he couldn't stop her from killing herself. And yet he had _known_ that he didn't need to. He was her father, her kin, her _blood_. He knew her better than she knew herself. And he had _known_, intrinsically, that whatever torments he inflicted on her psyche, whatever guilt welled up inside her, she would never actually do it. He was _counting_ on it, on some kind of nebulous side of her, cowardice and self-delusion and all of the other aspects of herself that she had suppressed for so long, rearing their heads at the last and refusing to let her carry through with what any sane observer could tell was the only solution.

And he was right.

She sat alone on the rooftop for many uncounted minutes, as the rest of the Tower slumbered peacefully. The weight of her own fatigue pressed on her like a mantle made of lead. She no longer had the energy even to curse herself for having brought this doom on an entire planet, on her friends. Slowly, the brands on her arms and body faded out, as if, having delivered their message, they now no longer were necessary. Soon enough they were gone entirely, and she was left sitting on the gravel that covered the Tower's roof, to all viewers simply lost in thought on this, a normal and average day. Her own curses had run dry, and the End of the World now loomed before her like a clinical thing, a fact, unalterable by any source, neither evil nor good. It simply was. It was of course impossible to remove the personal element of what was happening, nor to disguise her own culpability. But, for a little while, it _was_ possible to pretend.

She only needed to pretend for a little while now.

The wind died away, and in its place left only the soft warmth of the sun, which she knew would grow over the course of the day and become truly hot as only the late summer of Southern California could be. People would be outside, in the parks, at the beach, doing whatever they could to enjoy themselves. For many days and nights, she had wondered idly what she would do when this day finally came. A thousand useless plans she had considered and discarded, in the hopes that when it actually did happen, inspiration would strike her.

And sitting here, turning her thoughts away from herself, she thought of her friends, sleeping soundly below, oblivious to what was coming much sooner than they had thought. Her friends who had been working so tirelessly on her behalf for weeks to try and prepare for a thing that could not be prepared for. And as she thought of them, sitting here in the warming sun, no inspiration or flash of genius struck, but rather a gradual realization that there was really only one thing _to_ do.

Carefully, she stood back up, and dispelled the holding spell on the roof's door with a wave of her hand. With one last deep breath, she turned, opened the door, stepped through it, and descended the staircase towards the Common room, leaving the sun to shine alone down upon the metropolis of Jump City, to watch over it or not as it saw fit, and to bathe the shining city in its lifegiving warmth.

One last time.

**O-O-O**

On the day he died, the boy called David Foster woke up to the smell of something burning.

It was half past eight in the morning, and the alarm wasn't scheduled to go off for another fifteen minutes, but the acrid smell whatever was presently burning had a way of insisting upon itself, even from the midst of a deep sleep. Sitting up and rubbing his eyes, David simply sat in his bed for a minute, listening.

The walls of his room were soundproof in theory, layers of acrylic tile sandwiched within the bare metal of the Tower itself. But given that the door was not so-equipped, and transmitted all noise from outside like a sounding board, David was not entirely sure why whoever designed this place had gone to the trouble. For the moment though, he didn't mind the intrusion. For the last few days, he had found it prudent to listen to the ambient sounds of the Tower before venturing out into it. At present, there were no explosions, no screaming fights, no loud, repeated 'thuds', like the sound of a hydraulic pile driver. Just the faint noise of people stirring outside somewhere. All evidence that pointed to, if not a calm day, at least a _reasonably_ calm one.

Given the current residents of the Tower, reasonable calm was the best he could hope for.

He dressed quickly, attaching his belt around his waist and clipping a retractable baton to it. Despite Robin's efforts, David had never gotten used to thinking of his baton as anything but an fifteen ounce prop for his explosions, and normally preferred to so-equip himself only when out in the city. This, however, was not a normal situation. He'd had to draw and 'ignite' the damned thing four times in the last three days alone, thanks to various "disputes" that he was involved in either directly or indirectly, and he would no more consider leaving his room without it today than he would leaving it at home when going out on alert.

Opening the door and stepping into the hallway, David could hear the sound of something sizzling from down in the common room's kitchen area. He sincerely hoped it was food, and not somebody's face, but there were no screams or curses coming from the room, just the deep voice of Cyborg and the nasal one he knew to be Gizmo's, as they spoke in what appeared to be normal tones.

Would miracles never cease?

He entered the common room, and instantly wished he hadn't. The smell of burnt... _something_ was simply overpowering. On second sniff, much stronger than the first, he wasn't sure if it was burning food or burning tires. The air was lightly tinted with a white smoke that the Tower's air circulation system was greedily sucking out through a ceiling vent, and the various teenagers spread around the common room were keeping well away from the kitchen area, though why any of them were in here at all when Starfire was cooking (only Starfire could possibly create a smell this noxious) was beyond him. Normally the others knew better.

"Morning," said someone from behind the awning. "Pancakes?"

David turned to see who was addressing him, and froze. For a second or two, his brain simply hung, like a computer that had experienced some kind of massive operating system failure, and only slowly did he begin to rationalize what he was seeing.

His assertion a moment ago that only Starfire could have created such a smell through cooking had apparently been in error. _Raven, _of all people, was standing in the middle of the kitchen, holding a platter of some kind of... material. He couldn't really narrow it down any more than that, for the stuff looked like it had just been roasted with a nuclear incinerator. It was a shapeless, formless mass of charred organic matter that smelled vaguely like an oil fire, and yet all that barely registered. Strange burnt objects in the Tower were normal. It was even normal to see Raven holding them.

Seeing Raven _smiling_... was not so normal.

Raven was smiling, grinning even, like she was glad to see him or something, and held out the tray of fried slabs invitingly. Across the room, Cyborg was kneeling over the table in the center of the common area next to Gizmo, both of them looking down at some kind of enormous blueprint spread out on the table. Beyond them stood Mammoth, leaning up against the wall with a sneer on his face, as though daring anybody to shift him from where he stood, watching Cyborg and Gizmo, mostly Cyborg. And to one side, curled up in a large easy chair, was Beast Boy. A Gamestation Portable was in his hands, emitting various sounds at high volume, and yet David didn't even need to look twice to see that he wasn't paying it any attention. Instead, he, like Mammoth, was watching the room, one of his eyes still purple and swollen from where he and Mammoth had "fallen down the stairs" two days ago after Mammoth had said something or other to set him off.

Beast Boy caught David's furtive glance, and gave a small shrug to indicate that he had no idea what was going on here or what had come over Raven. Mammoth turned and fixed his eyes on David as well, growling softly to himself, clearly suspicious that this was all some kind of secret code between the Titans. David paid him no attention at all. Mammoth, he had learned, was always growling about _something._

"They're a little overdone," said Raven, "but they should still be good."

The last thing on David's mind was the quality of whatever those incinerated lumps were, but his body acted where his mind refused to, and he sort of nodded, surreptitiously (or so he hoped) removing his hand from the handle of his baton as he did so. "Th... thanks," he managed to say. He even managed to make it sound sincere. "What's... what's the occasion?"

Raven smiled again. "I just felt like doing something nice for my friends." She said.

Given that Raven had (to David's knowledge), never done so before, he wasn't sure what to say to that, and yet none of the others sitting or standing around the room appeared to be taking any _overt_ notice of this wholly uncharacteristic change that appeared to have come over Raven. Cyborg glanced up from his blueprints long enough to send David the quick signal of the finger drawn across the throat, but he appeared to be referring to the food.

One bite confirmed that he was not exaggerating.

Doing his damnedest to maintain equilibrium so as not to offend Raven (a mortally foolish thing to do, whatever her present demeanor), David tried to ignore the burning sensation in his mouth (had she boiled these things in _gasoline_?) and half-turned away from the table after forcing a smile onto his face, partly so that he could follow what Cyborg and Gizmo were saying, partly so that if he would up gagging, he wouldn't spit it all over Raven.

"I figure we'll use the obstacle course hardware to power everything," said Cyborg. "How much energy do these things need?"

"The EM coils are supercooled, and the tracking sensors are power hogs," said Gizmo, not looking up. "Make it twenty-five megawatts for the whole setup."

Cyborg frowned. "Isn't that a little much?" He said, "That's more than most office buildings use."

"Yeah," said Gizmo, "so? This place has a reactor, doesn't it? That's like two percent of what you can put out. Unless you want them to fail when you need 'em the most."

"Fine," said Cyborg curtly, and made a note on the PDA built into his arm. Normally, discussions this technical were wholly beyond David, but right now he needed an excuse for why he wasn't eating any more.

"What are you guys building?"

Gizmo lifted his head, and his face was covered with a grin that stretched ear to ear. "Rail guns," he said, sounding almost giddy at the prospect.

"We're _not_ building rail guns," said Cyborg definitively. "We're installing a few outside the Tower for when Slade decides to make his move."

"Not just a few," said Gizmo excitedly. "_Forty _of 'em. Part of a whole system." Cyborg frowned, but did not gainsay him.

David of course didn't know a rail gun from a transistor radio, but he knew he'd heard the term before somewhere, though right now he couldn't remember where. "Rail guns?" he asked.

"Electromagnetic accelerators," said Cyborg. "Fire a slug five times faster than a normal bullet. They'll put a hole through anything short of battleship plate."

"Will that work on Slade?" asked David. It seemed like a reasonable question.

"Worked well enough on Robin, didn't it?" commented Gizmo offhand.

The room became extremely quiet extremely quickly, as everyone, Mammoth and Gizmo included, realized at once just what a mistake that had been. Gizmo looked up in mortal terror, fully expecting Cyborg to ram a fist right through his face. Honestly, so did David. Had Starfire been present, blood would have no doubt have been shed, but she was not, and Cyborg retained enough lucidity to hesitate for a second before blasting Gizmo's head right off of his shoulders with a single shot of his sonic cannon.

A second's hesitation was enough for something to totally pre-empt the fight that was about to happen.

"What else do we have?" asked Raven.

If Raven's goal had been to defuse the situation, she could not have possibly succeeded more triumphantly. Both Cyborg and Gizmo seemed to instantly forget what they were doing. So did Beast Boy. So, honestly, did David, spinning back around to face Raven so rapidly that he nearly gave himself whiplash. It wasn't that the question was so strange, David had been about to ask something similar (and for similar reasons). It was that... well... Raven hadn't so much as asked a _single _question about their preparations since they had started making them. She had thought the entire process a waste of time, and had not been shy in letting everyone know it. And now here she was, asking calmly what they were planning to use to ward Slade off. And she was _still smiling_.

Fortunately, Gizmo was not as thunderstruck as he had looked, and given a chance to talk about something completely different, he seized it as rapidly as he could, returning his attention to his blueprints as though merely looking at Cyborg risked incurring his wrath. It probably did.

"We've uh... we've got _everything_," said Gizmo quickly, pawing through his blueprints. "Anti-tank mines, thermobaric grenades, particle beam emitters. Once we power the whole network up, anything that steps on shore's gonna get smeared all over the rocks." He chanced another look up at Cyborg, who was staring at Raven like she had sprouted wings. "I've got enough firepower here to make Slade wish he'd never heard of you guys."

David recalled Cyborg telling him that Jinx usually kept Gizmo on a leash insofar as his outlandish military-grade weapon designs were concerned, but faced with an existential threat to the entire planet, he'd been allowed to indulge himself, an opportunity he had been enjoying enough to thoughtlessly run his mouth _all damned week_. Raven gave a thoughtful nod. David couldn't tell if she was just feigning interest or if she had actually decided they had a chance.

"The plan right now," said Cyborg carefully, giving David a puzzled look before returning his eyes to Raven, "is to use this stuff to thin out whatever Slade sends against us, and then take him on ourselves once we've cut his army down."

"Dude, do we even know he's sending an army?" asked Beast Boy. "I mean, last time he showed up, he made a pretty big mess of things by himself."

"We don't know anything," said Cyborg, "so we're preparin' for the worst. Whatever shows up when all this goes down, we'll have a surprise or two waitin' for 'em."

"More than that, hopefully," came a reply from the doorway behind them. All heads turned to see who it was, but everyone already knew from the voice alone.

Jinx stood in the open doorway, arms crossed, surveying the scene as though trying to decide who to hex first. Gizmo breathed an almost-silent sigh of relief, as Beast Boy narrowed his eyes, but Jinx took no notice of either of them, nor of anyone really, except Cyborg. For his part, Cyborg seemed to wilt slightly, as though Jinx' very presence was yet another one of the travails he had to undergo lately. Perhaps it was.

"How's Billy doin'?" asked Cyborg.

Jinx, as was her wont, didn't mince words. "Starfire broke six of his arms," she said, which given Billy, wasn't nearly as strange a statement as it sounded, "and dislocated his jaw three times. See-More's patching him up in the infirmary."

"Is... he gonna be okay?" asked Beast Boy, who like David, was having trouble following how that all worked out.

"He'll be fine," said Jinx without even turning her head, walking right up to Cyborg with a cutting stare. "I thought we had a deal here, Sparky," she said. "I thought I told you what would happen if any of your people messed with any of mine."

Cyborg was plainly having none of it. "Starfire's not my 'people'," he said. "She's my friend and this is her home. And she caught your boy Billy tryin' to break into Robin's room with a keycard scanner. That wasn't part of the deal either."

Jinx flinched, almost imperceptibly, but enough that David knew instantly that Billy hadn't mentioned that little aspect of the encounter to her. Still, she recovered and went on gamely.

"You're supposed to be keeping your team under control," said Jinx, trying to sound threatening. That doesn't include this."

The threat was a mistake. "_You're_ supposed to be keeping _your_ team under control too, way I remember it." snapped Cyborg in exasperation. "And it ain't _my_ team. It's Robin's. He's dead, and so in case you hadn't noticed, things aren't exactly workin' the way they should, right now"

"Well that's just _tragic_," snapped Jinx right back, "except _I'm_ the one who has to go downstairs in a few minutes and explain to Billy why he can't go get back at the person who just threw him down an elevator shaft. Have you got a good suggestion for what I'm supposed to tell him to make him walk away from that?"

"Maybe you should try reminding him about the four-eyed Devil that's coming along in a little bit," said Cyborg angrily. "If he wants to pick a fight, he's gonna get all the chances he wants."

"I didn't notice Starfire holding back on that account," replied Jinx in kind. "You guys are supposed to be the responsible ones, remember? That's why you're so much _better _than us, right?"

Inevitably, Gizmo picked _that _moment to chime in, and with the worst possible thing to say. "Yeah," he said. "We're not the ones who brought some demon-witch onto our team and _made_ this whole mess."

Before Cyborg, Jinx, or even Raven could react, there was a primal _roar_, and in the blink of an eye, Gizmo was suddenly being held eight feet in the air by an enormous, red-eyed, green-furred gorilla, whose hands were cupped around the stunned gearhead's throat. Nobody had even seen Beast Boy move, so swift was the transformation. Mammoth had no time to react, nor did Jinx, nor certainly Gizmo himself, before he was dangling in mid air with his eyes wide open. What might have happened next was conjectural, but Cyborg wasn't interested particularly in finding out.

"_BB!_" he shouted, his digitally-enhanced vocal chords drowning the deep growl that Beast Boy was making. He didn't need to say anything else, for Beast Boy turned his head, took one look at Cyborg's face, and after an agonizingly long second or so of indecision, slowly lowered Gizmo back to the ground, even as Jinx signaled for Mammoth to hold with one hand. Once back on the floor, Gizmo seemed to recover both his powers of speech and his acerbic temper. "That's _right_, you snot-guzzling..."

"_Gizmo,_" snapped Jinx through clenched teeth, interrupting his string of epithets. She clenched her fists tightly enough to cause her hands to shake. "_Shut up!_"

Jinx looked deadly serious, and Gizmo, who of course knew her better than any of the Titans, was in no mood to chance it, and so with a few more whispered mutterings, he settled back down onto the ground in front of his blueprints, while Beast Boy resumed his human form and sat back down in his chair, saying nothing. Jinx took a long, slow breath, one that was laced with fatigue, and slowly turned back to Cyborg, suddenly drained of her anger, and unmistakably eager to simply get yet another 'crisis' over with. "Can you..." she said, trying not to sound as tired as she looked. "Can you at least _try_ to get Starfire to stop," she said.

Cyborg could not help but groan. Too many flashpoints and potential disasters in the last few days had plainly ground him down as well. "I'll try," he said. "But I can't speak for it if Billy goes playin' burglar again. If he gets in her - "

"He won't," said Jinx with all the certainty in the universe. "I'll make _certain _he won't."

"Good," said Cyborg, eying Jinx carefully. He let the word sit for a second or so before adding one more. "Thanks."

"Don't mention it," said Jinx with all the sarcasm she could muster, rolling her eyes as she collapsed into a chair. Gizmo was still plainly unhappy, but equally plainly, was not about to gainsay Jinx when she was in a mood like this. Jinx looked annoyed and tired enough to respond to complaints with a hex or worse.

She wasn't the only one, by the looks of things.

The conversation in the room had died, and David was trying to decide if he should contribute another comment or let silence reign for a while. Once more though, he was pre-empted by the most unlikely source.

"So what's the plan for today?" asked Raven, and she sounded... well... _pleasant_, not giddy of course, that would have convinced him that he had entered an alternate dimension, but upbeat, positive. It was strange enough to see Raven like that at _all_, let alone right now, when everyone else was teetering between exhaustion and despair. David didn't know what the plan was for the day, but if he had, he wasn't sure that he'd have been able to respond coherently.

Fortunately, Cyborg was. "Settin' everything up for the big throwdown," he said, his voice filled with weariness as he considered the prospect. "Same as yesterday. Don't worry, I don't think we'll need to bug you for any - "

"Actually," said Raven. "I was sort of wondering if anyone wanted to go out."

For a second, David was certain he hadn't heard Raven right, and it wasn't until he saw the flabbergasted stares of everyone else in the room, Titan and Hiver alike, that he realized he had. He turned slowly back to Raven, who was smiling gently, as though she had just made the most reasonable suggestion in the world.

And by some standards she _had_, but...

"It's a nice day out, and we've all been cooped up in the Tower for too long anyway," she said. "I just thought it might be nice to spend some time together, is all. Maybe go to the park or something."

Just off the top of his head, David could think of fifty reasons why that was not a good idea, starting with the Hive being in the Tower, and ending with the fact that Warp, Slade, and whoever else was likely still out there, waiting for them. None of those reasons however came leaping to his tongue, so stunned was he at what Raven was suggesting. In other circumstances, he might have imagined Beast Boy making such a request, perhaps even Starfire, but _Raven_?

"You..." said Cyborg, "thought we should... go _out_?"

"Sure," said Raven. "I mean, if you guys want to that is."

"Why do you want to do that?" asked David, and he knew that it sounded rather heartless, but right now he was too busy trying to ascertain if Raven had just _lost her mind_ to care. He was hardly a stranger to new and odd developments from the other Titans, but eight months in the Tower had given him _some_ idea of what Raven was and was not likely to do. This was the latter in a _huge_ way.

Raven didn't get angry, but merely shrugged. "I've just... missed hanging out with you guys over the last couple weeks," she said in all innocence.

So sincere, so truthful was the answer, that David almost felt ashamed. When, he wondered, had he become so cynical as to immediately suspect the worst whenever someone expressed an uncharacteristically kind sentiment? The alarm bells in his head continued to ring, but he pushed them aside and smiled and turned back to the others to see what they thought of this unorthodox, but, in his opinion, perfectly valid idea.

And then he saw the stone mask that was Cyborg's face, his entire body motionless, like he had just turned to stone, and like a light switch had been flipped, David suddenly understood, and the blood froze in his veins.

The plate of burnt food slipped from his fingers and shattered into a thousand pieces on the metal floor, and the sound was like a gunshot, shaking Cyborg from his meditation, distracting the Hivers and Beast Boy and Raven herself. Jinx rolled her eyes and smirked and Gizmo laughed and said something David didn't even hear, no doubt some stock insult. His hands began to shake, and he clenched them tightly, squeezing his eyes shut, trying to force his body to remain still. If only to give himself something to do, he crouched down carefully onto the floor and began to gather the pieces of the plate together.

"Unless," said Raven, and she sounded almost afraid. "I mean, if you guys don't _want _to hang out - "

"I'll go!"

David raised his head and saw Beast Boy standing up. He looked... well David honestly couldn't evaluate it in his present condition, but merely seeing Beast Boy's reaction was enough to calm his own screaming nerves. Slightly.

Only slightly.

Needless to say, there were generally few things in the universe Raven wanted to do less than hang out with Beast Boy, but given everything, David wasn't at _all_ surprised to see her hesitate for a second, and then smile and nod wordlessly. Beast Boy _grinned_, broadly, uncaring as ever who might see it and what they might think and with a glance to Cyborg to see if he would stop them (Cyborg made no such effort), he walked out of the room. He even managed to look triumphant.

Raven turned to follow him, but before she did she stopped, and turned back to David and Cyborg. "Are... you guys sure you don't want to come?" she asked.

There was no way on this Earth that David could possibly have responded to that question coherently. But fortunately, Cyborg came to his rescue, standing up and walking over to where David was crouched, placing one hand on his shoulder as a signal not to interfere. "Y'all go ahead," said Cyborg carefully, his voice as calm as a lake on a windless day, his face composed as though at a funeral. "We'll be right here when you get back."

Perhaps Raven sensed what he meant by those words and perhaps she did not, but she nodded thoughtfully and turned away, walking out the door after Beast Boy. Only once it had slid shut behind her did anyone voice an opinion.

"Well _that_ was weird..." said Gizmo, scratching his head.

David ignored him. So did Cyborg. So did Jinx, for that matter, who was watching not the door but the two remaining Titans, particularly David, as if she alone among the Hivers had sensed that something was going on here beyond the obvious. David paid neither her nor anyone else any mind, staring into space in the vague direction of the door. Only after nearly a minute had passed did he slowly stand back up and turn to face Cyborg, who was watching him carefully. Neither one of them said anything, until Cyborg drew his hand back, and crossed his arms.

"Go find Star," he said, "and let her know."

David's resolve shattered with Cyborg's confirmation, and he tried to nod, but wound up nearly doubling over, his entire body beginning to shake so hard that the baton on his belt was rattling against his side. "_Hey_," said Cyborg, sharply but not harshly. "Listen to me, man." And David slowly recovered his equilibrium and raised his head again.

"It's gonna be all right," said Cyborg. "Just find Star and tell her, okay?"

"R-," stammered David, "right..." He took a deep breath, expelled it, took another, and then slowly turned around and made his way out the door, leaving Cyborg and the three Hivers behind.

**O-O-O**

Most of the Titans were fond of Patriot Park, down by the waterfront, and there was really nothing _wrong_ with it in Beast Boy's opinion (at least on the increasingly rare occasions when it hadn't been torn to bits by some lunatic with a rocket launcher), but if he had his choice in excursion locales, he far preferred to get away from the city altogether, up into the mountains to the East of the city, the domain of deer, foxes, even mountain lions, cut only by the occasional bike or hiking trail. He came here himself on occasion, a place where he could become any animal within reason, with nothing to mark him out from the rest of the local fauna save his green coloration. He had brought the others here too once or twice. He'd gone camping with Starfire and Cyborg here, walked and talked with Terra for hours. It was here that Robin had taught him how to pitch a tent, and where Starfire had taught him the Tamaranean names for the gemstones and rocks common to both her planet and Earth. It was a place of old familiarity.

To his knowledge, Raven had never been here before today.

The woods were oddly quiet, at least to Beast Boy's ears, the ambient sounds of wildlife muted as though they resented the intrusion. Despite his powers, Beast Boy wasn't some Doctor Doolittle who could discern the meaning behind their chirps and calls. But if he had to guess, he figured they were wary of Raven.

He didn't mention that part to her.

Raven was quiet, which wasn't uncommon, and smiling faintly, which _really_ was, not that Beast Boy was complaining. He had volunteered to come on this little excursion of hers largely on a whim, without pausing to evaluate if she was likely to say yes or no, as was his custom. That wasn't to say he didn't care, but ever since Robin's death, he'd largely been trying to engender just this sort of reaction from Raven, with little success. He didn't need to understand why she was suddenly acting nice to appreciate the change.

"So... uh... you're feeling better?" he asked. Not the most subtle question, but it would do.

Raven had been turned away from him, looking out at the City. She half-turned her head back to him as he asked, but didn't answer with anything but a slight nod. It was answer enough, he supposed.

Outlined against the edge of the trail, with the sun overhead and the city behind her, Beast Boy mused that there was something different about Raven today, beyond the base fact that she was acting differently. She was walking along as normal, but her movements seemed... _relaxed_ somehow, lacking the tension that she usually kept bottled up and that recently had been so profound as to be visible to anyone who knew how to read the clues. What brought this shift on was entirely beyond him, but it emboldened him enough to venture a return to a subject they had not spoken of for several weeks.

"So I guess this means you don't hate me?"

He realized only too late that he should have phrased that better. A lot better. Raven halted in mid-stride and turned around, looking half-confused and half-aghast. "What?" she asked.

Beast Boy sputtered for words. "I um... I thought... after that time in the alley a while back..." he trailed off.

Raven got the idea. "Oh..." she said, and did not elaborate. She resumed walking, and Beast Boy followed her, unsure if the subject was dropped or not before she added a question. "What about it?"

"I thought... you might be upset," said Beast Boy, catching up with Raven and falling in alongside her.

She waited an inordinately long time before answering him, and when she did, it was with a rather perfunctory "I wasn't upset, Beast Boy," and then more silence. He glanced at her as best he could without attracting attention, but she seemed to be lost in thought, to the extent that she tripped on a root and stumbled. Beast Boy caught her arm almost reflexively, but instead of shaking him off or blasting him into the nearest tree, she simply steadied herself, and tuned to look at him without a word. He let go of her gently, confused by her non-reaction, and debated whether or not to take a step back and what she would think if he did or didn't do so.

"Beast Boy..." she said finally, though she left it at just his name.

"Y.. yeah?" he said, confused.

"I..." she seemed to have no better idea than him. "I'm... glad you're here," she finally said.

By now, Beast Boy had no idea what to think. "You are?" he asked. It was a reasonable question, he thought, given what her usual reaction was.

"Yes," she said. "There's... there's some things I've been meaning to tell you."

"What things?" asked Beast Boy.

Once again she didn't answer immediately. Whatever she had to say, she seemed to be in no hurry to actually say it. She breathed in and out and closed her eyes and whispered to herself so softly that he couldn't tell what she was saying, before finally elaborating, albeit slowly.

"I've... I've never really told you... a lot of the things that I should have," she said, all without turning her head to face him. Her voice was controlled and careful, as though she were choosing each word with exquisite precision. "You've... been a better friend to me than I deserve."

That was just about all that Beast Boy _wanted_ to hear, and he smiled and put a hand on her shoulder. "Rae, it's cool," he said. "I told you, you're fun when you get upset. You don't have to - "

"Please just let me finish this," she said abruptly. "I'm bad at it and I'm not going to be able to do it twice." Beast Boy blinked and hesitated and finally removed his hand and nodded. Even though she wasn't looking at him, she evidently saw it. Raven _did_ that.

"Ever since we met," she said. "All I've done is try to get rid of you somehow, and... I wish I hadn't. You've always been there for me, no matter what, even when I didn't want you to. I never... thanked you or even thought about how lucky I was to have you there to do all that. And... I know that you're gonna say that it's all right and that you didn't mind and maybe you didn't, but it's _not_ all right, even if you think it is. But I... I wanted you to know that I... always appreciated what you tried to do for me, even when I said I didn't."

Beast Boy blinked a few times. "I uh..." he finally stammered. "That's... really nice of you to say." He was frankly so astonished to hear all this come from Raven unbidden that he didn't know what else to say.

Far from looking grateful or relieved though, Raven grimaced and clenched her fists and shook her head. "No," she said bitterly. "It's not. 'Appreciated' makes it sound like you helped me move some furniture or something. You deserve more than that. You all do. And I... I _don't know _how to give it to you. I don't know how to do _this_. And it's too late for Robin, and nearly too late for the rest of you too."

Beast Boy stood quiet. He didn't know what to say, or even if he should speak at all. But before he could make up his mind either way, Raven turned to him.

"That... that time in the alley," she said, and he saw that there were tears in her eyes, though her voice was not sad. "I never... I didn't know..." she stopped, took a few breaths, and started again. "I didn't give you an answer."

This was rapidly becoming stranger and stranger. "An answer?" he asked, unaware that he had even asked a question.

She didn't explain herself, Raven was never fond of doing that, but instead she walked over to him, and such was the look in her eyes that he had the sudden urge to back up. She looked so... composed... that for a second he was worried she had actually decided to kill him.

"You've been my friend for so long. All of you have, but... you especially," she said. "And I... I wanted you guys to stop worrying, to just... have one more perfect day without worrying about me or anything else. And I know that wasn't going to happen, because of Robin, and all this... and because I didn't realize what I wanted to do until way too late."

She seemed to steel herself, as she put a hand on his shoulder. "But... I'm _still _glad you came with me, because I want you to know that I never _ever_ hated you. Ever. Not even when I said I did. And I know it's so far beyond too late for me to tell you this that it's almost funny, but I want to make sure you knew anyway. You... told me back on the day Robin got killed that I was a good person."

"I said you were the best person I knew," said Beast Boy.

"I never imagined that anyone like you existed," said Raven. "Ever. I never thought there was anyone like the others either, but especially like you. You've been my friend even when I didn't deserve it, _especially_ when I didn't deserve it. You're..." she seemed to lose her place, stuttered, stopped, and then with a visible act of will, forced the words out of her mouth.

"You're the one who made me glad I came to Earth," she said.

And then she _kissed _him.

It was so far out of the blue, so beyond any _possible_ expectation he'd had that Beast Boy didn't even realize what she was doing until she was doing it. When he had kissed her, back on the day that Robin died, she had been too stunned (or something) to react, and had stood there like a frozen statue. Now he knew why.

It might have lasted five seconds, or thirty, or two. It might have lasted an hour. Time lost all meaning for a brief period, and the next thing he knew, Raven was pulling back from him slightly, and her face was more composed, more calm and peaceful than he had ever seen it. And he knew that he was just _standing there_, staring like an idiot, and that he should have been doing something, even if he didn't know what that something was, but he couldn't move at all, all he could do was stare in something like wonder at Raven.

She didn't seem to mind.

Her hand was still on his shoulder, light and gentle, and she left it there as she smiled softly. She said nothing, perhaps there was nothing to say, or perhaps she figured that he wouldn't be able to understand her if she did, but after a few moments she pulled him carefully towards her and wrapped her arms around him in a soft hug. This alone would have been shocking but for what had just happened, but Raven didn't seem to care that he was too thunderstruck to reply coherently. She squeezed him tightly, her eyes closed, her head resting on her shoulder. And as she did, she whispered something into his ear.

"Thank you."

Then Raven released him, stepping back and taking a deep breath. And in an instant, she was Raven again, the Raven he knew, composed and calm. She nodded carefully, though what she was nodding at was beyond him, and then she turned away, and slowly began walking up the path, leaving Beast Boy standing there with his tongue tied in knots and his heart pounding like a snare drum and his eyes following her of their own volition, for his brain had just switched off.

"Are you coming?" she asked without turning back after what might have been a minute or a century, and he followed her, slowly, walking like he was in a trance. He had all kinds of questions of course, but he didn't ask them, he didn't _want_ to ask them. He didn't want answers and facts and analysis, he just wanted...

He wanted _nothing_. _Nothing _in the entire world. He had everything that he would ever want or need right here.

He followed along after her without watching a single other thing, such that this time _he_ tripped, and stumbled, and fell on all fours. And as he caught himself on the ground, he spotted a small glinting object, a coin, a copper penny that some wayward hiker or bicyclist had let fall here some time ago. He lay there for a moment, looking at this most familiar of objects, and then the words to some half-remembered rhyme that Elasti-Girl had once taught him came back, something about finding pennies and good luck, and he scooped it from the ground without a word.

And when he looked up, Raven was staring at him.

The wind ran through her violet hair and teased the hem of her indigo cloak, and the sun overhead seemed to be shining down on her alone, like a spotlight in midday, or so it appeared to him. Her hand was out-stretched, fingers splayed out towards him, for he had made some inadvertent cry when he tripped and she had spun back in case he was being attacked. And he saw her relax as she realized what had happened, and even smile at him, and at the sight of her smile, Beast Boy's face shifted into a grin all by itself. He felt like springing up and running over and tackling her with a gigantic hug. He felt like dancing through the forest singing at the top of his lungs. He felt like turning into a giant Eagle and picking her up and flying into the clouds. She had _kissed_ him! She had _kissed_ him and smiled at him and hugged him as well, something she had only ever done twice before and both times when she was in the middle of...

...

The smile froze on his face. The urge to sing and dance vanished like smoke, and he stared at Raven, and an icy fear gripped his heart in chains of frozen steel, and all of a sudden, he asked her a question whose answer he was already dreading.

"Raven," he asked, "why are you telling me all this _now_?"

But before she could answer him, the sun went out.

The birds stopped singing, the insects vanished, the creatures nearby all squealed and fled, but Raven remained stock still as the sun darkened overhead, and the light faded and vanished altogether. A black disk, like the moon during a solar eclipse, had placed itself before the sun, save that it had done so in a matter of seconds, covering the sun in a sheath so total that not even a glimmer of light remained, plunging the forest and the mountains and the city below into a darkness so complete that Beast Boy could not see his hand in front of his face. Far away he could hear the sounds of squealing brakes, of shattering glass, of shouts and screams as thousands of cars crashed at once and people ran into the streets and screamed and cried and prayed aloud for forgiveness and deliverance, but the sounds were distant and he paid them no mind. All he was watching was Raven.

His eyes were still adjusting to the un-natural twilight, but he still had no difficulty seeing Raven, for before his eyes, glowing red marks, glyphs in some language he could not recognize, slowly appeared on Raven's body. Bright red, glowing in the darkness like embers, they seemed to materialize from nothing, running up her legs and arms and down her sides, shining right through the fabric of her uniform. She made no sound or sign as the marks appeared one by one, last of all a great rune on her forehead, circling the chakra jewel she wore there. Only when the last one finally appeared did she look up at Beast Boy with eyes that were suddenly full of tears, and suddenly she jerked back as though she had been struck, and fell to the ground.

_"Raven!"_ shouted Beast Boy, and he was on his feet in an instant and racing over to her. He fell to his knees at her side and grabbed her wrist, half-expecting it to be burning with the terrible brands that had been seared into her, but it was chill and cool to the touch, and he could feel it shaking. Tears were running down her face, but she did not appear to be in pain, at least not that he could tell. And while he was stammering to try and figure out what to do, she turned her eyes to him and answered his question from before.

"Because," she said through choked tears, "I don't think... I'm going to get another chance to."

"We're _not_ gonna let that happen!" yelled Beast Boy without even realizing that he was yelling. "Not ever!"

"Beast Boy," she said, and she sounded almost almost delirious, "it's _happening. Now._ You have to get the others and run or something, save - "

"I'm not going _anywhere_," he said. "We have to get you back to the Tower and get ready."

"_No!_" she shouted, grabbing his collar and shaking it. "You _Have. To. Go_. You _can'_t fight him!"

"Watch us," he said, and he stood up and shifted into a pteranodon. Gently picking Raven up with his claws, he beat his wings against the still air and lifted off, circling around and flying back towards the Tower. She didn't resist or try to fight him off, perhaps she couldn't, but he flew as fast as he could regardless. Trigon was coming, and they needed to finish getting everything ready for him.

But then he was pretty sure that the others already knew that.

**O-O-O**

Darkness lay on the city before him, a darkness more profound and total than anything he had before experienced aboveground. The sun was extinguished, the moon still below the horizon, and the stars that should not have been visible in the first place at this hour were vanishing one by one from the sky, swallowed up by an invisible malice that crept around the margins of what few lights still shone, palpable and cruel, waiting only for its appointed hour. Titans Tower was more than a mile offshore, but even at this distance he had heard the sounds of the panic within the city for an hour or more, mixed with the sirens of the emergency personnel trying to restore some semblance of order. Barely a handful of flickering lights came from the darkened city, for the automated, timed streetlights that normally illuminated Jump knew only that it was still early afternoon, and had not turned themselves on.

The sounds were mostly dimmed now, as the populace had mostly returned indoors, either home to barricade themselves, or to churches, temples, and mosques to pray for whatever salvation was available to them. Accordingly, David could now hear the sound of the waves below breaking over the rocks at the edge of the island. He did not know, as he stared into the darkness, that Raven has stood in the same place this very morning and contemplated similar thoughts on this, the last day of the world.

He heard the door behind him open, and half-turned to see who it was. When he did see, he paused, considered for a moment if he should stay or go, before finally turning back and leaning against the railing without a word. His baton was clipped to his side, extinguished and cold, and in his hands instead was a dog-eared, paperback book, closed at present.

"See anything?" asked the person in the doorway.

David shook his head. "No," he said. "But I'm not up here as a lookout."

He heard the door close and footsteps crunching on loose gravel as the other approached. "Well then what _are_ you doing up here?"

"Waiting," he said. "Same as everyone."

A few more footsteps, and the other figure strode into the light of the floodlights that covered the Tower's roof. Unlike the darkened city before them, the Tower was lit up like a navigational beacon, every light switched on at full force, bright enough in the all-consuming darkness to be visible fifty miles away. Cyborg had turned everything on partly so that the Titans could actually see what they were doing, and partly because the Jump City Chief of Police had asked him to. Merely seeing the Tower still shining as brightly as ever on its lonely island was enough to calm the worst of the panic in the City.

Most of the rest of the world had no such help.

David turned his head as Jinx came fully into view. She looked no different than she had in the diamond mine, oblivious, to all appearances, to whatever pressures must be weighing on her as they were on Cyborg. He remembered Cyborg's warning about how the HIVE might try to stab them all in the back when the time came, but no sooner had he dredged up the warning than he pushed it back again. It didn't matter anyway. If the HIVE did screw them, there was nothing he could do about it anyway. And he already had too much to worry about to add another care.

"You guys have everything set?" she asked.

Why she expected _him _to know was a question he chose not to ask. "Raven's in the safe room," he said. "Cyborg and Beast Boy are in the control room. Starfire's..." he didn't know _what _Starfire was doing or planning to do, so he let her sit. "I think everything's in place."

"And what about you?"

He exhaled slowly, watching the condensation from his breath float off into the darkened sky. "I'll be all right."

"You'd better," said Jinx with a smirk. "We don't have time to babysit you when everything starts."

He shot her as stern a look as he was capable of. "I'll be fine," he said. "I'm not the one who was _working _for these guys."

"Relax," she said. "It was a joke."

If it really was a joke (which he doubted), it wasn't a particularly funny one, but he didn't say so. He hadn't spoken more than five words to Jinx since the Hive had arrived at the Tower, and right now he just wasn't up for her usual back-and-forth. It was all he could do to keep his nerves under control as it was.

As it happened though, it appeared that Jinx wasn't really in the mood for it either. She was standing against the railing with her arms crossed, watching the darkened city as though she could discern something from it and glancing back at him every few seconds as though he somehow had any better idea of what was coming than she did. He paid her no mind.

"A little light reading?"

For a second, David wondered what she was talking about, before he remembered the book in his hand. "Oh," he said. "No, I just..." he trailed off. He had brought the book up here in the hopes of being able to read a little and take his mind off of what was coming (he could read, even in the dark, simply by visualizing the molecules of ink on the pages), but his mind had been too jittery to take in a single word. Accordingly he shrugged and gently tossed the book to Jinx.

Jinx raised an eyebrow. "The Lord of the Rings?"

David nodded. "Raven loaned it to me a while back. I lost my copy when I came here."

"I never read it," said Jinx.

"I've read it six times," said David. He looked up at Jinx, who was smirking at him, and half-smiled. "I know," he said. "Don't say it."

"Wouldn't dream of it," said Jinx sarcastically. "But I never figured you for that sort of heroic fantasy stuff."

"I'm not, normally," said David. "But that one's different. Elves and dwarves and hobbits and all. I always liked it. It felt... I dunno... _safe_? Just a story, not some lesson or something, nothing to do with me, or what I could do." He sighed. "At least it used to. And now..." He trailed off and shook his head.

"Now we're sitting in a Tower waiting for a Dark Lord to send his armies after us?" asked Jinx. David raised a confused eyebrow at her, and she smirked again. "I saw the movies," she said.

"Yeah," said David, and he sighed. "I feel like I'm trapped in some bad novel, and I don't know how to get out."

"Cheat," suggested Jinx. "It's what I do."

David chuckled. "Thanks," he said, only half-sarcastically. "That's such a big help."

Jinx tossed the book back to him with a smirk. "I'm a bad guy," she said, "I'm not supposed to help you. It'd be against the rules."

The two of them turned back to the railing and watched the city for a little while. It might have been five minutes before Jinx spoke again, this time in a more serious tone.

"So Sparky says that you were the one who thought up calling for our help."

David nodded. "It was my idea," he said. "Starfire wasn't real happy with it."

"Yeah, I noticed," said Jinx. "Still, I'm surprised."

"What do you mean?"

"After what happened to Robin, I figured the next time we heard from any of you guys, it'd be on the business end of a gun. I didn't think any of you hero types would look to us for _help_ of all things."

"They didn't," said David. "Never even occurred to them."

"But it did to you."

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see her watching him, but he didn't turn to her. "Yeah," he said after a little while. "It did to me."

The implication went unsaid by either of them. It was clear enough in any case.

"Annoying as you guys are, I'm glad it did," said Jinx finally.

He sighed softly. "Yeah."

Neither one said anything for a little bit, each watching the horizon in their own unique way.

"See-More told me about what happened on the roof," said Jinx after a time. David didn't respond, didn't turn his eyes, simply continued to stare off at the distant city.

"I guess I ought to thank you for not killing him," she said.

"Well," said David, "you didn't kill me when you could've. I figured that's the sort of thing I ought to encourage."

Jinx laughed softly. "Good plan."

"Even though I know why you didn't."

Jinx stopped laughing and turned to look at him, but didn't answer.

"Warp told you not to kill me, didn't he?" asked David without turning his head. "Back in the mines?"

"Yeah," said Jinx. "He did."

David lowered his head slightly. "That's what I figured," he said.

She watched him for a few seconds. "That wasn't the only reason."

He lifted his head a bit. "Oh?"

"I was gonna kill you anyway," she said. "Originally. Before we got cut off. I didn't know why Warp wanted you alive, but I knew he was bad news and he was trying to insist on it without sounding like he was insisting on it, you know? Besides," she smirked, "I don't follow instructions too well."

"So why didn't you, then?"

Jinx sighed and leaned against the railing. "Because you're weird," she said.

David laughed. "Thanks,"

"I'm serious," she said. "I mean you guys are _all _weird, you heroes, but you're... well... Any of the others would have helped me out down there, you guys are all stupid like that, and most of them would have been better at it by the way, but you actually wanted to _talk_."

David shrugged. "Beast Boy talks more than I do."

"Yeah, but he talks like a hero. 'You must do the right thing' and all that. You didn't. That whole time we were down there, you never once tried to get me to 'see the error of my ways' or whatever. Maybe you were faking it, or just trying to kill time, but you actually _sounded_ interested in what I had to say. Only Cyborg ever did that, and... let's just say that didn't go well."

"I haven't been doing this long enough to start converting people," said David. "Besides, would you have listened to me if I _had_ tried?"

"'Course not," said Jinx. "Do I look like the kind of girl who switches sides whenever some kid in a red suit asks me a couple of questions? But let's just say I appreciated you not trying, even so."

"And that was enough to make you change your mind?"

Jinx shrugged. "That and Warp's little manifesto. Plus if I'd actually killed you, Cyborg would have murdered us."

"You killed Robin," ventured David. "Cyborg didn't murder you for that."

"Only barely," said Jinx. "And besides, Sparky never felt _responsible_ for Robin."

An almost imperceptible shudder ran through David as he closed his eyes and sighed. "Yeah," he said.

The two of them stood there for a few minutes, listening to the sounds of the wind and the waves and the soft sounds of the distant city. No sign could be seen of anything amiss, save the darkness itself, and yet the darkness itself felt almost tangible, like it was reaching out towards them, a nebulous, shapeless malice just outside the range of the Tower's light. The dread seemed to grow and deepen as they stood there, until a chill ran up David's spine and he shivered, his baton rattling against his leg.

Jinx glanced at him. "You all right?" she asked.

"I just... I wish Warp or Slade or whoever would just _get on_ with it, you know?" said David. "Waiting for it's almost worse than being in it."

"I doubt that," said Jinx as she peered back off into the gloom, "but I know what you mean. Can't you use that other sight thing you do? See if something's coming?"

David shook his head. "I can't see far enough," he said. "The air molecules get in the way. Besides, Cyborg and Gizmo have got sensors out for a mile in every direction. We ought to know if anything comes close."

"I don't really trust 'ought to' right now," said Jinx.

"Me neither," said David, "but this waiting's gonna kill me if something doesn't happen al- "

And then all of a sudden, something did.

The loudspeakers atop the Tower's roof suddenly burst to life, startling both teenagers out of their conversation. Jinx had a hex formed in her hand before she even turned around, while David was so surprised that he was unable to draw his baton. And yet rather than the alarm or alert or serious announcement that both of them had anticipated, the speaker's static resolved all of a sudden into music. Guitar music.

And singing.

_"I see a bad moon rising.  
I see troubles on the way."_

Both Jinx and David stared up at the loudspeaker above and behind them like paralyzed manaquins. All decorum was forgotten. In fact, _everything _was forgotten. It was superfluous to say that this was the last thing either of them had expected to hear tonight. Indeed, David wasn't sure he hadn't suddenly started hallucinating. From the looks of it, so did Jinx, at least judging from the glowing hex she had materialized.

David just broke down laughing.

_"Don't go round tonight,  
Well it's bound to take your life.  
There's a bad moon on the rise."_

Jinx was just shaking her head as David laughed. "There is something seriously _wrong_ with you people," she said. "You know that?"

"No argument," he said, smiling.

"Who the hell decided _this_ was a good idea?" asked Jinx. David knew of course, he had known the instant the music had started playing. But before he could answer, someone else answered for him.

"Guess," said Cyborg from the doorway to the roof. The music had masked his footsteps approaching, and neither Jinx nor David had heard him opening the door. He now crossed the rooftop towards the two metahumans, his face a study in poker calm. Immediately, David knew that something was up, and all impetus to laugh left him in an instant.

"Is it... is it time?" he asked, nervously than he had intended to, but then he probably wasn't fooling anybody anyway.

"The buoys we set out picked somethin' up coming this way from the north," said Cyborg. "Right over the bay like it's walkin' on water. Moving slow, but headed right for us." He walked over to the balcony. "Could be it's a fault or something..."

"No," said Jinx, pointing into the un-natural darkness. "It's not."

Far off, more than three miles away yet, a small speck of red was just becoming visible in the dim darkness at roughly horizon level. It was too far away to identify, too far away even to see if it was moving, save that the speck seemed to flicker and dance, like the flame of a candle being blown in the wind. Perhaps it was merely David's imagination, but he could swear it was slowly getting brighter.

Cyborg did not indicate any surprise. He folded his arms and nodded grimly. "So yeah," he said. "It's time."

David's internal organs all began to tighten. Had the light been better, he was sure the others would have been able to see him turning pale. Even after all the buildup and anticipation, the revelation that the moment of truth was _here_, _now_, made him feel lightheaded and queasy. He remembered sitting up here on the roof all those endless months ago with a firebreathing dragon bearing down on him, helplessly terrified and unable to think clearly. Some things never changed.

Cyborg was watching him carefully, and he forced himself to remain upright and steady. He took a ragged breath and straightened out his red and orange uniform, the baton at his side clinking nervously against his belt. He drew the baton slowly, felt its grip in his gloved hands, let it slide out to full extension with a soft 'click'. He concentrated, pushing down the fear, repeating the mental mantras that Raven and Robin had forced into him, closing his eyes for a moment as he reached out to the molecules in his baton, and felt them respond to him, felt the temperature of the metal beginning to fluctuate in a rythmn, and when he opened his eyes again, red flames were gently rising from the dark steel, casting a soft light over the the three superhumans.

"Okay," he said.

Cyborg smiled, and he slowly extended one robotic arm and gently laid his heavy, titanium hand on David's shoulder. "My man..." he said almost whimsically, and he chuckled.

Jinx, standing off to the side, smirked at the scene. "So are you gonna tell him?" she asked. "Or was I supposed to?"

David's eyes flicked from Cyborg to Jinx and back. "Tell me what?" he asked.

"I need you to do somethin'," said Cyborg. "And I know you're not gonna like it, but I need you to do it for me, all right? It's... important."

David blinked quizzically. Cyborg wasn't exactly a taskmaster, but normally if he had an unpleasant order, he just gave it. The framing was unusual. "Sure, Cy," he said. "What do you need?"

Cyborg sighed. "I want you to go down into the sub-basement," he said, "and I want you to go into the safe room with Raven."

David froze, his brain skipping a track. "... what?" he asked.

"I know this ain't what we planned," he said, "but I need you to do this. I want you to go into the safe room, lock it behind you, and stay in there _no matter what happens_." He emphasized the last words without raising his voice. "Don't come out until you get the all-clear from us. Do you understand me?"

David honestly didn't know what to say. "I... I mean... yeah, Cy, I understand... but..."

"I know," said Cy. "And believe me, I'm not sayin' you wouldn't give a good account when it starts. This ain't about you. It's about what is. We've all been dancing around pretending that Trigon is only coming after Raven when we know that ain't so. He wants you. I don't know why, and I ain't about to find out. I'd have told you before, but I didn't make up my mind on it until just a little while ago. I know you think you can help us with this, and maybe you're right, but this is how it's gotta be.

Was he disappointed? Should he be? Would Cyborg have been disappointed in his place? He didn't know. Right now he didn't know _what _to feel. He lowered his head. "Cy..."

"David," said Cyborg, with just a touch more formality, just the slightest hint of command in his voice, and David's words died in his throat. "I need you to do this," he said. "Can you do it for me?"

There was only one answer to give. He knew that it would not have been any use arguing even if he had wanted to argue, which he wasn't sure if he did or not. "Yeah," he whispered. "I can do that."

He saw Cyborg breathe a sigh of what might have been relief. "I knew I could count on you," he said. "Now go on. We're gonna be locking it down in a few minutes."

"Is there... anything you want me to do when I get there?" asked David. He didn't know why, but he felt he needed to ask.

"Just make sure Raven doesn't do anything crazy," said Cyborg. "She's... in a weird place right now. I don't think she'd be able to fight even if we let her."

David nodded. "Right," he said, and he turned to leave. He was a couple paces from the door into the tower when Cyborg stopped him short.

"And David?"

David turned back. "Yeah?"

"If they get past us," said Cyborg evenly, "and try to break into the safe room, I want you to take them out _any way you can_. If you have to bring the Tower down on them... if you have to bring it down on _me_... You do it."

There was no way David could respond to that in words. He nodded instead, silently, and then opened the door and walked through it, descending the stairs towards the Tower's sub-basement. Cyborg and Jinx watched the door close behind him, and only after it had done so did they slowly turn away, Cyborg back to the horizon where the red speck seemed just a little closer, and Jinx to Cyborg, crossing her arms and smiling despite herself.

"A little melodramatic, don't you think?," she asked.

"I hope so," said Cyborg. "But he's a good kid, whatever else."

Jinx considered that for a moment. "Yeah," she said. "Yeah, he is." She turned back to the horizon, and crossed her arms as she peered into the darkness. "So were you planning on shutting that music off?"

"Actually, no," said Cyborg, and Jinx turned her head slightly and raised her eyebrow. "BB thought it'd buck everyone up, but I want _Slade _to hear it. I want him to know we ain't afraid of him 'fore he even sets eyes on us."

"I don't imagine he's the sort to care," said Jinx.

"Maybe not," said Cyborg. "But I ain't shuttin' my tower down on _his _account."

The door behind them opened again, and Jinx and Cyborg both turned to see who it was, half-expecting to find David having returned for a last minute question or some such. However, the figure they found standing in the doorway, hanging back as though avoiding the light of the rooftop, was not David.

Indeed she was about as far from David as one could get.

"Is the moment at hand?" asked Starfire. A quiet voice that held a coil of razorwire.

"They're coming," said Cyborg. "We were about to make the call."

Starfire did not move, did not enter the light, standing veiled in shadow. Cyborg had not seen her for three days. She had ignored or left unanswered all of his pages and messages, and he had been unable to integrate her into the plan he had for confronting Trigon's army. He'd been forced to assume simply that she would fight.

"I am prepared for them," said Starfire softly, her voice almost frighteningly calm and even. The second-hand reflection off of her green eyes gave her an otherworldly look that even made Jinx hesitate. "Where are we to have the encounter?"

"They're comin' in from the North," said Cyborg. "We're gonna meet 'em outside the Tower."

Starfire's silhouette nodded. "Then I will see you there," she said, and turned to leave.

"Wait, Star," said Cyborg, taking a step forward. "What... What are you gonna _do_?"

Starfire didn't turn back, though she did pause long enough to answer.

"I am going to exact retribution."

And then the door clicked shut.

Cyborg was left standing, facing the shut door. He stood there for a few moments, until Jinx walked up next to him. She didn't ask him anything. She didn't need to.

"All right then," he said, perhaps to Jinx, perhaps to himself, perhaps to nobody in particular. "Let's _do_ this."

**O-O-O**

The last stars went out as Slade stepped upon the island's shore.

He was alone, for he apparently had no need of minions on this last day, a statue of obsidian and rusted iron, one eye gazing upon the Tower before him, and flames were about his hands and feet. None had hindered his approach to the Tower, not the police, not the coast guard, not even the navy, for all had been warned away by Cyborg and their own commanders. What was to transpire here could not be halted by a mundane agency. The only representatives from the world at large were above, giant insects of steel and diesel fuel marked in red and blue numbers. News helicopters, whose spotlights illuminated the scene below, their cameras transmitting the events to all those within range of their broadcasts. How they had learned that something was to occur here was unknown, and unimportant. Mute witnesses, they could do nothing but watch and comment on events that exceeded their understanding.

So it went.

Slade stood upon the shore, and flames ran about his hands and feet. "I've come for what's mine," he said to the empty scene ahead. "Give them to me."

There was no reply, not at first, but then slowly, from the rocks and ridges that lined the island's shore, there came a figure, large and broad, with a wide stance and footfalls that shuddered the ground beneath him. He advanced alone to meet Slade, his hands at his sides, his form glowing a pale blue in the all-consuming darkness.

"We ain't givin' you anything," said Cyborg. "This place is off limits to you and everybody else in Trigon's little crew. You have five seconds to leave or we'll be mailing you back to your master in pieces."

Slade merely smiled. "This day was ordained eons ago," he said. "This is the end of the World, boy. What are you possibly thinking? That you can save your friends with some selfless heroics at the eleventh hour?"

"What I'm thinkin'," said Cyborg, his voice dangerously quiet, more a growl than spoken words, "is that you're a loudmouth punk who thinks he's gonna scare us into handin' our friends over to you with a bunch of fancy tricks and some fire-play."

"I see," said Slade, not the least bit discomfited, "and is that what your new friends from the Hive think?"

From behind Cyborg there now emerged a second figure, smaller and lither, her pink hair done up in horned spikes. A crystalline glyph of karmic energy was in her hands, and she played with it as though she had no concerns at all, tossing it lightly from hand to hand. Cyborg did not so much as glance at her as she stopped next to him. "I think you're a liar who tried to use us to jump-start the end of the world," she said. "We don't like being used. And we _really_ don't like being used for something that's gonna get us all killed."

More figures now appeared, from behind rocks and crevices before the Tower. Most were identical, a crowd of clones clad in red. Before the clone army though, there stood figures large and small, in green and black and purple and bearing harnesses of gold and dun steel.

Slade surveyed the array of teenagers before him with a practiced eye. "Quite the little get-together," he said, affecting bemused interest. "Tell me, did what _did _Raven tell you all to get you to throw your lives away on her behalf?"

"You _shut your mouth_." shouted Beast Boy from where he was perched atop a nearby rock, his gloved finger pointing at Slade like a jouster's lance. "Just _shut_ _up_! We're _not_ letting you have her! _Get out of here_ and don't come back!"

"No," said Gizmo, and Slade could see a gleeful grin on the diminuative Hiver's face. "No, let him try. I wanna see what this stuff can do."

"Shut up, Gizmo," shot back Cyborg without turning his head, and the newly anointed leader of the Titans stepped closer to Slade. "Go back to Trigon and Warp and tell them they're gonna need another Portal, because this one's shut."

Slade laughed, as a schoolmaster might laugh at the antics of precocious kindergardeners. "This is all very amusing," he said, "but I'm afraid you don't really have a choice in this matter. I am taking Raven, and Devastator too. If you interfere, I will simply reduce you to ash."

He didn't really expect them to believe him. Indeed he hoped they would not, and the Gods of Chance favored his hopes today, for he saw the hardening of Cyborg's gaze, and of Jinx', and he saw Beast Boy ('why him?' he wondered), tense up like a coiled spring. "Oh yeah?" asked the shapeshifter, "you and what army?"

Slade did not answer in words. Instead he raised his hand, and from the ground there issued forth living fire.

A company, a regiment, an _army_ aflame, a roiling mass of hukling warriors, vaguely humanoid, whose bodies were formed of some substance unknown, magma perhaps or something similar, and they burned like torches soaked in oil, burned without being consumed, every one of them roaring and crackling with the flames of Hell. Hundreds there were, emerging from nothingness, demons of fire and molten rock, and foul vapors issued forth from the crevices in their skins, and they stank. And as they appeared, surrounding the Titans and their newly minted allies, Slade beheld the fear that formed in the eyes of his opponents, and watched as Beast Boy's bravado quailed and subsided, and he laughed.

Jinx groaned and rolled her eyes as she looked up at Cyborg. "He just _had _to ask, didn't he?"

"Their name is Legion," said Slade, and he closed his fist, and watched as it too began to burn "for they are many."

But before he could order his army to attack, something else intervened.

There was a green flash, and an explosion of fire and smoke, and two of the burning warriors nearest to Slade were blown to pieces, and still-burning fragments of their bodies were hurled into the bay. And as the smoke wafted away in the sea-borne breeze, something descended from on high.

If an angel, it was a singularly angry one.

Starfire floated above the army of Slade, and green fire danced from her eyes and dripped from her hands, searing the ground where the droplets struck. Rather than the violet she usually wore, for this occasion she had donned a uniform of black, like velvet dyed with pitch, and around her upper arms and stomach were bands of iron. Plate steel was mounted on her shoulders and wrists, and a terrible crown framed her face, jagged and gleaming in the glow of her flaming hands. And all who looked upon her, friend or even foe, were filled with wonder and awe, for this was the uniform of the Tamaranean Royal Guard, the very one she had worn when first she arrived on Earth, and then never again before today.

Today was a special day.

"Slade," she said bitterly as she touched down upon the ground, before the other Titans and Hivers, before Cyborg and Jinx, directly in front of Slade himself. The army of flame demons stood waiting for Slade's order, but Slade did not command their attack. Not yet.

"Princess," said Slade sarcastically. "To what do we owe the - ?"

"You will _not_ speak," she said, her eyes flashing green, anger boiling up from her throat like bile. "You will say _nothing_. You have done enough."

"Or what?" asked Slade bemusedly. "Will you arrest me? Read me my rights perhaps?"

"No," said Starfire, and none wished or dared to gainsay her. "You and all your associates have gone too far. You have committed crimes which cannot be atoned for." She stepped forward, her eyes aflame, her bearing regal and indomitable, a princess proud and merciless. If you are still susceptible to death, then I swear by Tamaran's star that you shall _die _this night."

"And what if I am _not_ susceptible to such things?" asked Slade. "What will you do then, Koriand'r?"

If Slade had hoped to scare Starfire or the others, he was to be disappointed. Starfire drew herself up to her full height, her face stony and quivering with anger, and with short, proud words, spat Slade his answer.

"Then we shall _improvise_."

Behind Starfire, a forest of mechanical tools, of guns and launchers and weapons of various sorts, unfolded themselves from within the nooks and crannies of the island's terrain, and a swarm of red-suited clones descended towards Slade's army, slowly at first, then at a dead run. And as Starfire lifted her hands to the heavens and the flames that danced about her condensed themselves into bolts of pure energy, and as Jinx washed her eyes out white and conjured crystaline hexes into her hands, and as Cyborg's form rippled with blue and chrome as cannons emerged from where hands had been, and as Beast Boy's lanky form vanished and was replaced with that of a nameless _thing_, furred and clawed and guided by orbs of red blood, then, only then, did Slade clench his fist and cry silently to his legions to attack.

And so broke the Red Storm.

**O-O-O**

_"Fell deeds awake: fire and slaughter!_  
_spear shall be shaken, shield be splintered,  
a sword day, a red day, ere the sun rises!"_

As he shut the book for the fourteenth time, both unable and unwilling to focus on the words, David reflected on the absurdity of this situation: When there was silence, he longed for sound, and when there was sound, he longed for silence.

The safe room was well-named. Hermetically sealed, with walls of solid titanium steel so thick that even David couldn't see through them, protected by electromagnetic locks on the enormous double-doors, built with redundant power and air circulation systems, this was beyond any doubt the most secure location in the entire Tower, and by extension, in Jump City itself. The walls were inscribed with stone and neon sigils, taken straight from one of Raven's magic books, supposedly part of some kind of warding ritual designed to keep anything noncorporeal or supernatural from penetrating the room. A circle of bright light shone on the ground, and in it lay Raven, sprawled on the floor, her eyes shut, saying nothing. Dead to the world, or so it appeared.

David was jealous.

He was pacing back and forth nervously, a habit he'd picked up when he had first come to the Tower and that had not abated with time. Leaving Raven the center of the room, he moved around the margins like a caged panther. Nothing he did was of any help in stemming the tension that was screwing his insides into knots, and his ears were perked for every rumor, every minor echo of the raging battle that had to be going on outside. The walls were thick, and they were deep underground, but every so often he caught one regardless, a muffled explosion, a high energy discharge, a distant roar, or the clash of metal on rock. Deprived of actual information, his imagination ran wild with each successive sound, imagining the raging hurricane of fire and blood that was blowing just a few dozen yards away.

Raven emitted a soft groan. She'd been laying there, like that, when he arrived in the safe room, and he'd been unable to wake her or get her to acknowledge his presence. He'd chosen to assume that she was meditating or some such, but now she appeared to be stirring at last.

"Raven?" he asked. He tentatively entered the circle and knelt down beside her. She was twitching, like she was in the throes of some kind of extremely deep dream. "Raven? Can you hear me?"

"No..."

Raven's voice sounded pained, and David was fairly certain that she wasn't talking to him, though that of course begged the question of who she _was_ talking to. "Raven, are you there?" he asked.

"Don't hurt them..."

An icy coil wrapped itself around David's heart. "Hurt... who?" he asked.

"Father," said Raven, still asleep or whatever this was, and still plainly addressing someone who wasn't even here, "I don't want to..."

The tense screws inside David's guts and head tightened even further. He gently extended a trembling hand towards her shoulder. "C... C'mon, Raven, snap out of it. You're scaring the hell out of - "

_"You cannot hide from your destiny!"_

The words came from Raven's mouth, but the voice wasn't Raven's. It was deep, malevolent, a voice of doom and damnation that chilled the very marrow of his bones and sent shivers running all the way down to his heart. David stared in wide-eyed horror as Raven's eyes went blood red, and a second pair of equally-red eyes materialized from nothing on her forehead. He yanked his hand back, stumbled, and fell backwards, as Raven suddenly jerked bolt upright, her voice returning in a pained gasp. "No!" she cried, and her eyes opened, and suddenly she was awake, and blinking, and looking around at the room and at David as though astonished to be sitting here.

And before either of them could say anything, there was a thunderous boom from somewhere above and outside the Tower, shaking the entire room like a small earthquake. And then all of a sudden the lights went out.

David was absolutely certain that he felt his heart stop, just for a moment.

The safe room had its own emergency power system, and moments later, it kicked in, and the lights returned. Without even meaning to, David had scrambled away to the side of the room, shaking like a leaf in the wind, and Raven was kneeling in the center of the room, one hand held to her temple, her eyes, now reduced back to the usual two, squeezed shut.

For a few moments, David could not physically move. His muscles were frozen, his nerves shot. Only with difficulty did he manage to force his body back under control. He sat against the wall on the side of the room, one hand clasped to the handle of his baton. "What the _hell_ is going on?" he asked.

"The end of the world," she replied without opening her eyes.

All of his fear and uncertainty boiled to the surface at such a dismissive answer. "_I know that!"_ he snapped before he could stop himself. "What does that _mean_?"

"It means Trigon's coming," said Raven, slowly looking at him. She looked utterly drained. "Whatever any of us do."

It was utterly hopeless to try and get more specifics out of Raven, David could see. She was only half-here to begin with, and her gaze was so forlorn, so devoid of emotion, that David was suddenly reminded of something from his prior life, of the kids from the Foster care centers who had been abused by their parents or other caregivers. The dead eyes, the hollow stares, the emptiness that led the other kids to avoid them even when they weren't violent, that was what he read on Raven's face as clear as daylight.

The screw tightened another turn.

He stood up carefully, eyes locked on Raven. "What's happening out there?" he asked.

She lowered her head. "They're fighting the inevitable."

"What does _that_ mean?" he asked, desperately. "Are they winning? Losing? I know you can see out there. _Tell me_ what's going on."

Raven tried. She bent her head and held her temple harder and tried to concentrate. Seconds rolled by like hours as David waited, barely able to breathe.

"Fire," she said at last. "So much fire... and blood. A tide. Screaming and shooting. Metal. They're... they're afraid. Adrenaline everywhere. And... and I can feel something... something else... "

The Tower shuddered suddenly as a series of blasts outside shook dust from the ceilings and rumbled through the safe room like thunder. Raven's eyes opened, and she met David's frightened stare.

"Pain."

As the tension crushing the life out of his insides mounted yet further, something in David's brain desperately clawed its way to the fore. "We..." he stammered, "we've... we've gotta do something. Help them somehow."

"We can't," said Raven quickly. "Nobody can."

"Cyborg doesn't believe that," retorted David, "none of them do. There's gotta be something, a... a spell, a ritual, some magical thing you can do to help with - "

"I _can't_ stop my father's army," insisted Raven. "And Trigon's power is a _million_ times more than everything the others have put together."

"W-wait a minute," said David, his brain flailing for straws to grasp at. "Raven, you're more powerful than all of the rest of us put together, you _know_ that. There's _got_ to be something you can do. _Anything_."

"I can't perform _miracles_!" insisted Raven.

The tension and frustration boiled over all at once, and David exploded. "Well we've got to do _something_!" he shouted angrily. "We can't just sit here and listen to them die!"

Raven, under no less pressure, and probably under considerably more, still managed to hold herself somewhat together. "There is _nothing_ we can do," she said with the finality of ages. "Nothing _anyone_ can do, do you _get that_?"

David was not easily excitable. He had a very strong filter in place between his brain and his mouth, one which normally would have caught his next statement before he had even begun to speak. But this was not a normal day, and his mind was flailing about in panic.

"You broke into my head and tried to murder me so that this wouldn't happen," he said, "and now you won't lift a finger to even _try_ and help the others?"

Raven's eyes twitched, her whole body froze for an instant. And then suddenly she let out a choked cry and raised her hand and fired a blast of pitch-dark energy straight into David's chest. David didn't react, he didn't have time to even flinch, but the bolt of dark energy vanished into nothing the instant it touched the fabric of his shirt, leaving behind only the faint smell of acrid smoke.

For a few seconds, neither one of them moved or said a word. And as they stood there in silence, there came a muffled roar, like a jet engine or a raging firestorm, and the room shook once again, moments before they caught the distinct sound of a high pitched, agonizing scream that trailed off into silence once more.

Raven looked back into David's eyes. "The others are already dead," she said. "All we can do is prolong their pain."

And like that, David's tensed, taught, frayed nerves, finally snapped.

"Bullshit."

He stood up and quickly walked over to the door of the safe room, sliding the cover off of the electronic keypad next to the door and setting it on the ground.

"What are you doing?" asked Raven.

"I'm going out there by myself," said David without turning around.

Raven could only sigh and lower her head. "You _can't_ help them," she said.

"I don't give a damn," said David, typing his security code into the doors. "I am _not_ sitting in here like a sardine waiting for Trigon's army to kill the others and break in." His fingers moved robotically, his brain refusing to dedicate conscious effort to what he was doing, lest he lose his nerve.

"The only thing you can do out there is make their last day worse," said Raven, stepping forward as she made a last attempt to try and get him to see.

"You have _no idea_ what I can do!" shouted David as he whipped back around to face Raven. "Neither do _I_. Neither does _Trigon,_ for God's sake! And even if you're right, what the hell does it matter if I get killed out there or in here?"

Raven had nothing to say, and without looking, David reached back and hit the green button next to the keypad. The magnetic interlocks clicked and hissed for a moment, and then suddenly the door slid open, admitting into the room the still-quiet but plainly audible sounds of the raging battle going on outside.

David felt his fear, the self-preserving fear that normally coursed through him prior to a fight, starting to metastasize. He hesitated, standing at the doorway, and looked back at Raven.

"Lock it behind me, I guess," he said lamely, not sure of what else to say.

"David," said Raven sadly, "all you can do by fighting is make it worse for them."

Part of him believed her. Part of him _wanted _to believe her, and concede the initiative to the others, who were so much more certain of what they were doing. And then a large part of him was presently screaming that he was about to die horribly. But none of that really bore on the subject at hand. The others were in trouble, maybe even dying. This was what he _had_ to do. There was no choice at all.

Thank god for that at least.

He managed to shrug. "I'm good at that," he said. And with that he turned away and ran, ran down the hallway towards the elevators, letting the door slide shut behind him.

It sounded like a guillotine.

He sprinted down the hallway to the elevators that would take him up to the ground floor. They were out of order of course, the power was cut to non-essential systems when the Tower was in battle mode, but next to the elevators was a stairwell. He threw the door open and ran up the stairs two at a time, the sounds of fighting growing with each step he took. Two flights later, he was standing on the landing, and he shoved the hidden door open that led into the lobby of the Tower.

The lobby was dark and deserted, but through the enormous windows that lined the front of the entranceway, he could see flashes of light and beams of energy flying past in every direction. Green and pink and orange and light blue and combinations thereof, and every so often a dark shape flew past, too quickly to identify. The noise was loud now, deep, thunderous explosions, and the staccato snarl of gunfire mixed with roars, screams, shrieks in what might have been English or some other language. Outside was a cauldron of death, a maelstrom, a dwelling place of unspeakable abominations, and the fear gripped David as he stood there, and held him in place, trying to force him back down the stairs. He reached to his side and grasped the baton, unclipping it from his belt, and reaching his mind out to it largely to prevent it from wandering to the terrible things that might be about to occur. And then, dragging himself forward by main force, he approached the front door.

He reached it just as something wrenched it open.

There was a hollow thud, the sound of rending metal, and suddenly the front door was torn open in front of him, and in the open doorway, there stood a creature that burned like a raging bonfire. Ten feet tall and vaguely humanoid, it looked like a straw effigy aflame. It had a head of sorts, and two long arms, but no legs, floating over the ground like a disembodied spirit. Its very skin burned with an unholy flame, and it faced David and roared. David's heart froze and his blood ran cold, and he fell back without thinking about it before this monster of living fire, and as he did so, the wind blew through the doorway around it, and the _smell _of it accosted his...

... wait a minute.

He stopped retreating all of a sudden and sniffed the air again. That pungent, rotten smell, vaguely mineral. He _knew_ that smell from somewhere. Something in training... one of the substance-drills he'd done with Cyborg and Robin. The creature was still prying the doors apart to make a hole wide enough to enter, but he shifted his vision to molecules rather than light, and beheld the thing in its constituent parts, all agitated and roiling from the heat. There was a fair bit of miscellaneous rock and other minerals that he couldn't identify, but running through the entire thing were rivulets of a very pure, very specific substance, a substance he knew well, but had never expected to encounter like this, one whose continuous burning was producing the acrid smell. Sulfur.

Or by another name...

"Brimstone."

...

Fire and brimstone?

...

_Seriously_?

The ridiculousness of a demon comprised _literally_ of fire and brimstone hit him all of a sudden, and perhaps it was just the tension seeking an outlet, but in reducing the monster before him to such a rank absurdity, he felt the fear that had tied his insides in knots starting to loosen. He stared at the monster as it finished peeling the Tower's doors back, and where previously he had seen a demon from Hell, a monster, a creature of darkness and flames come to carve out his heart and devour his very soul, now he saw only an animate heap of a purified substance that he knew well, had trained with and practiced with, and knew precisely how to manipulate on a molecular level.

And then he heard a scream from outside, a scream with nothing to cut it off anymore, a scream of pain, though he could not tell its source. And like a switch had been flipped, before the fear that had so abruptly dissipated could return, David felt a strange, numbing calm flow over him, like a windless night on some distant prairie, peaceful save for a looming thunderstorm on the horizon. Before he even knew what he was doing, the baton in his hand exploded into the red flames of wrath and devastation. The book was still in his hand, and he dropped it unconsciously, and it landed on its spine on the ground, opening randomly to a page near the end, the lines at the top of the page illuminated suddenly in the flickering firelight

_"Ride to ruin and the world's ending!"_

"Hi there," he said to the fire demon as it loomed before him in the doorway. "Looking for me?"

**O-O-O**

The explosion caught everybody by surprise.

Pandemonium reigned. A cacaphonious whirlwind of disparate sound and fury which raged about the base of the Tower like a tornado of living fire. Gunshots and screams and roars all merged into an unrelenting bedlam. Cyborg had long-since lost track of what was happening, of who was where and what they were doing there amidst the tides of violence, chaos, and anarchy. He had resorted to a microwave uplink to the news helicopters flitting about overhead so as to retain even the slightest idea of what was going on, but the thick smoke that now shrouded the island made even that impossible, even for his electronic sensors. Try as he might, accosted by swarms of enemies wherever he turned, he could not retain any kind of lucid idea of how the battle was progressing. He could only catch brief glimpses, breaks in the smoke and cries for him, towards which he fixed his attention as best he could.

And it was one such glimpse he was trying to act on now.

A fire demon loomed before him, and he scythed it down with his sonic cannon even as another one caught his arm in a flaming tendril. He bellowed like a weightlifter and hurled the offending demon over his shoulder and onto the ground, stomping its head to ash as he forced his way towards the main entrance of the Tower. More flame demons were arrayed there, pounding on the armored door, and the sounds of rending metal told him that the barricade would not long hold.

"Don't let 'em inside the Tower!" he yelled to anyone who might be able to hear him, but his words were hollow and he knew it. A dozen more demons who had just finished bludgeoning down a handful of Billy Numerous' clones turned and interposed themselves between Cyborg and the entrance, even as the shriek of protesting steel told him all he needed to know about the demons' progress. Desperately, he bum-rushed the demons, sending four of them flying in every direction before the others dragged him to the ground. He roared and fought and smashed two more with his fist, and aimed a chancy shot at the demons on the doorstep, managing to blast a hole straight through one of them, but a dozen more were ready to advance, and as Cyborg watched, the first one roared and stepped into the Tower.

And was expelled.

Even amidst the background of chaos and cries, the blast was loud and deafening, a booming cannon shot that rang out bare instants before the entranceway to Titans' Tower was transformed into an artillery piece, and the disintegrated remains of the fiery demon that had entered the Tower were flung out like giant shotgun pellets, mingled with the tangled ruins of the front door. Half a dozen other fire demons were caught up in the blast and tossed into the air like toys or torn to shreds by the jagged debris. The pressure wave managed even to clear some of the smoke away, and the distraction permitted Cyborg to throw off the remaining demons pinning him to the ground and turn to the agent of this new devilry, only to see exactly what he was afraid he was going to see.

Devastator stood in the entrance to the Tower, and fire was in his hands, and his uniform looked like a flame writ in mylar, crimson and orange illuminated by the burning light of war. Demons thronged around the stairs that led to the Tower, and they pointed at him with their long arms, and cried aloud and rushed towards him in a tide, but he leveled his baton at them like a flaming sword, and their leader exploded like a bomb, casting fragments of itself about in every direction. A score of others were thrown back by the force of the blast, and tumbled to the ground among the rocks. And a moment later, from out of nowhere, a dark green beast, a werewolf or some other hideous creature conjured up from the bowels of Beast Boy's mind lunged out of the smoke and fell upon the sprawling demons, and rent their hides with his claws and teeth, sending armfuls of burning sulfur flying in every direction.

Cyborg only had time to shake his head. "You goddamn little idiot..." he said, mostly to himself, for in this mess of noise and screaming, he doubted that anyone could hear him. Seeing that there was nothing more to do, he turned back to the army of Slade, and flaying the air with his sonic cannon, Cyborg charged into the breach once more.

**O-O-O**

As it happened, David did hear Cyborg, but there was nothing more that _he_ could do about it either. Besides, it wasn't anything he wasn't thinking himself.

It was as though a sea of fire had materialized upon the island, a sea punctuated periodically by the shadowy forms of the Hivers and Titans fighting for their lives. He could identify only glimpses of what was happening. Starfire darted in and out of view, visible mostly through the green flashes of light that appeared whenever she unleashed her starbolts. Cyborg was easily visible even through the haze, for he was made of metal, and thus stood out to David like a blazing torch in the darkness, charging into and through demons of fire like a raging bull, stabbing at the air periodically with bursts of sonic energy that disintegrated everything before them. Beast Boy was below him, on the steps, and he had become a creature of terror and bloodlust, a ravening wolf-thing, a Beast whose claws glowed with molten rock and who howled in primal rage against those who dared threaten his family.

The sight of Beast Boy's horrifying bestial form sent shivers running down David's spine, dredging up memories of a similar creature he had met long ago, but he suppressed them as best he could. There were, after all, far better things to be afraid of here. And yet at the same time, the practiced observer still within him couldn't help but venture a question. Many times, since the incident at the chemical factory, David had seen Beast Boy fight, sometimes ferociously, in defense of his life, his friends, or both. Yet never before had he seen him willingly bring forth the werewolf-inspired monster that the others had come to call simply "The Beast", not even when the danger to himself and the others reached levels of near-certain death, as they had tonight.

So what exactly was he defending tonight that had forced him to bring out the Beast?

There was no time to answer that question, or even muse upon it. Two masses of animate evil lunged from the darkness, one from either side, shrieking like damned souls as they beat the air with their whip-like arms. David compartmentalized his thinking, by now it was rote, and focused on their constituent materials, on the sulfur, the brimstone that coursed through them like blood or ichor, and as he did, he swung his baton back and forth, like a fencing sword. Instantly, both demons were blotted out of existence like mosquitos struck by sledgehammers, and bits of flaming sulfur rained down upon him. It was fortunate that his uniform was fireproof.

He could not stand here. There were _hundreds_ of demons before him, to say nothing of whatever other monsters lurked in the shadows. Dozens already were looking up at him, screaming like steam whistles, and from every direction there came tendrils of flame, snaking and writhing as they flew towards him like loose ropes in a hurricane. He ducked and ran forward, avoiding most of them, though one wrapped around his upper arm and nearly pulled him off his feet. Even through the fabric it burned, and he hissed in pain and brought his baton around and down onto the tendril of fire as hard as he could. It wasn't an explosion, but it did the trick. The tendril parted, the sulfurous bond around his arm extinguished and crumbled away, and before the demon could resume its attack, David had scrambled down the stairs and into the thick of things.

The very _earth _was on fire. Noxious fumes choked his nose and mouth, and screaming flame demons assaulted his senses as they pressed towards him from every direction. He could see nothing, nobody, except the demons that pressed around him, and in desperation he lashed out randomly, striking at half-glimpsed figures of sulfur and flame in every direction. Half a dozen he blew to pieces, sending three times that many flying in every direction, but more pressed in from all sides. Something hit him in the back like a baseball bat, and he cried out, and fell forward onto the ground. An instant later something landed on his back, something large and heavy and he cried out and blew it off of him with a wave of his hand, sending it pinwheeling into the bay like an errant firework, but others pressed in around him, reaching down to bind him before he could stand up.

But before they could do so, something landed amidst them feet first, something huge and hulking, and with a roar, it seized the nearest flame demon, and ripped off its head, and cast its body into the crowd. Laying prone on the ground, choked and barely able to see, David thought for a moment that it was Cyborg, perhaps even Beast Boy in his feral form, but then other figures joined the large one, and he realized with a shock that it was neither.

Mammoth _roared_, roared like his namesake, enraged and covered in soot, and he beat the ground with an enormous iron bar that he had dredged up from somewhere and swung it two-handed like a viking berserker, cutting a swathe through the nearby demons. They snatched at him with their tendrils, and he seized them with his bare hands and tore them apart, heedless of the fire that scorched its skin. And next to him stood Jinx, flinging hexes like throwing stars and sending waves of pink energy rippling through the legion of the damned. It took David's addled mind a full second and a half to process this before he grabbed his baton from off the ground and scrambled to his feet.

He lunged into the fighting without giving himself time to think. Fire demons roared and threw themselves at him from every direction, far too many for him to have dealt with. Had he been alone, no amount of desperation would have saved him, for the demons would have buried him beneath a mountain of their bodies and roasted him alive. Yet he was not alone, for Jinx was there, spinning like a dancer, laying flame demons down left and right, and Mammoth was there too, the iron bar in his hands glowing cherry-red from the heat, and yet he smashed it into and through demon after demon and cast their crumpled forms into the water, whence emitted clouds of thick steam.

Had either Hiver chosen to betray the Titan beside them, David would surely have been crushed, but neither Hiver did. In this moment, faced with this enemy, all other enmities were simply absolved, all sins forgiven, and they fought like cornered wolves, as did their friends and fellows across the battlefield, all simply trying to stem the tides of darkness.

David's arm was like lead, his head pounding from the extended concentration, and the sulfur dust was so thick that he could barely see, much less breathe, but still he lashed out, ripping more animate fires apart with his mind, even smashing them with his baton when necessary. Their flaming tendrils stung his face and chest like whips of molten steel. They grabbed at his arms and legs, trying to snare him or pull him to the ground, and he stumbled over and over but always Jinx or Mammoth bought him enough time to stagger back to his feet and fight some more. He tried his best to do the same for them. Perhaps it helped, perhaps they could have handled it without him, but all three were still standing when the press of demons began to thin.

For a second, David thought they might have won. But then he saw otherwise.

He turned to his right, back towards the entrance to the Tower, and he saw Cyborg standing there, alone. His blue skin and metallic body were marred by scorch marks and jagged rents torn in his armor. A true _army_ of fire demons, of searing magma and burning sulfur, were arrayed before him in a wedge. And amidst them stood a tall, menacing figure in black and brown. David didn't need to be able to see his face to know who he was. The empty void where the figure's molecules should have been told him enough.

"Slade," hissed Jinx.

And then to David's surprise, Jinx actually ran towards Cyborg, Cyborg whom she professed to hate. Though all the hordes of Hell lay between them, she ran to help him defy Slade, though what motives she might have for doing this were anyone's guess. There was not one chance in ten million that she could make it. A thousand demons and more stood between her and Cyborg, but she tore into them with renewed vigor, and Mammoth followed her, as did David, after a fashion. The army of demons was already closing on Cyborg though, and none of the other Titans were within sight. It seemed hopeless.

But Cyborg, as it turned out, had a trick or two up _his _sleeve as well.

"_Nobody's gettin' in here!_" he roared, and slammed a button on one arm. Instantly, his form began to ripple and shift, his metallic body parts unfolding and unfurling like an origami sculpture. Enormous cables snaked down from the Tower and plugged themselves into ports on his back, and both his forearms expanded and shifted into gigantic cannons that glowed with blue energy like pilot lights on a flamethrower. The Tower behind Cyborg darkened, the lights dying floor by floor, as Cyborg's electronic parts began to glow ever more brightly, and a small crystal eyepiece slid into place over his human eye, marked in red with a crosshairs.

The demons hesitated. Even _Slade_ seemed to freeze, as whitish-blue energy built up within the twin cannon's of Cyborg's siege weaponry. David stared, his baton limp at his side, stared like a deer in headlights, and would likely have continued staring had not Jinx had the foresight to grab him by one arm and physically drag him to the ground.

A moment later, Cyborg fired.

A tsunami of blueish energy flew right over David's head, a wave front, a ribbon of pure annihilation that carved a furrow in the ground and struck the wedge of fire demons a thousand strong head on and blew through them like howitzer shell striking toy soldiers. The roar was _deafening_, and David lay on the ground and covered his head with his hands and screamed and could not even hear himself as Cyborg bathed the entire island in white death. The demons were obliterated, the lucky ones flung thousands of yards offshore to drown in the bay, the unlucky ones simply reduced to ash on the spot or vaporized without a trace. And David distinctly saw Slade's single eye widen in shock and surprise an instant before the blast wave struck him dead on, and then he saw no more.

As the light and the sound faded, and David slowly regained his hearing, he carefully got back to his feet. The entire island was a charred ruin, rocks melted to slag, bits of smoldering sulfur scattered about like confetti, and choked with smoke. David saw Cyborg's body re-assemble itself into its normal configuration, saw Cyborg slump over onto the ground, his power reserves utterly spent by the terrible holocaust he had unleashed. And through the smoke he saw Beast Boy and Starfire joining him, both beaten and exhausted, heads hanging, hands clasped over injuries, but still they moved to help Cyborg up. Their thoughts were easy to gauge. Surely, _surely_ not even Slade could survive a blow such as that, a blast which could have cut a battleship in half.

And then David heard a laugh. A calm, smug, arrogant laugh, the laugh of an adult amused by the antics of children, and he turned, and there, standing exactly where he had been a moment ago, stood Slade.

And he was _unblemished_.

"No _way..._"

The voice was Jinx', she had gotten to her feet and stood next to David without him even realizing it, but the sentiment was David's, indeed it was everyone's. Even _Mammoth_ could not believe what he was seeing. Cyborg had struck Slade dead on with enough power to set the very sea to boiling, but it had not been enough.

And then Slade lifted his arms, and a thousand more flame demons emerged from the ground.

Time seemed to slow down.

The demons charged even as they emerged from the ground, a flood tide advancing on the three Titans. David had plenty of time to watch them, watch their expressions turn from horror to grim realization of what was about to come. Cyborg could not even stand. Beast Boy was nearly as bad off, staggering to his feet and struggling to muster the strength to shift forms one more time. Starfire alone remained able to fight. Her body was marred by burns and her uniform torn and charred, but the fire still burned in her eyes, and with a single glance back at her friends, she turned back to the army of fire and charged it alone. Starbolts burst from her hands like missiles, and the front rank of demons collapsed, but then they were upon her. For an instant, David saw her struggling against a sea of foes, crying Tamaranean war paeans aloud, fighting to buy Cyborg and Beast Boy a few more seconds with which to fall back into the Tower and escape. And then the demons dragged her to the ground, and David could see no more.

And then all of a sudden, he was running.

It was as though his body was acting without conscious input. His mind was still fixated on the image of Starfire being overwhelmed and Cyborg and Beast Boy about to share her fate, and yet his body was already moving, running, _sprinting_ even directly towards the army of fire demons. And all of a sudden he realized that he felt no pain at all, no fear, no hesitation, no worry about what else might be transpiring. His vision had become a tunnel, his awareness reduced only to the scene in front of him as his friends were overwhelmed by a sea of enemies. And as he ran, he lifted the baton, that an instant before had been as heavy as lead, and was now as light as a feather, and felt the flames around it flare to life once more, and pointed it forward, and willed his enemies to be destroyed.

And they _were_.

The ground heaved, the skies split and a dozen different demons all along the demon army's flank were blown to steam with such force that the rock beneath them was sundered and fissures were torn open like an earthquake had been unleashed. Dozens of demons turned on him, roared and screamed and tried to seize him, but he lashed out at them with in desperation and wrath, and they were tossed away like broken toys, detonated with a wave of his hand or his fiery baton. A moment later and he was in the midst of the enemy force, refusing to stop, his hand held up in front of him motionless, striking at anything nearby with his mind, and blowing it outwards, sending demons by the dozen and the score flying in every direction. Still more pressed in around him, _far_ too many for him to have dealt with even at his most potent, but then a fusillade of rockets smashed into the far side of the demon army, punctuated by the sharp bark of Gizmo's rail guns, engaging the enemy from the flank, and as the demons turned from foe to foe, and some moved away to deal with this new threat, he managed, barely, to push through. He had no time to consider what he was doing, no sense of accomplishment in laying the demons down. His only thought was to get to the others.

Suddenly, he was there. He was standing in front of the stairs that led up to the Tower's entrance, and Starfire was laying on the ground unconscious in front of him. Two fire demons were crouched over her, but he tore them apart with a wave of his baton and slid to the ground next to her. He grabbed her wrist, tried to help her to her feet, and then suddenly Beast Boy was next to him, in human form once more, taking her other arm. Between the two of them, they managed to haul Starfire to her feet, and half-drag, half-carry her up the steps to where Cyborg was limping back towards the entrance to the Tower.

For a brief instant, David thought they might make it.

"Tell me, David," came Slade's voice from _right behind_ them. "Do you know what the definition of insanity is?"

David froze. Beast Boy froze. Cyborg froze. And as all three of them turned around, David and Beast Boy still supporting Starfire between them, they saw Slade standing at the base of the steps, not ten feet away, his arms folded, staring up at them.

"Insanity," said Slade, "is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result."

David raised his baton towards Slade, intending to blow the ground out from under his feet, but before he could manipulate so much as a single molecule, Slade was on him.

Perhaps Slade was inhumanly fast. Perhaps he simply teleported. Either way, suddenly Slade was simply _there_, right in his face, and with one hand he grabbed David's arm and stopped his embryonic swing with the same effort a giant might need to repel a gnat. And then suddenly, with a motion so fast that it was simply a blur, Slade pivoted around and hurled David down from the steps of the Tower. He landed on his stomach, sliding to a halt two dozen yards from where he had stood, fetching up against a large broken rock.

Urgent signals to move came blaring from brain, and he obeyed them, scrambling back to his feet as quickly as he could recover his balance. He turned around to see Slade already standing before him some fifteen feet away. Behind Slade, a cordon of fire demons moved to block his path back to the Tower.

"You know," said Slade. "I knew the others would try some infantile flailing rather than accept the inevitable, but I rather assumed, David, that we would wind up having to chase you halfway around the planet. Even after all this time, I still figured you for a pragmatist, rather than someone given to these juvenile displays of rage."

David did not allot himself enough time to be scared. Instead he tightened his grip on his baton, and released his powers like a sharpened spike, directing one of said juvenile displays of rage straight at Slade.

The earth heaved as a subterranean explosion vomited the two ton rock behind David into the air, cracking it in half and showering David with pebbles and bits of rock. He raised his hand behind him as the broken pieces of the rock rose, slowed, and reached the apex of their flight. And then, when he judged the moment proper, he threw his hand and baton forward like he was directing a flight of birds overhead, and two enormous blasts hurled the pieces of rock straight down at Slade with enough force and momentum to crush an armored car. But the rocks shattered against Slade as though made of styrofoam, and he did not even break his stride.

He loomed before David, a monolith of inviolate armor and malice, and David searched desperately for something else to detonate, but it was too late. Suddenly Slade was directly in front of him, and as David stumbled backwards, Slade's flaming fist shot out and belted him in the stomach, hard enough to double him over and crush the air out of his lungs. And then a moment later, Slade swung his other fist around low and hit David in the solar plexus with what was, quite literally, the strongest punch David had ever imagined.

It was like being uppercutted by a kodiak bear. The blow snapped David's entire upper body back and lifted him clean off the ground. The baton slipped from his hand as he flew up and backwards before coming down on his back on the broken carpet of rock. His chest felt like it had been struck with a baseball bat, bright spots danced before his eyes, and he physically, absolutely, could not breathe. The blow had sent a cavitative shock straight through his body, like seismic waves moving through gelatin, and his diaphragm was frozen, his nerves unable to respond. He lay on the ground stunned and half-conscious, one hand pawing spastically at his throat as he gasped for air.

"Did you harbor some fantasy of the being the loyal, plucky underdog, springing into action at the last minute to save your friends?" asked Slade as he approached. "Did you imagine they would cheer your name after you defeated an enemy that none of them could master?" He folded his arms and watched impassively as David slowly forced his lungs to work, forced a breath down his quivering throat, and groped with his left hand for the baton that lay bare inches away. Slade stood before him as David reached for it blindly, until his fingers brushed against the handle, and managed to turn his head and stretch his arm out to take it.

And then Slade lifted his foot and stomped down on David's wrist like a pile driver, and David threw his head back and _screamed_.

There was a loud _'snap'_, and David's vision went white, and the bloodcurdling scream he released drowned out even the roars of the fire demons scattered about. He writhed on the floor in agony, clutching his maimed left hand to his chest, unable to see or hear or do anything except scream in pain, and above him, Slade's eye watched with approval and satisfaction, as he crossed his arms and pronounced judgment.

"You are an, unskilled, unnecessary intruder in matters that you will never understand, David. And for this intrusion, you are going to die."

There was the wail of an energy discharge, and the screech of machinery, and suddenly a wave of pink force slammed into Slade from the right like a miniature tsunami, accompanied by a barrage of micro-rockets and a hail of rail gun slugs powerful enough to stagger even him. Even in his agony, David managed to turn his head towards the source of this fresh assault, and saw Jinx standing there, eyes washed out white, her hands extended with fingers splayed out in a fan. And beside her hovered Gizmo, his green jumpsuit burned black and soot smeared liberally on his face and hair, but grinning at Slade with a diabolic glare as the reflected fires of Hell danced in his eyes. Gadgets of all description hung from his harness as he raised one hand, and the laser pointer on his arm drew a bead on Slade's face. An instant later, the rail guns mounted up near the tower all turned and fired remotely, locking onto Gizmo's signal, sending slugs of ferrous metal at hypersonic speeds smashing directly into Slade's face.

Slade's response was instantaneous.

He roared in anger and frustration and with a single leap, he flew through the air and landed before the two Hivers. Jinx brought up her hand with a hex held in it, intending to smash it across his face, but he caught her arm before she could do so, and spun, hurling her into the nearby rock hard enough to shatter its face. Jinx slid to the ground in a heap of rubble and did not rise.

"_Hey!_" screamed Gizmo. "_Leave her alone, you flaming piece of devil snot!", _and he hit a button on his arm, and the rail guns behind him switched to automatic fire, deluging Slade in a rain of iron flechettes. But Gizmo might as well have been firing nerf guns, for the slugs bounced off Slade as though he were Superman, and before Gizmo could prepare another counterattack, Slade charged him and drove his burning fist into the gearhead's electronic harness, which simply shattered like glass, raining pieces down onto the ground. With his other hand, he caught the suddenly-falling Gizmo and hoisted him into the air by his throat, where he struggled and kicked and swore at Slade.

There was a flutter of wings, and suddenly David noticed that a small green sparrow had landed next to him. A moment later, and Beast Boy was crouched over him, saying words he couldn't hear, taking his undamaged arm and helping him slowly to his feet. Beast Boy was badly injured himself, beaten and bloodied from all manner of terrible abuse, but he somehow found the strength to help David up, draping David's arm around his shoulders, and taking part of his weight, for David could barely even stand.

"I've got you, dude," said Beast Boy. "Come on, we've gotta get back to - "

"Do you think this is a _game_?"

Slade's voice boomed out like a cannon, like that of an angry, wrathful god, and reflexively, both David and Beast Boy turned their heads. Jinx was on her feet once more, and was facing Slade, who still held Gizmo with one hand high above the ground. Slade looked _pissed_, angrier than he had been before by far, and David saw Jinx hurl hexes at Slade that shattered against him like crystal thrown at a cinderblock wall.

"Do you think I came all this way to abide your delusions of grandeur?" demanded Slade of Jinx. "Do you think you can simply turn on Trigon the Terrible without _consequence_?" Slowly he brought Gizmo around in front of him, raising him as high as he could, even as the gearhead continued to struggle and squirm.

"_Behold the wages of sin!_" roared Slade, and then suddenly Slade's entire hand burst into flames that wrapped themselves around Gizmo. Gizmo screamed, screamed Jinx' name in unimaginable agony, no longer a confident Hive member, no longer a wrathful mad scientist, but a ten-year-old child once more, crying for his elder sister to save him from monsters cast forth from Hell itself. Behind Slade, See-More was rushing towards the scene, his visor switched to a red filter that fired a high powered laser, tracing searing designs on Slade's back as he tried to force Slade to release Gizmo, but Slade merely reached back with his other hand and launched an enormous fireball straight at the See-More without even bothering to look his direction. And then, before the eyes of all present, the fire in Slade's hands flowed over Gizmo entirely, and burnt him to ash, moments before the fireball he had launched struck See-More head on, and blew him apart like an overripe melon.

And right then, like someone had waved a magic wand over his head, David realized with absolute certainty that they were all going to die.

Everyone stood frozen in stunned horror as Slade let the charred bones and twisted harness that was all that was left of Gizmo fell to the ground, even as blood and bits of burnt flesh rained down all over the battlefield. Jinx stood frozen like a statue, and David recognized the expression as clearly as he would an old friend, that of shock and disbelief and the inability of the mind to comprehend what had just happened. Slade stared down at her, a cobra facing a mouse, and then, contemptuously, he turned his back on her, his feet kicking aside the small pile of ash that had once been Gizmo, even as he brushed the splattered remains of See-More off of his arms and shoulders.

A second later, Jinx' mind caught up with the situation, and she went absolutely _wild_, screaming incoherently, hurling hexes and blast waves of energy at Slade like a vengeful goddess, but Slade did not even bother to turn around and Jinx could not so much as dent his impenetrable armor. She would have charged him anyway, her eyes shot red and streaming tears, incandescent with rage, but Mammoth, alone among all present, had managed to retain a clear head, and ran up and seized her from behind, lifting her bodily off the ground to prevent her from killing herself by attacking Slade directly. She screamed and cursed Mammoth and fought with all her might to break free of him, and even tried to blast her fellow Hiver with a hex, but Mammoth held her firmly as he backed away from Slade and his army both, having made within whatever mind he had, the simple calculation that there was no winning this, and that having lost two friends in as many seconds, he would not lose a third.

Slade ignored them both. He had another target in mind.

Even had they been able to think clearly after all the death that had suddenly materialized around them, Beast Boy and David could never have made it to the Tower, not with a thousand demons between them and the entrance, and Slade bearing down on them with the inexorability of a locomotive. David could clearly resist no further by himself, and so Beast Boy, despite what he had just seen, despite his own injuries and what he knew Slade to be capable of, released David and stepped forward, turning himself into a velociraptor and snarling at Slade. In his present state, he likely couldn't manage any bigger animal. Slade continued to approach, and Beast Boy lunged at him as soon as he was in range, but he might as well have thrown a spitball, for Slade simply seized him in mid-leap and slammed him to the ground. For a brief, horrible instant, David thought that Slade might do to Beast Boy what he had just done to Gizmo and See-More, but instead of burning him to ash, Slade merely shook his head at Beast Boy before spinning around and hurling the changeling like a discus, over the heads of his own army, into the entrance to the Tower, where he landed in a heap and did not rise.

Carefully, Slade turned back to David, who now stood alone in the midst of his enemies, unarmed, beaten, and crippled. And he seemed to smile, even through the emotionless mask he wore, and raised his hand, and the ground shook beneath David's feet, and he stumbled and fell forward, landing on his stomach on the ground, with Slade standing over him only a few feet away.

"I have to say, David," said Slade, "even by the standards of the Titans, your capacities for self-delusion never cease to amaze me..."

**O-O-O**

"Star, can you hear me?"

Starfire was slowly coming to, all too slowly, but Cyborg had no idea how to bring her 'round any faster than she was already waking up. Tamaraneans needed a lot to knock out, but consequently, would simply sleep right through things that would bring even a human coma patient leaping from their beds.

Beast Boy was knelt next to Starfire, the entire right side of his face a mass of purple bruises, and God-knew-what other injuries held invisible within his torn purple and black uniform. Cyborg refused to think about it now. Everyone was beaten up, and they needed to get moving before Slade's army decided to press the attack rather than standing around like the idiots they were.

"Can you see any of the Hive?" asked Beast Boy.

Cyborg shook his head but didn't raise it. "I think Jinx and Mammoth got out. The others..."

"I was _there,_ dude, I saw," said Beast Boy, and he sounded scared. Hell Cyborg thought his _own_ voice sounded scared. That wasn't a huge surprise. He was terrified out of goddamn mind, but he didn't know what else to do at this point.

_"This was all ordained long ago by beings mightier than you can even envision. By prophecies written in the blood of angels. Did you actually think you had the slightest chance in the world of stopping it? You or any of your friends?"_

Slade's voice rolled across the broken battlefield like thunder. Cyborg didn't need to be able to see him to know who he was talking to. By process of elimination, it could only be one person.

"What the _hell_ did he think he was doin'?" snapped Cyborg angrily. "I _told_ him to stay in the safe room. I shoulda' _locked _the goddamn door, I'm so _fucking_ _stupid!_"

"Cy!" cried BB sharply, "_chill_, dude, we'll worry about that later. We've gotta get Star and get over there and - "

"Yeah, I'm _workin'_ on it!" snapped back Cyborg, as he shook Starfire a bit harder. He hated to do that with all her injuries, but they couldn't very well break through the wall of fire demons without her.

Not that they had a chance _with_ her.

He shoved that thought aside. It didn't matter. After all this, he was not going to just abandon one of the Titans to Slade's devices, no matter how bad the situation looked. He was certain it was what Robin would have done, and even if not, what else were they supposed to do? Retreat to the Tower and wait for Slade to walk right in?  
_  
"At a certain point, one realizes that there is no purpose in fighting further. I don't really care what it takes to bring you to that point, but I'd appreciate it if you'd stop wasting my time with childish gestures of defiance."_

"I'd give real money if he'd _shut up,_" remarked Cyborg_._

"He's _Slade_, dude, he doesn't know _how_ to shut up."

"Yeah, well I'm gonna teach him." It was a preposterous bluff. They already knew that nothing they had here could even phase Slade, but it made him feel a little bit better anyway.

Starfire gave a soft moan, and to Cyborg's infinite relief, her eyes slowly opened, or at least one eye did, the other one swollen shut.

"Wh... what is..." stammered Starfire, but before she could get any further, Beast Boy practically lunged forward and hugged her tightly, his entire body quivering in relief at seeing her alive. Bewildered, but still capable of reacting to such an elemental thing, Starfire returned the hug, nearly crushing Beast Boy's lungs as she did so. And by the time she was done, she had remembered what was happening, and taken stock of her surroundings.

Her first question got right to the point.

"Where is Friend David?"

"Slade's got him," said Cyborg, gesturing in the vague direction of Slade's mocking voice. As was typical with Slade, he was playing with his chosen victim like a cat toying with a mouse.  
_  
"If only you all had believed me when I first told you, then Robin would still be alive, as would your friends."_

Starfire looked at the swarm of demons that separated them, and Cyborg knew that she understood. Starfire had never been as naive as she appeared, certainly not in matters relating to combat and war. And yet despite that, she did not even hesitate.

"Then we must _retrieve _him."

Her voice was absolutely certain, no trace of debate or hesitation or even fear. She could plainly see what odds stood between her and Slade, and she chose not to care.

Cyborg glanced at Beast Boy, who looked nervously at the army before them. For a second, Cyborg thought that he might object. They were way past any sort of command structure here. Beast Boy would do as he wished to, and neither Cyborg nor Starfire would compel him. And yet when Beast Boy spoke, it was not with an objection, but merely an observation.

"I didn't... think it'd end this way," said Beast Boy.

Cyborg reached over and put a battered hand on the changeling's shoulder. "It ain't over yet," he said.

Beast Boy nodded slowly. "Do... d'you think Raven'll be able to hold them off long enough to escape?"

"I don't know," said Cyborg. He had long since abandoned any hope of comparing the levels of power on display here. "All I know is that we lost Robin already. And I _ain't_ losin' anyone else. Not Raven, not David, and not you, Grass Stain."

An ironic thing to say, given what they were all about to go and do, but what of it?

Beast Boy nodded, and slowly his grim expression turned into the feral grin that Cyborg remembered all too well. "Okay, dude," he said, slowly getting to his feet. "Let's show this losers how we do things here."

Starfire was on her feet too, and she extended a hand to Cyborg to help him up. She said nothing. There was nothing that needed saying, and he checked his power reserves (less than ten percent), and took a deep breath, and turned to face Slade's army.

But Slade's army wasn't facing them.

The demons had thinned out, spread around Slade and David in a loose circle, and from the Titans' elevated position on the stairs, they could now see Slade and David. David was laying on his back before Slade, who was towering over him, delivering some pithy lecture about inevitable victory, typical villain stuff.

"Have you nothing to say for _yourself_ after all this pain? Not one word of retort or prayer? Perhaps you'd like to beg for mercy? After all, these _are_ your last words..."

Something was wrong.

David was holding his baton, and it was pulsing softly with red energy, not the roaring fire it normally had whenever it was being used as a mental focus, but a soft, glowing ember. Cyborg couldn't remember perfectly, but he was _pretty_ sure that he'd never seen the baton do that before. What it signified was beyond him, perhaps simply that David was beaten within an inch of his life (which was true enough). And yet there was something... something in David's expression, his demeanor, in the way he held his baton with his right hand and cradled it with his mangled left arm, something that made Cyborg intensely uneasy.

Whatever David had to say was whispered so softly that neither Cyborg nor Slade could hear it, and Slade hauled David to his feet to better hear it. Neither Starfire nor even Beast Boy had a prayer of overhearing David's whisper, not at this distance, but being half-mechanical had advantages, and he switched his sound amplifiers on, screening out all of the background noise automatically as he listened carefully for whatever David was saying to Slade. As Slade leaned in to hear what David had to say, David's head turned slightly such that he could see Cyborg, and their eyes locked for just a second. And in that instant of wordless communication, in that single glance into David's hollow, pained, nervous eyes, Cyborg realized that David had made the same calculation that the three of them had, and come to the same conclusion.

And then Cyborg heard the word that David whispered to Slade, and his circuits froze.

"_Boom._"

"No," said Cyborg, his voice trembling as he realized what was about to happen. "God, no, no no, _David, NO!_"

Too late.

Without a word, Cyborg threw all that was left of his emergency reserve power into his limbs, and he seized Beast Boy and Starfire both, and pulled them back behind him, and flung them to the ground even as David and Slade and the entire army of flame demons suddenly vanished from view, replaced by the undifferentiated, blinding flash of a thousand burning suns...

**O-O-O**

"Sweet _Jesus!_"

Unlike the cameraman, the Helicopter pilot had no time with which to swear, as the flash of light blinded him right through his polarizing goggles, and scrambled every camera and LIDAR system on board the news helicopter he was flying. The flash lasted only a second before slowly abating, as a horrible, atonal _roar_ filled the air around them, a violent, evil sound that physically shook the helicopter and threatened to rip it from the air. The flying machine bucked and twisted and the pilot had to strain in order to retain control of it, and yet as he did so, the light diminished, and he could see once more, and his mouth fell open of its own accord so as to contribute his own comment.

"_Madre de dios_," whispered the pilot, and he crossed himself.

A fireball, an _enormous _fireball was rising from Titans Island, boiling into the air like some type of alien life form, already hundreds of feet tall and growing ever taller. And behind it, Titans Tower had gone dark, and the entire face of the Tower was shattering, floor by floor, glass spilling down onto the island below or being blown half a mile across the water. The pilot pulled the control stick towards himself as rocks the size of minivans passed them nearly six hundred feet in the air, and an entire flame demon, or rather both halves of one, flew right past their passenger-side window. The enormous antenna and satellite dish complex on the Tower's roof teetered and fell, collapsing off the back side of the Tower into the ocean, and the Tower itself swayed, the sounds of groaning metal audible even up here. For a horrible second, the pilot thought the Tower might collapse or topple. In the end, it did not fall, but the cloud of flame and destruction before it continued to rise, bubbling upwards to form the ominous shape of an enormous mushroom. Already it was as large as the Tower itself, and beneath it, the entire front section of the island, _thousands_ of tons of rock and stone, were simply _gone_, pulverized and blown into the ocean out to a distance of half a mile.

The pilot slowly backed the helicopter away as the mushroom cloud reached their altitude and continued to rise and spread. Only once he had managed to stabilize the helicopter did he turn to the cameraman.

"What the _fuck_ was that?" he exclaimed, adrenaline still pumping through him.

"I don't... I don't _know_, man!" shouted back the cameraman.

"Was anybody in the middle of that?"

The cameraman didn't answer immediately, reviewing his tape before he slowly lifted his head and turned to the pilot with a hollow expression.

"Yeah," said the cameraman. "Yeah... someone was..."

**O-O-O**

For a long, long time, Cyborg didn't know if he was alive or dead.

His money was on dead.

There had been just enough time to hurl Starfire and Beast Boy to the ground and dive on top of them in the hopes that his own metallic, armored body, would shield theirs from the worst of the blast. Of what happened next, he could tell very little. A thunderous roar, the ground bucking beneath them all like a living thing, the sounds of glass shattering and the feel of it raining down upon his back, the horrible moans of the Tower itself as its foundations and structural supports protested and shook, but finally held. Splashes, as debris and wreckage landed in the bay for miles around, and always the lingering echo of the explosion itself, a sonic pressure wave that rebounded and danced throughout the entire Jump City basin, turning it into a huge timpani drum.

Only when the sound finally faded, and the last bits of debris had finished raining down onto the ground, did Cyborg realize that he was actually still alive.

He got up slowly, shattered glass sliding off of his back and tinkling onto the ground. Beneath him, Starfire and Beast Boy were laying stunned. Cyborg was not light, and they had not received any warning before he had leaped upon them. Still, they were both still alive, which was more than he had dared hope for, and he carefully helped them up, before all three of them turned around to see what was left of the battlefield.

Not much.

The entire front section of the island was simply _gone_, as though someone had carved it out of the island with a giant ice cream scoop. In its place the sea now sat, whipped into an angry frenzy, its waves beating against the newly truncated shoreline with such violence that spray even reached the three Titans standing on the stairs. Barely a trace of Slade's army was still visible, a few fragments of smoking sulfur and cooling lava here and there. The rest were all gone, pulverized and hurled off into the black or simply vaporized where they stood. _No_ trace of the Hive could be seen, at least not within the field of vision they possessed, hemmed as it was by clouds of dense smoke.

And of David and Slade... nothing remained.

"What _happened_?" asked Beast Boy, his eyes wide.

Cyborg shook his head. "I don't know, man..." he said, but the truth was that he _did _know, and could not bring himself to say it. Even as his conscious mind was sitting in astonished awe of what had occurred, his mechanical brain was making calculations of volume and forces and pressure gradients. The explosion, whatever the hell it was, had been powerful enough to simply obliterate several thousand _tons _of solid stone, turning hundreds of cubic feet of bedrock into sand and pebbles and bits of debris that were still raining down in the distance. The physics simulations came back with an absolute verdict. A blast capable of doing that should have blown the Tower itself to pieces, and torn all three of them to shreds.

But Cyborg didn't need to wonder at why they were still alive. He knew already that the same will that had generated the monumental explosion had also contrived to channel the majority of it upwards, away from his friends, directly towards Slade, and by extension, directly towards himself.

Starfire whispered something in Tamaranean, something his computer didn't know how to translate. Beast Boy was simply standing stock still, staring wordlessly at the scene of ruin before him as the wind began to blow away the smoke. And as Cyborg did the same, he saw, several feet in front of him, a small metal object sticking out of the rock, and realized all of a sudden what it was. It was a steel riot baton, shiny once again, for the layer of impurities on its surface had been boiled away by the heat. It had been driven like a railroad spike halfway into the rock before them, and then buffeted with a wind of such violence that its still-visible half had been bent double.

At his side, Beast Boy lowered his head, and Cyborg reflexively laid a hand on his shoulder as the Changeling swayed and fell against him, his fangs clenched together like a vice, his hands balled into fists which he pounded lightly against Cyborg's metal side even as tears began to run down his face. Starfire meanwhile stepped forwards, down to the edge of the water where the baton was laying, and took it with her hands, and wrenched it out of the ground. She turned it over in her hands for a few moments, staring down at it in shock, and then she let it fall from trembling hands, and suddenly her legs gave out beneath her, and she fell to the ground, staring out over the waves wordlessly as the baton rolled to a stop next to her.

But Cyborg only tangentially saw any of this, for in his mind, he was not even present anymore. As he had been on the day that Robin had died, he was gone from this place, transported back to a time not so terribly long ago when his robotic parts had been fresh additions, a time when he had stood in a place of long familiarity for the very last time, and stared down at a casket covered in flowers, ignoring the whispers of those around him. And despite the fact that he had not returned to that place in years and had put it and all it stood for out of his life, forever, words as familiar to him as his own discarded name softly emerged from his mouth, mingling with the tears that began to run from his human eye.

"Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name..."

**O-O-O**

Is this how you thought it would end?

Is this what you expected? A last, desperate act, a final defiant blow against the hated aggressor? Selfless desire to spare the others with one last effort? Was it, after all this, to be expiation by death? All sins forgiven, all errors corrected, all mistakes remedied in one desperate, selfless act of heroism? Did, in the end, you believe this tale was to be that of the immortal hero, memorialized, remembered, redeemed through one burst of all-purging fire? Was that to be the epitaph? One final entry into the immortal ranks of the honored fallen?

Tell me, in all this time, through all you have seen and all of these adventures, have you truly learned _nothing_?

In a world of such chaos, death, and ruin, did you _actually _believe that the salvation of man, of Earth, of the Titans themselves, could come at the hands of an explosion of hydrogen and granite? With the forces of Hell itself arrayed against the Titans, did you _really _believe that salvation could come at the hands of an explosion, or that prophecy so-long anticipated, so long-arranged, could be undone by a mere child, play-acting at the role of the heroic suicide?

Or, in the depths of your heart, did you know better? Did you know, with all the certainty in the world, that no misguided delusions of sacrifice could stop what was intended to happen? Did you realize, on some level at least, that the easy way out, the simple, heart-plucking cliché of the heroic death would not suffice here? Did it occur to you, as you saw the flames rise, that it was all in vain, that the world would not be permitted to get off that easily?

A hero cannot be forged through such means, no matter the intent, no matter the belief. The truth is that death, heroic, self-sacrificing death, is just a lie told by those who need to believe it to those who want to. Death is a surrender, a concession, an acknowledgment of defeat and failure. Death is nothing but a coward's escape, glorified by those who stand to benefit from it until foolish children imagine it as the end of every glorious tale.

Death is a surrender. It earns you no sympathy, no reward, no tug on heartstrings from those left to ponder the meaning of it all. It is not some cheap ticket that lets you evade those things you have a responsibility to do. Just as an author cannot garner cheap sympathy for his characters by forcing them to die for one another, so a hero cannot kill himself to vanquish his foe. To do so is to fail, and to fail is to break the promise you have made.

If you learn nothing else, nothing whatsoever from all the months spent at the study of this matter, learn only this then. You cannot evade your responsibilities through anything so short-sighted as this. If you wish to complete the task set before you, you must complete it, not strive towards the easy way out through fantasies and clichés of self-sacrifice. The parties interested in the resolution of this case deserve better than platitudes and cheap tricks. They deserve better than a meaningless death to satiate them.

For no matter how much you want to, you cannot destroy the Devil with a bomb.

**O-O-O**

_"Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done."_

A deep and full throated roar lifted everyone's heads, tears suddenly staunched, prayers choked off as all three Titans stared in wide-eyed astonishment as, hovering above what had once been part of Titans' island, there appeared a pillar of fire.

It roared like a thing alive, twisting and writhing like a tornado of flames, casting bright light upon all who beheld it. Beast Boy's jaw dropped, Starfire sprang back to her feet and retreated back to her friends, and Cyborg could do nothing but stand there and watch as the flames danced above the water, whipping them into a whirling frenzy. And as they watched in horror, the fire began to slow its mad dance, and the flames died down, the Titans could only blink in disbelief, as the smoke parted to reveal Slade once more.

It could _not_ be, and yet it was. Slade floated above the waves where the rock had stood a moment before, and he was unharmed. No blemish, no injury, not even a _scratch_ was on him, despite having just been subjected to a direct hit from an explosion of the same power as that of a sub-nuclear bomb. And with one hand, he held David aloft, unmoving and limp, but physically intact, which was even _less_ possible. David had no protection whatsoever from the explosions he had unleashed, and was not some kind of demonic construct held together by hatred and flame, but a normal, human boy. A blast like that should have _disintegrated_ him, yet there he was.

None of the Titans moved, none of them _could _move, as Slade slowly floated down to the newly-hewn shoreline of the Island. And as he did so, he cast David down before him, where he landed on the rock on his stomach. He was still _alive_, albeit barely, breathing softly and with great difficulty. His face was turned to the other Titans, and it was covered in blood, blood that was leaking from his nose and ears and the corners of his eyes. He was not moving so much as twitching, his right hand trembling as he slowly slid it over the ground towards God knew what. But whatever he was trying to do was simply beyond him at this point, and after only a few moments, he gave a soft sigh, and his hand fell still, though whether he was dead or merely unconscious was impossible to tell, for an instant later, Slade raised one hand, and a thousand more flame demons emerged all around them.

The situation was so beyond desperation that none of the Titans even reacted as a fresh army of fire demons materialized all around them, cutting off their view of David, though not of Slade, for Slade walked forwards, through his army, ascending the stairs until he was within ten feet of the three remaining Titans.

"I _told_ you that this was inevitable," said Slade, shaking his head, "but you chose instead to fight it. Tell me, did David convince you to perform an act of collective suicide? Or did you decide on this all by yourselves?"

Cyborg, Beast Boy, and Starfire were now standing in a tight triangle, back to back to back, facing the army around them. Cyborg was in front, where the majority of the demons were, as well as Slade himself, and he stared into Slade's eye, and answered him.

"He didn't have nothin' to do with it," said Cyborg. "_I_ made the call, and we _all _agreed to it."

"Then you have succeeded," said Slade, "in getting yourself and all your friends killed for nothing." He shook his head again. "I'm disappointed. Robin would have done much better."

"Robin would've done the same, and you know it," said Cyborg. "Now shut up, and get it over with."

"As you wish," said Slade, and he turned his head to his awaiting army, and his hands caught fire once more.

"Take them," said Slade.

But before the army could react, someone else countermanded him.

"_Stop!_"

The shout came from behind the Titans, from the Tower itself, and everyone, Slade and demons included, turned to look. Above the fray, at the very entrance to the Tower itself, there now stood a lone figure draped in shadows, an indigo cloak pulled tightly around her, its hood draped over her head. And as the assembly watched, she took to the air, flying over the heads of the three other Titans, and landing lightly between them and Slade, stared Slade straight in the eye.

Beast Boy, alone among the other three, had the wherewithall to venture a word. "Raven?" he asked.

Raven did not answer him, nor did she turn around. Her eyes were locked on Slade's, and the army of demons slowly withdrew to the water's edge, leaving only Slade and Raven before them, with David laying motionless at their feet. Slade crossed his arms as Raven looked up at him and spoke.

"I will go with you."


	32. Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

**Disclaimer:** The world may end, but the Titans shall never belong to me.

**Author's Note: **And so we are come to it again, my friends. I have been forced to delay this chapter overmuch as ever, as circumstances conspired to prevent me from writing for a godly time, and in addition, this was one of the hardest chapters I've ever had to write. At long last, however, it is complete. And may the results bear some meager fruit from the efforts made.

Customarily, I use these lines to thank you, my cherished readers, for the inestimable privilege of your company on this long and weary journey, to beg forgiveness for the inexcusably long period it has been since my last update, and to plead your indulgence in leaving me a review, be it ever so short. But rather than do so again, I thought this time I might simply and sincerely thank each and every one of you who has supported and read this story, either since its inception, or since a later period, as well as those who might stumble upon this story for the first time today and seek to read it. Without you, none of this could have been created, and though the chapter below may be great or terrible, my every thought therewith has been to write something that you might wish to read. Your support, your criticisms, your mere acts of reading these words, have made this grand experiment of mine one so richly rewarding to perform. From the bottom of this author's heart, thank you so much, and as ever, fair readers, may you find success in every endeavor.

* * *

**Chapter 32: Sic Transit Gloria Mundi**

_"Behold the Pale Horse. And the man who rode on him was Death. And Hell followed with him."_

- Revelations, 6:8

**O-O-O**

"Your friends cannot stop the inevitable."

The voice was like thunder in the mountains, distant and yet magnified, inexorable, rolling and rumbling long after it had finished. A voice like ten thousand screaming children writhing in agony and howling curses at the skies. A voice comprised of the auditory manifestation of pain. A voice she knew better than her own.

She was in a cave, dark, secluded, a trillion miles beneath the surface, the weight of rock overhead suffocating, stifling her. She cowered on the ground, huddled beneath her cloak, hiding like a girl of six from the terrors of her nightmares. Blood coursed through channels in the floor beneath her, steaming, boiling, the fumes making her sick. A hundred thousand damned souls wailed faintly in the distance, immured alive for all eternity in some private Hell. She did not have to raise her eyes to know that behind her was a wall comprised of living flesh, pulsating and undulating like a jello mold, periodically emitting the smell of stale formaldehyde mixed with the indescribable scents of death and entropy, more sensed than smelled, but all too present. Several times in the past, she had tried to blast her way through that wall by main force, rending the flesh, scattering the fluids, carving a furrow a hundred miles long through it, but never had she come to the end.

And in front of her... well...

"They are doomed."

Something slid underneath her, something rough yet soft, something that pulsed with heat and rage, and she felt herself moving. Slowly she drew the cloak back from over her head, raising her eyes to see, as she expected, that she was cupped in a gigantic red hand, connected to an arm that trailed off into the gloom, but not so far as to disguise what was waiting therein.

Her father stared at her, quiet now, expectantly, and she faced him directly, the four red eyes that had followed her so far, and had her at last.

"I won't help you," she said.

He did not rage. He did not scream or curse her, as was sometimes his wont. Nor did he laugh contemptuously and mock her feeble attempts to deny her birthright. She was prepared for either of those.

Not this.

The walls of dark rock receded, and in their place appeared visions of her friends in pain. Her friends being overwhelmed and butchered like cattle, vivisected, rent apart, screaming, cursing her, crying aloud for succor. They were fake, and at some level she knew it, for the torments being inflicted on them bore no resemblance to the events going on outside, tortures too cruel, prolonged and calculated to inflict in the middle of a raging battle. It didn't matter. They were no less effective for being invented. Indeed they were moreso.

"Do you really want their last day to end like this?" asked Trigon, spinning the images around her like disembodied screens, visions of her own personal apocalypse. She did not move, did not dare to, as the images floated past her one by one. "How can you stand to watch them suffer?"

Her head dropped, her eyes closed to stem the flow of tears that were already forming. "Don't hurt them..." she whispered.

"I am not the one hurting them," said her father, "you are." His voice was calm, reasonable, like that of a professor or judge... or father, she assumed.

Despite the heat of the cavern, she suddenly felt a chill, and shivered, wrapping her cloak around herself and clutching it to her sides like a winter coat. Dimly, she could hear another voice, one she knew that she knew, but it was too faint to identify, and she hadn't the means to concentrate on it anyway. Not now.

"You know what must be done."

She tried to scream that she did not know that, or that she would never do as he commanded, whether she knew it or not. She tried to conjure up the reasons why. She tried to think of the world and her friends and what they meant to her. She tried to make philosophical arguments about how they were fighting to protect her, to prevent this very thing from happening, but it was all rhetorical ash swept aside by the first stiff breeze. The truth was that the others were dying on her behalf. The first sensations of their pain, their _real_ pain, not the imagined torments of her father, were already pushing their way into her consciousness.

"Father," she whispered, "I don't want to..."

Someone was shaking her by the shoulder, gently for now, but with increasing vigor. Enough that her mental equilibrium was being disturbed. Part of her wanted to flee back to the real world anyway, but another part of her knew that she would like what she found there even less than what she had here. Here the images of her friends dying were only figments of her father's diseased imagination. There...

But her father made the decision for her. "It is as I told you, Raven," he said. "No matter how you try, no matter where you flee, no matter what struggles you impose on yourself or your fellows, you cannot _ever_ escape me."

And then he evicted her from her own mind, cast her back into the realm of the living with one final warning to follow, one that burst forth from her throat like the voice of a possessing demon, sending David, who had apparently been trying to wake her, scurrying backwards.

"_You cannot hide from your destiny._"

**O-O-O**

She'd never seen him this upset.

It shouldn't have been a surprise. David didn't get upset easily, always trying to suppress his own anger rather than cause a problem. He was good at it too, very good in fact, better than Raven was (though that wasn't saying much), better than Beast Boy or Starfire, better than Cyborg even. There had been times when she was envious of it, that he could just shove all of his rage and frustrations aside and proceed like everything was fine, for while he had his limits, just like everyone else, she found that she had actually become accustomed to them being safely beyond reach. He had, after all, essentially forgiven her for coming within an inch of murdering him with scarcely more than a caustic remark and a couple of days to cool down.

But then things were not normal. Not for either of them.

She knew he was afraid, fear was hardly in short supply around here, but she had nothing to assuage it with, no words of comfort, no words of hope, nothing, and this time, in his panic and terror, he shouted and grasped at straws. He begged her to help him help the others perform acts that were physically impossible, so far beyond the realm of what could be done that it was like bailing out the ocean with a thimble. And when she refused, when she tried to make him see how all such acts were in vain, his temper snapped, and he openly accused her of bad faith, treachery, and all of the other names she had been flaying herself with for weeks.

To Raven, in that one moment, David ceased to be David, and became instead an avatar of her own guilt, and before she could stop herself or think twice, she had shot him.

It was a stupid, instantaneous act, one she hadn't planned for, an atavistic reaction she wished immediately that she could take back, and for a second, she imagined he might retaliate in kind. For a second, indeed, she _wanted _him to. She had caused him no harm of course, Devastator still shielded him from her wrath, but it struck her for just an instant that the reverse was not true. Devastator had told her that he had been created to fight Trigon. Whatever David's level of power relative to her own, Devastator himself surely had the means to destroy her, and for a second she wondered if that might not be the best way.

But in the end, she was whistling in the dark, for David commanded Devastator, and not vice versa, and as the surprise faded out of his eyes, she watched the decision crystallize there. She knew before he even said a word what he was going to do, race out and face Slade directly. Deep inside, part of her wished to do the same, to stand by her friends and pour her unbridled powers out on Slade and his minions.

But she did not do it. She could not do it, for she knew with the certainty of mathematics that it was useless, that the result would be nothing but more agony for her friends. Against the finality of the end of the world, even Raven's meteoric rage was impotent, relegated to a back corner of her mind, left to beat its bloodied fists against the bars of its cage until everything came to an end. She did not know how to communicate this to anyone, least of all David, who was scared and confused and wracked by his own uncertainties and fears at being thrust into the center of this living nightmare. And before she could figure out what to say, he was gone, and the doors had closed behind him, and he was lost with the others to the empathic sea of adrenaline and pain that flowed about her like a polluted ocean.

She never knew what to say.

_'What is there to say? Did you not already tell them who you are?_'

"Why are you doing this?" she whispered aloud, eyes clenched shut as she sat in the center of the room.

_'I am doing nothing_,' came the reply '_You are the prime mover of these events. Ample warning was given, yet you chose to permit this to occur_.'

"That's _not true_!" she shouted to the barren walls, her voice bouncing back at her from all directions. "I didn't want any of this!"

_'Did you lift a finger to stop it?_'

"I couldn't stop it!"

_'You know that you could. Even now you could do so with but a gesture and a word, yet you hold back. You permit your so-called friends to die on your behalf, even knowing the depths of agony that you could spare them._

"Spare them?" she demanded incredulously, loading the words with all the contempt she could muster. "You wouldn't spare them an instant's pain if I offered you the galaxy! You don't know the meaning of the word! You're evil incarnate!"

_'And what does that make you, my daughter?' _came the endlessly calm reply. _'If I am so depraved, what of my creations? You who employ your friends as a shield to ward off my minions for a few moments, are we so unlike one another?'_

She bent beneath the invisible weight, eyes shut, hands clutched to the sides of her head. "I don't want to hurt them!" she insisted.

_'Yet that is precisely what you are doing. Reach out. Sense them. Use the power I gifted to you when you were born. Feel their fear, their pain, their terror of the unknown. Feel their resentment and hatred. How long, do you think, before they throw down their weapons of their own accord and permit my servants to seize you?'_

"They won't do that," she whispered dourly, not a challenge but a statement of immutable fact. Whether she wanted them to or not, she knew the others would never give up the fight while still alive.

_'Perhaps not,' _replied her father,_ 'even though it is what you would do in their place.'_

"That's not true!"

_'Is it not? Can you say such a thing for certain? You who have done everything to conceal your heritage from your friends?'_

"I _told_ them what I was!"

_'Yes, under duress, faced with no other choice. Prior to which point you had considered every possible crime, from theft...'_

"I didn't..."

_'... to kidnapping...'  
_  
"Stop it..."

_'... to suicide...'_

"Father..."

_'... even murder.'_

"Don't hurt them."

_'I will hurt them. I am hurting them. And I will do worse.'_

Her eyes opened even as the breath caught in her throat. "... worse?"

_'There is always worse.'_

She raised her head in trepidation, as though expecting to see her father manifested before her, but the room remained empty save for herself. For a few moments, her gaze darted from corner to corner, the sounds of the battle raging outside, when all of a sudden, her father spoke to her once more.

_'Behold_,' he said, his voice a silky whisper, _'the wages of sin.'_

There was a distant, muffled scream.

Raven was empathic. She could and did feel the emotions of the people around here, whether she wanted to or not. Even with training, she had never been able to shut it all off altogether, especially where strong emotions were concerned. Battles tended to bring out the strongest of emotions, and since the fight had begun outside the others had been in the back of her mind, their pain shared, their fear feeding her own.

But then two of them just _stopped_.

For an instant she didn't even know what had just happened, merely that two of the presences outside had stopped broadcasting entirely, like televisions switched off. One instant there was fear, pain, panic. The next they were gone, and did not return. There was only one explanation for something like that, but in her current state, it took nearly three whole seconds before she stumbled upon it.

"No... _no_... _NO!_"

_'If you will not consent to face your own destiny, then others will die in your place.'_

She screamed, screamed incoherently in abject panic, and in an instant she turned on the doors to the safe room and blew them to pieces with the raw force of her uncontrolled mind. Torn from their sliderails, the ruined doors were cast down the hallway towards the elevator, but she ignored them, all thought bent on what had just happened, panic rising in her throat like bile. She hurled herself down the hallway like a meteor, not bothering even to summon the elevator. Flying at top speed in blind panic, she shattered the elevator doors like glass with a wave of her hand and flew into the empty shaft, ascending as quickly as she could. The elevator car was many stories above, and she rose to the ground floor, caving the doors in there as well, before stepping out into the main lobby of the Tower.

She barely had the first idea what she was doing, adrenaline and blind panic calling all the shots. She did not have time to consider if her father was trying to lure her out of the safe room, nor what it was she proposed to do when she got where she was going. She could not even determine which two of the combatants outside were dead, for her mind was racing far too fast to make use of her magical divinations. All she could think about were the visions in her head, of her friends broken and dead, and, in terror of this like nothing else in the world, she flew towards the broken front doors of the Tower.

She never got there.

She was within half a dozen paces of the door when there was a flash so bright, so intense, that it seared her eyes like hot pokers and stopped her short as though she had crashed into a solid wall. She staggered backwards, her arm held up in front of her eyes, as a thunderous roar echoed from outside, like the enraged bellow of a giant monster. And as the light and sound rose to a furious crescendo, the entire front wall - doors, windows, and all - exploded at once and was thrown into her face like the cosmic wave front of a supernova.

She reacted on bare instinct, throwing her hands out and conjuring the strongest shield she could, an elemental barrier of stupefying power, anchored to the ground by the nuclear forces of reality itself. She was fortunate that it was so, for an instant later a hailstorm of shattered glass and broken rubble smashed into the shield, accompanied by a blast wave so intense that she thought for a moment that Trigon had found a way to manifest himself without her aid. The sound wrapped around her like a blanket, an atonal roar that shook the very foundations of the Tower, accompanied by the horrible sounds of the Tower itself groaning under the strain as windows exploded on higher floors and equipment from the roof came crashing down. Potent as the shield was, fed by Raven's own desperation, capable of withstanding guided missiles or barrages of supernatural fire, this blast was almost too much for it, and she gritted her teeth and poured power into its maintenance, as the hallway buckled and warped around her and the Tower threatened to break and collapse into the ocean.

Yet, finally, the blast wave subsided, dissipating off into the night, and the flash and fireball darkened, and slowly, Raven lowered her shield, letting the detritus it had accumulated roll off it onto the floor to join all of the rest of the ruins the explosion had cast about. Smoke and haze filled the air, and she waved it away from her face with a simple spell. Her panic and desperation remained, but it had been stunted, stunned even, by the tremendous blast that had emerged from Azar-knew-where. None of the weapons that the Titans or Hive had on offer, no missile or energy cannon, not Starfire's largest starbolt, not even the awesome powers that Slade had manifested, nothing she knew to be present was capable of unleashing a blast of that caliber. Yet despite this mystery, Raven had a sick feeling in her stomach that she knew precisely what had happened.

And so she stepped forward onto the threshold of the Tower, and beheld the end.

The island itself had been savagely truncated, as though a volcano had blasted the entire front section of it away. That which remained had been scoured clean of all debris and equipment, swept aside by the broom of an explosion so large it could have been generated by a thermobaric bomb. Down below, on the steps that had once led to the docks on the north shore of the island (now vaporized or hurled off into the sea), Cyborg and Beast Boy and Starfire all stood, facing away from her, apparently having not yet noticed her presence. She hung back, hidden in the shadows of the darkened, ruined tower, her heart beating at blistering speed, relief flowing through her as she realized that they, at least, were still alive. Of the Hive there was no sign, but by process of elimination, the deaths she had sensed had to have come from their ranks. Right now, she was too relieved at seeing her friends alive to spare tears for any of them.

But of course, there was also someone _else_ missing.

It was clear beyond any doubt who had blown the front of the island apart. Though she had not thought an explosion like that to be within David's capacity to unleash, desperate times often had a way of bringing out capacities in people that they did not believe they had. From the demeanor and feelings radiating from her friends, to say nothing of the evidence on offer, she could tell roughly what had happened. David had somehow contrived to conjure an _immense_ explosion, consuming himself, Slade, and his army, in one, cataclysmic blow.

Perhaps she should have wept. Perhaps she should have felt the pain of loss, as she had when Robin died. She didn't know what she was supposed to do or say. She knew instead that she did not feel these things. There _was _a pang of regret, a sharp one, that stabbed through her, but the relief she felt at seeing her remaining friends alive, where a moment ago she had believed them dead, had not yet faded, and it smoothed over the pain, buttressed by the sudden hope that Slade was dead, _dead_, and that Trigon had been stopped, and it was over. Perhaps later, on reflection, she would have time to weep, or to curse herself. Later, when the adrenaline and relief had faded, and she and Cyborg and Starfire and Beast Boy were back in the Tower and had time to take stock of all that had happened, later, she would mourn and consider what she had done and not done, but not now. She simply couldn't now. Maybe that made her a coward. Maybe that made her a sociopath. Maybe that made her undeserving of this sacrifice. But on the other hand, maybe that made her human...

Her empathy warned her before her eyes did, as Slade and David appeared out of nothingness, accompanied by Slade's entire army.

... or maybe it didn't matter at all.

Slade landed on the edge of the island and cast David down onto the bare rocks, where he lay unmoving, broken in body. She could tell via empathy that he was still alive, albeit barely, and she knew that should have given her relief, in the way that the others had, but it did not. Nor did it provoke any other strong emotion, rage or anger that Slade had done this, fear that she was not actually out off the woods. Nothing was galvanized, nothing gained by this appearance. It was a disembodied fact, devoid of emotional content. She lowered her head, ignoring Slade's confident laugh and words of victory. She didn't even need to lift her head to know that her friends would fight him anew, and that they would lose, and die, on her behalf, as David had tried to, as the Hivers had.

"Father," she whispered, "I don't want this..."

_'What you want is irrelevant. What is, and what is not, is all that matters.'_

And she knew that he was right.

Her friends were. In a few moments, they would not be. And she wished for them to continue to be.

Nothing else mattered.

"Stop."

She had spoken in normal tones, but the background noise seemed to melt away at her speech, draining off like an orchestra silencing itself so that the audience might hear clearly the sound of a single horn. All heads, all eyes, turned to her, and she lifted herself with her mind, and floated overhead, landing gently between her friends and Slade, the place, she now belatedly realized, she had belonged all along. She lifted her eyes, dead and cold, to meet Slade, and crossed her arms in resignation.

"I will go with you."

"_No!_"

A brief breath of wind, and then suddenly Beast Boy appeared in front of her, ignoring Slade, facing her directly, and his emerald eyes were wide and wild with desperation. He seemed to trip over his words, but his meaning was clear enough, so clear that Raven's newfound resolution briefly faltered. "We _won't_ let them take you!" he shouted, half-turning to ward off Slade, as though he stood a prayer of doing so in his beaten condition. It was seeing his injuries up close, seeing him hurt and bleeding, coupled with the image still burned into her mind of him tortured to death in front of her, that resolved her once more.

"Beast Boy, I _have_ to go with him," she said, unable to hope that he would understand, but needing to say _something_. They would all kill themselves to stop her if she did not make them see..."

"You must return to the safe room," said Starfire from behind her. "Please!"

"We _got_ this," said Cyborg, framing his voice with as much command as he could. "Get back inside, _right now_!"

Raven lowered her head, clenching her fists and knotting them into her cloak. "I can't hide from my destiny any longer," she said, before bringing her head back up. "I have to do this."

Yet Beast Boy would not let go, to say nothing of the others. "Rae, you can't!" he said desperately, grabbing her by the shoulders as though to force her to not walk off with Slade. "There's gotta be something else we can... some kind of other... Please!"

She wasn't looking at him. She couldn't bear to. She was watching Slade, who had remained silent through all this debate. His expression was that of mild amusement at the antics of children, which probably wasn't far off the mark, but she could read in his face a message to her. Either she did something about this, or he would...

And so without turning her head, she raised her arm and did just that.

Beast Boy's protests were cut off as black lightning flowed through her hand and out into all three of the remaining Titans. It was a spell she had used many times, in many forms, on criminals of all stripes, but she had never imagined she would use it for this purpose. The spell coursed through her friends, lifting them from the ground, their features frozen in surprise, but at least not in pain. A moment later, all three were out like lights, somewhere between unconscious and asleep. Gently, she lowered her hand, laying each of them down side by side on the ruined rock, and wordlessly channeling a healing spell through the energy beam into each one of them. It was useless, a gesture they would never live to appreciate, but it was all that she could do.

With a whisper, she terminated the spell, and left them laying there peacefully, oblivious to the world.

"Goodbye," she said ruefully in a soft voice. "Be safe."

And then she turned away.

"Let's go," she snarled bitterly at Slade, who smiled, and nodded gently to her, and gestured for one of his fire demons to retrieve David.

That she would not countenance. Before the demon could touch him, she reached out her hand and disintegrated it with a snap of her fingers, letting its windborne ashes float off into the darkness. The other demons hesitated and glanced to Slade, who was staring at Raven.

"You came for me," she said. "He's not part of this. He stays here."

Slade shook his head. "I came for _both_ of you, Raven," he said. "And he is coming with us, whether you like it or not. If you do that again, I shall kill all of your friends, knock you unconscious, and drag you before your father in chains of fire."

She hesitated. "He's not part of the prophecy," she said. "What do you _want_ with him?"

"Me? Nothing," replied Slade. "But your father is quite eager to make his acquaintance."

She narrowed her eyes. "I _won't_ let you drag him into this."

"_You_ dragged him into this," snarled Slade, his patience suddenly at an end. "You dragged _all_ of them into it by your own selfishness and stupidity. It is _far_ too late for demands and threats. Either attack me and be beaten into submission at the cost of your friends' lives, or come quietly. Choose now."

David lay at her feet, motionless, bleeding inside, broken and helpess before Slade' wrath. The others lay behind her, stable but unable to defend themselves. But even had all of them been intact, armed, and ready to fight once more, there would still be no choice at all.

She lowered her arm slowly, her impotent rage deflating. "Don't hurt him," she said, but she knew that Slade would do as he wished, regardless of her preferences.

Slade however, having finally won, seemed to be in a magnanimous mood. He gestured to one of his flame demons, who approached and lifted David off the ground, moderating its flames so as not to roast him alive. This was likely not out of kindness, for they needed David alive too, for some damned reason, but she retained enough sense to thank Azar for small mercies.

Very small mercies.

And then, without another word, Raven walked away over the empty air that had once been part of the island that was her home, as the Flame demons parted to let her pass and Slade fell in beside her, an escort towards the destiny she had never been able to evade.

She did not permit herself to look back.

**O-O-O**

**Initiating primary boot sequence**...

**Project "Hephaestus" Automated Conscious Control Startup Procedure, Version 1.02b. Author: Dr. Silas Stone.**

There were certain advantages to being half-machine.

**Activating ACCSP Subroutines:**

**Clock generator online. ****  
****Chipset controllers online. **

At best, Cyborg's feelings about his mechanical side were dangerously ambivalent, at worst, downright resentful. His father had rebuilt him into Frankenstein's monster, separated him forever from his fellows. The stares that resulted from him doing something as innocuous as walking down the street were enough to sear that into his mind forever. From the first time he had woken up to find himself imprisoned within a body of steel and silicon, on even to this very day, he had needed to adjust himself mentally for the reality that he was now, and forever, a freak.  
**  
****Power regulators online.**  
**System memory online.**

Many times, in the years since the accident, Cyborg's father had tried to explain why he had done what he had done, why he had replaced over 60% of his son's body with servos and actuators and circuitry. He had claimed that there was no other way, that he had been forced into an impossible choice by terrible circumstances. That he had been too badly injured to save by any conventional method, and that in the aftermath of the accident that had claimed his mother, his father had simply been unable to let his only son die as well. Perhaps his father even believed that.

Cyborg didn't.

**Mass storage controllers online. **  
**M/MI uplink online.**

**ACCSP Subroutines active.**

His father was a genius, a Rhodes-scholared, triple-doctorate, two-time Nobel laureate, MENSA-certified genius. A master of bioengineering and cybernetic technologies. All of Cyborg's own not-inconsiderable talents in micro and macro-scale engineering were mere reflections of his father's own abilities. Yet what his father had done to him was wholly unique, a technological leap forward that left his contemporaries scratching their heads or staring in awe. The equipment, the construction techniques, the medical advances that had allowed Cyborg to come into being, were so far advanced that they could not have come from any single work of staggering genius. They were the fruit of careful research, long preparation, and detailed planning. Cyborg didn't know if his father had planned this for him all along, or if he had originally had other plans and adapted them on the spot. All he did know was that on the day of his accident, his father had had all the tools, materials, and medical preparations ready and present to turn him into what he was now.

His creation was pre-meditated, that much was obvious even to an infant, and his father's denials had only served to sharpen his curses, both of the machinery he was locked within, and of the man who had locked him there.

**Initiating preliminary system scan: **

For years, he'd extended his resentments from his father to his new body, to the host of computers and chips that governed his body, kept him breathing, intruded into his life in the most intimate and terrible ways. Prior to meeting the Titans, he'd damaged himself, purposefully, if only to spite his father. He'd refused to learn the proper functioning of his new body, disabled systems without a glance, cursed and railed against every sensory intrusion by his eyepiece and artificial ears. Had he been able to survive doing so, there were times he might have ripped all of his mechanical implements out of his body and cast them all in the nearest incinerator.  
**  
Warning. Major structural damage detected. M/MI Synapse prompts unresponsive. Conscious control disabled. Cesium Decay Projections loaded. Power reserves below defined super-critical threshold (8.2% optimal capacities).**

But machines were funny things...

**Initiating full organo-mechanical repair sequence.**

Machines didn't care, in the end, what you thought of them. They didn't care if you begrudged them every erg of power they sucked down from your organic power converters, nor that the meaning of the words you addressed them with was insulting enough to drive a priest to reach for a gun. They didn't bother themselves with worrying about what other people would think of the jobs they performed, nor of how they looked. Whatever you thought of them, machines did their jobs to the best of their abilities.

**Fusion injectors online. Thorium pellets loaded. Matter reactions at 84% stability.**

Machines, in their own unique way, were blameless and guiltless instruments of higher will. Whatever madness their creator created them to do, whatever horrors were perpetrated in their creation, machines did only what they were commanded to do. Without praise or thanks, without pausing in self-consciousness or doubt, even in the face of threats to their own well-being or very existence, machines continued to do precisely what they had been designed for, to the exclusion of all else.

**Priority alert! Hypothalamidic activity below 60% normal threshold. Metabolic signs suppressed. Unknown energy signature detected. Activating emergency neurosynaptic purge, charge level 17 nanovolts.**

In a way, the total dedication of machines was frightening, even ghastly. How many berserk robots or out of control war machines had the Titans been called upon to stop by force? And yet at the same time, for one whose continued existence depended on the willing cooperation of thousands of machines, there was also something almost noble to them. Thanklessly they toiled, without praise, without recompense, without any thought save for their task of keeping him alive by any means available. He did not love his mechanical systems, indeed sometimes he still hated them, but after all this time, he could not think of them as soulless trinkets, anymore than he could the T-car or the Tower or any of the other devices he had constructed with his own hands. They weren't alive, but they were living, each with their own quirks, their own personalities, imagined or real, it didn't matter.

**Firmware engaged. Loading non-volatile CMOS settings**

**ERROR:** **Primary CMOS cache non-responsive. Status unknown. Loading Virtual Serial Peripheral Interface. Downloading secondary CMOS settings.**

He quite literally could not live without his mechanical half, he was as dependent on it as he was on food or air, and he chafed against this dependence, and always would, but he did not fear it. His robotic parts might break, or collapse, or prove unable to master the challenge arrayed against them. They might become confused by a hacker or tele-mechanic, or be warped out of all functioning by magic, but never, of their own volition, would they ever turn against him. Will-less themselves, they nonetheless possessed wills of iron and adamant, and would serve their purpose of keeping him alive come Hell, High Water or both. That his father had created them to serve his own God-play, that Cyborg himself hated them and their creator by turns, none of that mattered. Their selfless devotion was total.

There was something valiant about that.

**Brainstem activity normal. Estimated time to nanobot repair completion: 21 seconds. Chemical organic activation sequence initiated.**

Some days Cyborg hated his machine parts. On others he was simply ambivalent. But no matter what mood he was in, or what his present thoughts towards his inseparable companions were, on days when the daughter of the incarnation of pure malice used a magical spell to put his conscious mind to sleep so as to prevent him from trying to save the world...

**Neurosynaptic purge complete. Unknown energy signature no longer detectable. Chemical brain stimulation complete. Shifting to conscious control in 3... 2... 1...**

... well, suffice to say, even Cyborg had to admit that there were certain advantages to being half-machine.

**O-O-O**

"Raven..."

There were no words to describe the relief that flowed through Cyborg at hearing Beast Boy say that word, at hearing him say anything really, not that he stopped to show it. Normally Raven was the one that was called upon to bring the others around from whatever state of unconsciousness they had been knocked into, but with her gone off with Slade, Cyborg had had to improvise.

Raven's spell had put them all into a cross between a deep sleep and a coma, and there they would likely have remained had she not forgotten (or simply neglected) to do the same with Cyborg's mechanical systems, which knew neither sleep nor fatigue and detected only that some unknown energy had shut his higher brain functions off like a computer deprived of power. Unable to determine anything beyond this, his robotic systems had painstakingly purged the energy from his system with a combination of micro-electric shocks and chemical additives to his bloodstream, all while simultaneously cordoning off damaged circuitry and flooding his organic parts with nano-probes to repair any other damage they could. The process was entirely automatic, and the first that Cyborg had learned of it was when he awoke some thirty minutes after Raven's departure, and found the log file waiting for his perusal, and his semi-robotic body once more awaiting his orders.

Bereft of Raven's healing powers, Cyborg had been forced to resort to smelling salts to revive Beast Boy, whose ultra-sensitive nose had practically catapulted him back to consciousness at the first whiff. Starfire was a tougher proposition (Tamaraneans seemed to consider smelling salts to be some sort of food additive) but even she was beginning to stir. The swelling around Beast Boy's face had gone down, and his skin was returning to its normal emerald color, while Starfire's injuries also appeared to be receding, the lingering effects of whatever magic Raven had cast before departing, no doubt.

"She really packs a wallop," muttered Cyborg as he shook Starfire hard enough to liquefy the organs of a normal human. It sufficed, barely, to slowly drag Star back into consciousness.

Starfire moaned softly before opening her eyes, shaking her head and blinking to clear her vision. Cyborg let her go, let her sit up under her own power, as Beast Boy crouched down next to them both, still rubbing the scorch mark on his uniform where Raven's dark lightning had struck him.

"Dude," he said plaintively, "we were only trying to help her."

"I fear it is too late to assist her," said Starfire quietly, head lowered.

"It _can't_ be too late!" exclaimed Beast Boy, his eyes darting from Cyborg to Starfire and back. "We've... we're not gonna just... let her go are we?" He tried, and failed, to hide his fear that this was precisely what Cyborg and Starfire were about to suggest they do.

But the thought of doing that had not even crossed Cyborg's mind. "We gotta go after her. After both of 'em," he said. Beast Boy took a sharp breath and looked to Starfire once again.

Starfire however simply nodded. "Agreed," she said, albeit nervously. "We cannot permit Raven to destroy herself, nor David to be ensnared by whatever fate Trigon holds in store for him. But can we even locate them now?"

Cyborg raised his forearm and flipped open the screen built into it, and with a handful of keystrokes, brought up a labeled street map of Jump City, on which two pulsating dots of light were superimposed. It took him only a second to deduce, based on the location of the dots, and the direction they were headed, where their intended destination was likely to be.

"Looks like they're headin' for the old library," he said. None of them knew why Slade would be taking Raven and David there. None of them wanted to. But Cyborg, at least, could guess, given what had been there the last time they had gone looking for Slade.

And apparently Beast Boy could too. He turned a slightly paler shade of green, and scrambled to his feet. "We've gotta go after them!" he insisted. "Come on!"

Nothing would have suited Cyborg more, but there were discrete limits that he had to work within. "My power's almost drained, man," he said. "I can't make it that far without a recharge."

Beast Boy was nearly frantic. "Dude, she's almost at the library! We can't wait or she - "

"Two minutes," said Cyborg. "And we'll go. Just let me get somethin'."

Plainly, Beast Boy begrudged every second's delay, but he nodded and turned away, clenching and unclenching his hands nervously. Starfire glanced at Cyborg, wordlessly imploring him to hurry, as she moved to try and calm Beast Boy, putting a hand on the smaller changeling's shoulder and trying to re-assure him that, despite appearances, everything would be all right.

Moving as quickly as his power-starved motors would allow, Cyborg scrambled over the ruins of what remained of the front part of the island, pressing on around the Tower to the west side, facing the ocean. There, near the base of the Tower itself, concealed behind a false rock, was a small emergency supply cache containing a spare power cell. All he would need to do was change out his depleted cell with the replacement, and he'd be ready to go.

Except when he rounded the Tower, he saw something that made him stop.

The west side of the island was more or less intact, the explosion having confined itself mostly to the southern quadrant. On the rocks nearest the shore, a lone figure sat motionless, staring expressionlessly at the pounding waves. Coated in gray ash and splashed with dark blood, she might well have been a statue for all she moved, neither raising her head nor giving any other sign of acknowledgment as Cyborg carefully approached.

"... Jinx?" he asked. She didn't answer, didn't even flinch, and for a moment he wondered if she was dead, slain instantly by some massive shock and left to sit there like a perched gargoyle. It was only when he approached and saw the tremble in her hands that he realized that the shock hadn't killed her.

Though given everything, that might not be such a mercy right now.

"Where's Billy?" asked Cyborg.

"He's dead." Her voice was monotone, blank, an empty vessel bereft of higher thought. She looked like something had broken within her brain, and as he approached, he saw that in her hands she held a small scrap of green cloth, from a jacket perhaps or jumpsuit, singed on all sides and soaked with a dark substance that might have been blood or engine oil or both.

"And Mammoth?" he asked, quietly.

"I don't know..." she said. "He was... here. And then..."

Cyborg didn't know what to say. He wouldn't have known what to say even if he had time to think about it, which he simply didn't. To his surprise however, even as he was trying to decide whether to say anything at all, Jinx asked him a question, her voice a quivering whisper.

"Are you going after them?" she asked.

Cyborg nodded. "Yeah," he said.

Jinx' blank expression didn't change in the slightest. She was silent for a few moments. And then slowly she whispered her reply.

"I'm coming too."

There had been a time not that long ago when such a notion would have been greeted with laughter. This was not that time. Jinx' eyes were rimmed in red and crusted in dried tears, and her movements slow and hesitant, as though she were still stunned by all that had happened (which likely was accurate enough). Yet as she turned her head up slowly to meet Cyborg's gaze, he saw that her hands trembled, not in fear or shock or even sorrow, but in barely-suppressed, inconsolable rage. Her feline eyes smoldered with anger, rage with no outlet or conduit, rage enough to light the world aflame with or without Trigon's help. She stood up slowly, unsteadily, and it was plain that she could barely walk, and yet he had no doubts whatsoever that she would flay the very skies to ribbons if he even thought of trying to prevent her from going.

He had fought Jinx a dozen times. They'd beaten one another within an inch of their respective lives. He'd seen her furious, he'd seen her cowed, he'd seen her exultant, he'd seen her terrified.

He had never seen this.

"What are you gonna do?" he asked despite himself. She turned her head back to him, staring at him as though she was seeing him for the first time.

"I'm gonna kill Slade," she said.

And despite everything, Cyborg believed her.

**O-O-O**

Twice, the civic authorities tried to stop Slade's army.

The first attempt was practically over before Raven realized that anything was happening. They turned a corner, and found a phalanx of police cars drawn up in a barricade across Union street manned by SWAT and JC counter-terrorism units, along with whatever uniform cops could be drawn up on short notice, and a pair of police helicopters thundering overhead carrying sharpshooters. The police had been watching the broadcast of the battle at the Tower, and given everything, were not in the mood to obey the usual rules of engagement. They opened fire upon sighting Slade's minions, destroying half a dozen flame demons before Slade raised his hands and incinerated the entire company.

Raven barely had time to save even half a dozen of them.

Slade didn't even break stride as he contemptuously swept the entire barricade aside with a wave of his hand and a wave front of solidified flames, tossing a dozen police cruisers to one side in a twisted, burning mass of wreckage. The two Helicopters overhead simply exploded like fireworks, raining flaming debris down onto the street. Raven managed, as a gut reaction, to manifest energy shields around five of the cops, chosen at random, and imperturbably teleported them all to the other side of the city. The others died where they stood.

Having done so, she whirled on Slade. "That wasn't necessary!" she shouted at him. "You didn't need to kill them all!"

"No, I did not," replied Slade lightly. "But because it amused me to and so I did so. Now what will you do about it, little girl?"

Raven's preferred reply would have taken the form of a meteor, but that could help nothing, and so with difficulty she refrained from attacking Slade and turned away from him.

Slade laughed. "They are all going to die in a matter of minutes anyway," he said, "in a way, this is a kindness..."

"You don't know what you're talking about," she snarled at him without turning.

"Oh I think I have _some_ idea," replied Slade, "besides, I still need to practice with these these lovely powers. Now I see why you people place such stock in them..."

Raven glanced back at Slade. "You actually think you're going to get to keep those once my father returns?"

"Of course," replied Slade, "you don't think I'm doing this for _free_, do you?"

Despite everything, Raven managed to twist her features into a smirk. "You're a fool," she said, sneering at Slade. "Whatever Trigon promised you, he won't deliver."

Slade laughed and fell in beside her, swaggering along as though he had not a care in the world.  
"Now it's you who doesn't know what you're talking about," he said.

She raised an eyebrow. "You think I don't know my own father?"

"You are merely the portal," replied Slade, his voice beginning to sound testy, "an insignificant pawn in Trigon's game."

"Then I guess we have that in common," said Raven, "because once he gets what he wants, you'll be insignificant too."

"Don't speak of things you don't understand," said Slade, now sounding annoyed.

"Or what?" asked Raven. "You'll kill me? Go ahead and try. Your own army would turn against you the instant you raised your hand. They're Trigon's minions, not yours."

Slade turned on her with fists aflame. "I've heard just about as much from you as I'm prepared to countenance," he said. "Now be quiet or - "

Slade never got to finish his threat. He was cut off by a half-stifled cry of pain from behind. Both he and Raven turned around, but Raven knew who it was even before it finished.

Somehow, David was awake.

Slade made a move to grab her, and she teleported out of his grasp, re-appearing a few dozen yards back, next to the demon that was holding David. The demon's arms were extinguished, its body reduced to a low heat, but the damage David had sustained was already enough. He was coughing, retching, his broken body convulsing in the demon's arms as he fought, semi-consciously, to clear his throat of blood, his crushed left wrist hanging limply, his red uniform stained an even darker red by his own blood. David was no stranger to terrible injury, they'd found him in such a state after all, to say nothing of the mess Terra had made of him weeks before, but this was worse than before, much worse.

What with everything from before, she hadn't realized how bad off David actually was. It took only a single glance to realize that she needed to act. Now.

"Put him down," she said to the demon, and to her surprise, it obeyed, setting David onto the ground as gently as could be wished and backing away to give her room to operate. His eyes were open, but they stared blindly up into the air, blinking spasmodically to try and wipe away the blood that still leaked from the corners of his eyes.

He moaned softly, whimpering almost as she crouched down over him. "It's okay," she said, unsure if he could even hear her. "You're gonna be okay..." She didn't even know where to start. Broken bones and bruises, or other trauma wounds she was used to, but she had never even _seen_ anything like this before...

David was _soaked_ in blood. His own blood. It was beaded on his forehead and soaked into the fabric of his crimson uniform. Blood seeped from the corners of his mouth, from his nostrils, from his ears and eyes and from the base of his fingernails. Every so often he would convulse and cough up yet more blood, onto the ground or onto his own shirt, already saturated with the stuff. Yet despite the immense volumes of blood on display, she could not see where it was all coming from. Bruises he had in abundance, and a shattered wrist, along with other minor injuries, but no gaping wounds, no arterial spurts that would be needed to explain this much blood.

Gently, she laid a hand on him, and whispered a spell. Immediately she saw into him like an X-ray machine, and what she saw confirmed what she had suspected. He was bleeding out internally, not from any single wound, but from a hundred thousand tiny ones. His entire circulatory system was run through with micro-fissures, the tiny blood vessels that ran through him having spontaneously hemorrhaged for no reason at all.

"The chamber has been prepared for you," came Slade's voice from behind her. "Everything is ready for Trigon's ascent." She heard his footsteps approaching over the asphalt, sensed him stopping right behind her. "Stalling will not avail you. We have to go."

She whirled around in indignant fury. "What the hell did you _do_ to him?" she demanded.

Slade laughed. "I did _nothing_ to him. He did that all of that to himself. My only action was to shield him from the primary effects of his own stupidity. Had I not done so, he would presently be a puff of smoke on the winds."

David coughed violently, spitting blood up onto the street. Slade regarded them both with equanimity. "We have an appointment to make," he said. "We're leaving. Now."

"He's dying," said Raven, as deadpan as she could. "If I don't help him now, he'll never make it to the library. And then you get to explain to my father why he's dead."

Equipped with his nigh-omnipotent powers, few things in the universe could have forced Slade to back down. This, however, was one of them. Raven watched as his eye narrowed, and his fists closed, but he did not lash out. Instead he peered down at the two teenagers and grudgingly spoke.

"Very well," he said, "you have two minutes."

"I need ten," she protested.

"You have _two_!" snapped Slade. "He only needs to survive another hour. Shore him up for that long, now, or else I'll make him wish he _had_ died."

Raven had had quite enough of Slade's threats, and might actually have lashed out at him for this last one, had the skies not suddenly opened and vomited forth an entirely different kind of wrath.

There was an ear-piercing scream, like the wailing of a thousand damned souls amplified through a sounding board the size of a small city, and suddenly something _burst _into the sky from over one of the buildings, something dark and winged and flying at incredible speed on a tail of fire. In the blink of an eye, it turned down Union street and hurtled overhead past Slade and David and Raven and Trigon's entire army. Yet in its wake, it let fall half a dozen canisters, each of which burst in turn into a hundred bomblets that rained down onto the street below before exploding. In half a second, the entire area erupted into flame, as well-nigh half of Slade's demonic army was blown to ashes, along with the majority of the street.

Debris and shrapnel flew as thick as a swarm of bees, but Raven had prepared her shield the instant she had heard the fighter jet approaching, and knowing roughly what it portended, had erected it around David and herself with barely a second to spare. Slade had no such protection, but then he did not require it, standing upright and unscathed in the middle of unspeakable violence, as cars, streetlights, the faces of buildings, and hundreds of his flaming demon servitors were rent to pieces by the barrage of cluster munitions. She had thought, indeed she had _hoped_, that the military would not have time to react to Slade's army, but plainly her hopes had been in vain. That much was made all the more clear as the fighter returned for another pass, even as a flotilla of helicopters appeared from the south, some broad and packed with armed men, others sleek and agile, and spitting fire from gatling guns and unguided rockets, turning the entire street into a theatre of flames and devastation.

Fire roared around Raven, the very earth convulsing and cracking the asphalt on which she was crouched. The maelstrom was _deafening_, even through her impermeable shield, a cacophony of roars, gunshots, and sound waves so intense that they struck with physical force. Beside her, David cried weakly as the concussive waves slammed his broken body over and over again, and she felt him grab her wrist with his unbroken hand. No doubt he was just automatically clutching at the nearest stable thing, but it served, nonetheless, to refocus Raven's attention.

Alone amidst the sound and the fury stood Slade, the nearest demons to him having been incinerated or torn to pieces. He did not react, not to the bombs or the fire, not even when a rocket struck him square in the back. Instead he stared down at Raven, a palpable menace even through the black opaqueness of her psychic shield. He said nothing, only stared, his wordless gaze speaking more than his voice ever could. They both knew what was about to happen, and both knew who was at fault for the result.

That much didn't need saying.

Slade turned away, vanishing back into the flames and smoke of battle, as the larger helicopters began to disgorge their living cargo, grim-faced men in black and green warpaint, bearing badges of World and Anchor, who shouted to one another in code and opened fire on Slade's army with small arms and grenades. Bare seconds later, nothing whatsoever could be discerned, the smoke and flames having enveloped demons and marines alike, leaving the two Titans alone beneath the black shroud of Raven's telekinetic shield.

There was no time to pine or curse herself. She had urgent work to do and turned to it with a will, hoping it might distract her from what was ongoing. David's eyes stared sightlessly up at the smoke-shrouded sky, and he did not react when she laid her free hand on his chest as gently as she could. Softly at first, then louder as the noise of battle threatened to drown her out, she chanted her mantra over and over. Her healing powers were vast, and honed to a razor edge, having become the unofficial medic of the Titans over the last couple of years, yet the damage to David's body was far beyond anything she had ever seen.

Tens of thousands of microscopic capillaries all over David's body had burst like frozen water pipes, flooding every organ, every tissue with blood. Five minutes more, and he likely would have bled to death internally. As it was, she could only hope that she had gotten to him in time. The job would have been beyond the capacities of the most efficient and skilled surgical team in the universe, but her magic was yet more precise, and many times more powerful. As she whispered the ancient spells and let their energy flow into David's body, she spared a moment's wonder at the sheer breadth of the damage he had sustained. Devastator's powers were far beyond the capacities of a human body to sustain at full strength, and she vividly remembered how he had once over-taxed himself and blown half a dozen blood vessels in his head and eyes, but this was a thousand times worse than that had been.

Still, the damage was finite, and Raven's powers untapped and untrammeled by the battle he had sustained it in. She forced the blood pooling within David to return to his veins, sealed the breaches in his circulatory system one after the next, and slowly repaired the swelling and tissue damage that had already been caused. The whole process might have taken five minutes, perhaps ten, she lost count. But before terribly long, his breathing had regularized, his whimpers of pain had ceased, and finally, he woke up.

He opened his eyes slowly, blinking several times before any sign of recognition passed over his face. "Raven?" he asked weakly, as though uncertain if she was actually there. Strong healing magic suppressed the vital functions of the patient so as to better repair their tissues, and coupled with the blood David had lost, he looked as though he had been slipped a powerful sedative, reduced to fighting his own body merely to stay awake.

"I'm here," she said, and he seemed to relax somewhat, as though her presence somehow alleviated everything that was happening. It only served to deepen her sense of shame, and she turned her head away, suddenly unwilling to even look at him.

"What's... where are we... what's happening...?" he asked.

There were too many possible answers for that question right now. She opted for the simplest answer.

"The end."

The source of the shooting and screams that permeated the shield and surrounded them in stereo was hidden, for the smoke had cloaked all, and nothing could be discerned outside the small black bubble. Yet given the circumstances, this made them more appropriate for the setting, not less. She felt David tense up beneath her hand, and turned back, redoubled her concentration to try and close off the remaining leaks before he could injure himself further through precipitous movement.

"What the Hell did you _do_?" she asked, partly to distract him.

"I don't... I don't know..." he said, his voice fading in and out, still half-delirious from blood loss and shock.

"You _accidentally_ blew half the island apart?" she asked. Right now it didn't matter in the slightest how he had managed to channel this much power, but she had to focus his mind on something other than what was happening, or else she'd be forced to tell him things she'd rather not presently think about.

"No..." he said, too weak to protest with any force. "No I - " He caught himself, suddenly lifting his head. "I did _what_?"

"You nearly brought the Tower down," she said as calmly as she could. She didn't mention that it hadn't been enough. That much was obvious.

He fell silent for a few moments, to the point where she wondered if he'd lost consciousness again. Then suddenly he spoke again.

"There was... so much fire," he said, his voice weak and thin. "Everywhere. All around and... inside my head. And the others were... they were dying. I just wanted to stop him. I didn't know how..."

"What did you use?" she asked. "A propane tank? A pocket of natural gas?"

He shook his head. "No," he said. "No there wasn't... there wasn't anything. I looked for things... with my mind. I tried to... to sense anything nearby but... but there wasn't anything. Just the rocks and the water..."

Despite everything, she hesitated. "You got... _that_... out of nothing but granite and seawater?"

"... I don't know," he said almost wistfully. "I just _wanted _to stop him... I wanted it... so bad. To stop him, and drive him away from the others... and then it was like everything started to move by itself. Without me forcing it to. There was... so much energy. All around me. In the rocks, and in the sea, and even in the air. And I pushed it. I pushed it down into a tight little ball... and I aimed it right at Slade and..." he blinked several times and seemed to snap out of whatever waking dream he was in. "... and then I don't... I don't know what happened after that. Just... a bright light and then... I was here."

Something tugged at the back of Raven's mind. Something she had heard, either from Devastator itself or about it. Something relevant to this and desperately important, she knew, but she couldn't recall what it was. And as she hesitated, David's eyes focused and he looked around the shield and asked a question that halted her train of thought where it was.

"What happened to the others?"

"They're all right," she said, omitting the obvious postscript. Nobody in the world was all right at the moment, but she had at least managed to buy them a few more moments' peace.

He craned his head around, trying to discern what was going on, but the shroud was total, and the gunfire and shrieks of dying men and demons seemed to come from every direction at once, muted down to a tolerable level only by the shield itself. When finally he gave up trying to see what was happening, he turned back to face her, and his eyes were wet, this time with tears, and she could see him trembling like a leaf in the wind.

"Raven," he asked haltingly, nervously, yet directly, "are we gonna die?"

She lowered her head, turning away again. "Yes," she said.

He didn't scream. He didn't protest or fight or try to convince her otherwise. Any of the others would have, in their own way, because deep down the others didn't believe her when she told them it was hopeless. David did. And despite the fact that he had quite nearly killed himself just moments ago trying to save the others, the prospect still clearly terrified him, hell it terrified _her_, but she was considerably more experienced at hiding it. As usual, his emotions leaked out of him like a sieve, with or without empathy to catch them. Tears rolled silently down the sides of his face as he tried, and failed, to stop shaking.

"I didn't think it would end like this," he said.

"All things end," came the reply, but not from Raven. David gasped softly and Raven turned her head to see Slade approaching them. The smoke was thick as ever, yet she could see him perfectly well, just as his voice easily penetrated all the din and clatter around them, as though he were whispering directly in their ears.

Slade approached at an even pace, his form unblemished by whatever violence had been directed his way. The sounds of battle still raged, yet plainly he had no part in them, and he walked up to the edge of the shield, paused only for a second, and the lay a hand on it. Instantly, the shield popped like a soap bubble, letting the smoke of the world outside flood in, and setting David to coughing violently, spitting up more blood from his torn lung tissue. Slade ignored him.

"Come with me," he said to Raven, and without waiting for her answer, he grabbed her wrist and pulled her to her feet. She tried to pull away from him, and when that failed, even blasted him in the back of the head, but he didn't even change his pace, pulling her along through the smoke, before they emerged on a larger street and he raised his free hand and clenched it into a fist. Moments later, great gusts of hot wind swept in from nowhere, parting the clouds of dense smoke, such that Raven could see everything that was transpiring.

"Behold your handiwork," said Slade contemptuously.

The street was covered in wreckage. Twisted, burning metal was strewn about like the discarded playthings of a giant. Some of it Raven could recognize, the broken remains of helicopters and aircraft, interspersed with what might once have been cars or buses or streetcars. The facings of every building in sight had collapsed in an avalanche of brick and masonry, spilling into the flame-lit street like a landslide. Slade's flame demons lay here as well, hundreds of them, some perforated with shrapnel and bullets, others torn to pieces by high explosives, or crushed to paste by falling debris. But lest Raven imagine that she had been brought here merely to view a sterile battlefield, Slade pointed up ahead, further down the street, and she lifted her eyes to follow him, and her heart froze.

There were the marines.

Their vehicles obliterated by Slade or his army, they had formed a rudimentary barricade at one end of the street out of overturned cars and piles of rubble, and from there they fought, blasting away at an army of flame demons twenty times their number and more. The demons surged about them like an angry sea, and the marines scythed them down by the hundreds with machine guns and grenades, but it was plainly useless. More demons emerged from the ground even as Raven watched, replacing those that had been cut down in an unending swarm, surging around the embattled unit like a rising tide. Raven was no military strategist, but it was instantly apparent that these soldiers had no chance whatsoever, even if she had not known what will it was that animated the demons.

"Let them go," she said without turning away, her voice hoarse and curt.

"No," responded Slade.

"They can't hurt you!" she shouted, rounding on him in fury. "They're just trying to defend the city! You don't have to kill them, you don't even have to fight them, just walk right past and ignore - "

"They took up arms against the soldiers of Trigon," said Slade implacably. "I am commanded to ensure that those who do so pay the dearest cost, a lesson you would have done well to learn much earlier." He smirked and glanced down at her. "I don't see why you're so upset," he said. "They would only have died anyway, when Trigon arose."

Far from placating her, his contemptuous dismissal blew the top off of her already shaky temper. Her vision turned red, her mind erupted into fire and rage, and she felt her powers gathering up into a cyclone of vengeance and blood. She turned on the scene before her, and raised her hands, and let fly waves of pure destruction, her mind flailing at her enemies. Black energies surged forth and struck the demon army in the back. Within seconds, hundreds of demons were simply torn to shreds, their flaming remnants scattered across the burning street like crumpled leaves. The raw injustice of it, of these men being slaughtered for no other crime than trying to stop what her father was bringing to the World, was enough to break all restraint, and her powers flayed at the very air as she -

Something grabbed her arm.

A spike of unimaginable pain shot through her like red lightning, strong enough that she screamed aloud. Strong enough that her volcanic rage was subsumed instantly beneath it. Her powers dissolved instantly, her tendrils of dark energy vanishing into the smokey air, and the demons she had torn to pieces were duly replaced by others emerging from the ground. And then she was whirled around, and came face to face with Slade, whose iron-clad hand gripped her upper arm like a vice of molten steel.

"Spoiled _child_!" he roared, and raising his other hand, he backhanded her across the face, knocking her to the ground as though she'd been struck in by an iron bar. She shook her head and looked up to see Slade towering over her, flames dancing from his hands and his one eye wide in fury.

"Now? _Now_, at the _end_, you would bring forth your powers? _Now?_ When your friends have already burned, when your city is already in ruins, when your father's reign is assured, _now_ you choose to fight?" Slade was physically shaking, enraged beyond anything Raven had seen from him, his voice a full-throated roar. Slade was a vicious, brutal murderer, but one who prided himself on his god-like detachment and Hannibal Lecter-like calm. Never before, not when Robin had abandoned his apprenticeship, not even when Terra had turned on him and struck him dead, never before had she seen Slade this angry, this righteously indignant, and it stunned her to momentary silence.

"A _thousand_ chances you had to escape this fate!" he roared at her. "A _thousand_ different solutions, but you refused them all! And now, at the end of all things, when you have personally condemned the _planet entire_ to oblivion, _now_ you have the gall to become upset at the measures _you initiated_?"

She couldn't help herself. "I... I couldn't," she stammered. "There was no way!"

"There _was_!" bellowed Slade, and the street rang with his words. "You could have killed David, or _yourself_, or fled to another dimension! You could have read the signs that were visible to you! But you did nothing! _Nothing!_ And now you think you have the right to be angry? This is all your own doing! _Every bit of it_! _Your _handiwork, _your _actions, _your_ responsibility."

And she knew he was right.

In another time, in another place, she might have argued otherwise, that this was Trigon's doing, not hers, but the truth was that she didn't believe that. She never had. Trigon was the incarnation of pure Evil, a force of nature, a _thing_ that acted the way it was made to. She had long tried to convince herself and others that she was not, that she was different than her father, if not a hero, then at least capable of deciding for herself what she would do. But if that were true, then she could not blame Trigon for this. Trigon was doing only what Trigon was always meant to do. It was like blaming the bomb for killing people, rather than the bomber.

She lowered her head, and felt tears running down her face, her anger spent and gone, and she might have sat there for hours had she been permitted to. But Slade merely sneered, and reached down, and grabbed her by the arm to pull her back to her feet, before turning her around to face the still-raging battle, and forcing her head up so that she was staring directly at it.

"No," he said. "You watch."

She watched.

The marines never gave up. Not even as their ammunition ran out, and they were reduced to shooting at the demons with sidearms and grenades. Not even when the demons surged over their makeshift barricade and tore it to pieces, they still never gave up. They fell back into small knots of men, back to back, and shot the demons down with pistols until they had no more bullets, and then they fought them with knives and entrenching tools. At first she thought that they simply had no other choice. Surrounded and outnumbered dozens to one, they could do nothing but sell their lives dearly.

But then she realized otherwise.

A chance gust of wind blew much of the smoke aside, and she saw further down the street. There the damage had been less great, the wreckage less complete, and there she saw the tiny forms of people climbing out of their ruined buildings, civilians, families, ordinary people who had taken shelter in their homes from the oncoming apocalypse, and who were now fleeing for their lives away from the swarm of demons. They were defenseless, burdened with injured and without means of rapid escape, and would be easy prey as soon as the demons deigned to turn and destroy them.

But the demons could not do so while the Marines still fought.

And they knew it.

She watched, she watched with no words, no feeling except shame, as the marines fought to the end. One by one they were overcome and dragged down by flame demons who tore them apart, limb from limb, who cleaved their bodies and roasted their flesh with the fires of Hell. She could feel them empathically, feel the fear flowing off of them like an aroma, mingling with their bloodcurdling screams as they were overwhelmed. Many of them were only a few years older than she was, still practically children, confronted by monsters that none of them had imagined save in nightmares, and yet, while some did panic, none ran. They might have managed to escape, in the confusion and the chaos she could see paths out of their predicament, escape routes that led off elsewhere into the city. None of them even tried, preferring or at least accepting that their duty was to stand and fight and let others escape. And consequently, the tides of fire drowned them all.

The last one alive was older than the others, the commander perhaps, a Hispanic man in his late thirties, who was the last to live simply because the demons left him until then. Having watched all his marines fall, he faced the army of the damned with an equanimity that would have made Robin proud. His pistol was still in-hand, and as the demons moved in around him, he raised it and shot three of them down at his feet. The fourth pull of the trigger was rewarded with a hollow "click", and he glanced down at the gun, back up at the demons, and then unhesitatingly threw it into the enemy army. With one hand, he reached into his shirt and pulled out a small brass cross, which he brought to his lips and kissed. And then, as one of the demons stepped forward, he lifted his chin and spat in the monster's face.

The demon tore the Marine commander's head off, and cast his body into the midst of its fellows, and then the smoke occluded them all, and Raven saw no more.

The violent spectacle seemed to have mollified Slade somewhat, and he released Raven and gestured to his undiminished army, who turned and marched back towards them, an escort for the final stage of their journey. In the sudden silence of the empty streets, Raven heard something behind them, and turned, and saw David, standing between two more flame demons, who were propping him up. His eyes were wide and unblinking, and not aimed at her but at a point further down the street, and she knew he had been made to watch as well.

"It's high time we left," said Slade impatiently.

Raven didn't move immediately. Instead she stared up at Slade, who returned the favor, and then finally dredged a few words out of what remained of her shattered soul.

"One way or another," she said, "you're going to pay for everything you've done."

Slade smirked as he turned away and led the procession of the damned down the street, over the burnt corpses of his fallen enemies.

"Then I suppose we have _that_ in common as well..."

**O-O-O**

The cavern was dark as Slade entered it, quiet, yet plainly inhabited, a palpable malice pervading the place like a rank smell. Even to him it was a noxious sensation, like that of walking into fetid sewer or abattoir. The knowledge that this would be the last time he had to do this was something of a relief.

He had left the army at the entrance to the old library, and rushed here as quickly as he could, a calculated risk perhaps, but one worth taking given what was at stake. The army would conduct Raven and David to the chamber for the ceremony. Amusing as that promised to be, he had no intention of being on-hand when that happened. Trigon's intentions for the Earth were clear enough, and now that he had done what he had been told to do, the only thing left was to leave as soon as possible.

But of course, there was a matter to be resolved first.

He approached the far end of the cavern with a measured tread, the walls lit by the river of flickering lava that ran before him. He paused at its edge, crossing his arms and waiting, as the facing wall begin to glow a dull red, which brightened slowly into four points of light, like searing eyes, that stared down at him the way a scientist might regard a laboratory specimen.

Slade was not one to blanch at the sight, even knowing what it portended. He folded his arms, ignoring the flames that began to rise from the lava pit before him.

"The portal approaches," he said evenly. "The hour is near. It's time for my payment."

The lava began to boil, the chamber resonating with a voice that the very rocks seemed to shrink from, a voice dripping with malevolence, deep and resonant and utterly pitiless.

"Payment?" asked the voice. "For what? The Gem returns of her own free will. You did not deliver her. _I_ did."

Slade's fist tightened incrementally. "We had a deal," he said, his voice as sharp as a straight razor. "I held up my end of the bargain. Now give me what I was promised."

A low, throaty rumble filled the room, like a distant earthquake. Small pebbles fell from the ceiling, clattering against the stone floor like castanets. Louder and louder it grew, shaking the entire chamber, until it became clear that it was no earthquake or eruption, but rather the savage, mocking laughter of Slade's 'benefactor'.

"Do you think me such a fool?" asked the voice. "I know what you have done. You who worked to deny me the host I demanded. You who strove to sabotage my plans with petty sleight of hand. You would now stand before me and demand _payment_?"

In an instant, there was fire everywhere, tendrils of flame erupted from the lava, from the walls, from the eyes that bored into him, and wrapped themselves around Slade's limbs, binding him in place. He struggled uselessly, ripping the tendrils from the walls, conjuring flames and hurling them at the eyes mounted on the wall, but it was of no use. The eyes absorbed the fire as though born to it, and the tendrils replaced themselves by the dozens and hundreds, forcing him to his knees, dragging him to the ground as the four searing eyes lorded over him.

"Caitiff wretch," intoned the terrible voice, as flames poured over Slade. The eyes glared down on him contemptuously. "Did you think you could take my favors with your left hand, and run blades through me with your right? Did you envision this a moment for mediation and neutrality?"

The tendrils drew taught, bearing Slade's struggling form into the air, spread eagle facing the agent of his torture. As Slade watched helplessly, the river of boiling lava rose into a motionless wave, filling one side of the cavern, with Trigon's burning red eyes still superimposed upon it.

"Slade Wilson," pronounced the voice of doom. "You shall join the legions of those accursed by Gods and Devils. Enemy to all, friend to none, yours shall be the shared fate of _all_ who oppose Trigon the Terrible."

The wave of flame flew at Slade with a rush, pouring over him like a tidal wave, boring through his impenetrable armor to scorch his very soul. As the flames engulfed him, Slade heard Trigon's final condemnation.

"Burn with your world, wretch."

And Slade Wilson opened his mouth to scream.

**O-O-O**

The eclipsed sun shone through the rose window of the abandoned library as Raven stepped across the threshold.

Trigon's minions had been busy here. The chamber was well prepared, swept clean of debris and dust, every surface polished to a mirror shine and lined with mosaics of obsidian glass. The demon escort had held back, forming a barricade behind her. Other flame demons stood before her, arrayed in a ring around the base of an enormous pillar of hewn stone, several stories tall, and carved in the shape of an enormous hand and forearm, the palm and fingers opened as if to present a sacrificial offering to the Gods.

Fitting, in a way.

"It's time," she said.

A murmur of noise from her right, and she turned to see two demons holding David firmly by the arms. His eyes were wide with fear, and despite their firm grip, she could see that he was shaking. It hurt, it _physically_ hurt her to look at him, both of them knowing full well what she was about to do, but the time for choices had long passed. Everything was pre-ordained. It was fate.

"Let him go," she said to the demons. "You've already won."

She really didn't expect them to obey her, but they did, releasing David so suddenly that he stumbled forward. He shied quickly away from them, his glance darting from point to point to point, as though expecting the demon army to jump him at any moment. None of them so much as twitched as he drew closer to Raven, as though she somehow afforded some kind of protection.

She said nothing as David approached her, mentally steeling herself for what was to come. Part of her wanted to get it over with, to not have to face whatever accusations he had in store. But she refused to permit herself to do that. Whatever else he was, either to Trigon or to the others, David was a Titan, a teammate. In another universe, he might even have been a friend. She owed him the chance to speak his piece, even if it was only to curse her.

But plainly, David was too far gone in fear and shock to muster the energy to curse anything, and his question was fairly to the point.

"N... now what happens?" he asked.

"Now the prophecy comes to pass," she said, as simply as she could. He did not ask what that meant. He didn't need to.

Even as Raven was avoiding David's gaze, David seemed to be avoiding hers. He trembled, quivering like a bowstring, and from the corners of her downcast eyes, she could see him trying to muster the wherewithal to say something, anything, but after a few moments, the enormity of the situation overcame him, and he collapsed to his hands and knees on the stone floor. Two dozen demons immediately moved in towards them, but Raven turned on them with a molten glare, and they stopped and fell back. Carefully, she knelt down at his side as he held his tightly clenched fist up to his forehead and tried to force down the spasms that wracked his still-weak body. He gasped once, twice, and then all of a sudden he was sobbing.

She could _feel_ him trying to stop. She could sense, of all the god damned things, _shame_, not the shame of ending the world that she had, but the more mundane version. Shame at his own inability to do anything more useful than what he was doing. The conscious knowledge that he was supposed to be a hero, and presently was incapable of saving himself, let alone anyone else. Shame, guilt, the same gamut of emotions that she herself was suppressing with great difficulty. But atop it all, leavening the entire toxic mix, was the fear, fear forcing him to his knees, clawing the sobs out of his unwilling throat. She knew the mixture well.

He lightly pounded his clenched fist on the stone floor, and wiped the tears from his eyes with his other hand, trying to force himself back under control, and failing, and she didn't know what to do, the agent of this cataclysm that was overwhelming his ability to cope. She didn't know if she could face him or not, but she finally laid a hand on his shoulder, gently as she could, unsure if he would violently throw her off.

But he didn't. He didn't react at all, seemingly, at least for a few seconds. Then slowly, he reached back and took her hand and held it, tightly. He didn't turn around, didn't even raise his head, but gradually his sobs trickled to a halt, and his breathing regularized, and the empathic pulses mellowed and receded, like a tide drawing back once more from the land.

"I'm sorry," she said. It didn't matter that it was inadequate. It was all that could be said.

And perhaps he sensed that, for he lifted his head slowly, craning it up, up, up, until he was looking up at the enormous pillar in the center of the chamber. "Me too," he said, and only then did he let go of her hand. She closed her eyes, taking several long, deep breaths, and then she stood up, and stepped forward towards her destiny, walking past David, still crouched on the floor of the chamber, who watched her go without speaking.

"Raven!"

Both Raven and David froze, Raven in mid-step, as a desperate and slightly raspy voice that both of them would have known anywhere called out her name. For a second, they turned to one another in mutual shock. It couldn't possibly be...

A primal roar and a crash as a dozen flame demons were hurled aside by an enraged Tyrannosaur.

It was.

The Titans burst into the room like raging whirlwinds, scattering the guards that sought to hold them back and casting them aside like broken playthings. Starfire was there, and Cyborg, their skins, alien and metal, scorched and rent and covered with grievous injury, yet clearly they were unbroken in spirit, for they crashed into the phalanx of flame demons and tore it to pieces, starbolts and sonic blasts stabbing through the air and impaling their enemies like the lances of charging knights. And with them, of all people, was Jinx, spinning like a top as waves of entropy lashed her enemies, sundering limbs and shattering demons left and right.

But white-hot though their ardor burnt, it _paled_ before Beast Boy's.

He was before them all, ever before them, his form shifting from shape to shape so quickly that Raven could not follow the changes with her unaided eyes. From dinosaur to condor to rhinoceros to field mouse to bobcat to stallion to screaming eagle and then finally to something wholly fantastical, a towering monster of fur and fangs and claws honed to a razor's edge. No matter how violently the others threw themselves at their foes, Beast Boy outdid them, seizing the demons in his claws and rending them to pieces, heedless of what they might try to do to him in return, like some viking berserker on an ancient battlefield who had truly gone mad.

It was enough to actually stun Raven. But not so David.

Perhaps it was just his habit, drilled into him by Robin and the others, and having seen the others fighting he was acting on instinct, or perhaps he saw here a brief, fleeting chance to survive, and seized it with both hands. Either way, he was on his feet before Raven even realized what was happening, and though he had no weapon but his trembling hands and his frayed mind, he made what use of them he could. He reached out his arm to the demons, his fingers splayed out, and she saw his eyes glaze over as he called upon Devastator to strike them down. Without a somatic focus such as a baton, to say nothing of his physical condition, the process was slower than it normally would have been, but the demons were otherwise occupied, facing the wrong way, and they paid him no mind at all until Devastator's power burst forth in their ranks like an artillery strike. In an instant, half a dozen demons were blown to pieces, their bodies flying apart like fragmentation bombs. Thirty more were hurled in every which way, overhead, into the walls and ceiling, where they shattered like Christmas ornaments.

But it was all in vain. No matter how many demons the Titans tore to pieces, hundreds, _thousands_ more were already converging on them from every direction, coming out of the very walls and floors, forming barricades of impenetrable strength and advancing in ranks on her friends. Fueled by panic and desperation, the Titans tore through the first line of foes, and the second, but then the demons formed up in a mass and simply buried them, hurling themselves at the Titans in a cresting wave that broke and flowed over them all, pinning them down beneath restraints of molten rock. Others broke off and rushed David, who blew four of them to pieces before the rest seized him in their tendrils of flame and dragged him to the ground, where he lay writhing and adding his screams to those of the others.

The screams jolted Raven back to her senses. Carefully, she marshaled her powers, channeling and sharpening them into a terrible weapon. Turning to one side, she swept her hand across the entire room, and her magic exploded forth like an enormous broom. In one fell swoop, the entire army of demons was brushed aside, smashed against the far wall like broken crockery. In its wake, the Titans and Jinx were left on the ground, slowly stirring in the midst of the suddenly-silent chamber.

Beneath her, around her, she could feel the demons stirring once more, the endless legions prepared to burst forth into the room once more, but they did not move, and she knew why. They had orders to ensure that she fulfilled her destiny, orders they would carry out, should she try to defy it, but failing that, they would let her do things her way. Slade was the one who imparted the personal touch. The demons themselves cared only that she did what she had come here to do.

That much she was thankful for.

The others rose to their feet, mystified, but plainly in no mood to gainsay the reprieve. They moved into the chamber quickly, lest the demons return. David rose as well, unsteadily, his body still dreadfully weakened from the physical trauma he had undergone. He staggered towards them and was caught by Cyborg, whereupon he promptly collapsed, managing only to lift his head weakly to Cyborg and nod when asked if he was all right. The depraved conditions that presently defined "all right" were no longer even remarkable.

Beast Boy was standing before Raven, human once more, and his eyes were wide and spoked by the red streaks of tears. "Rae, come on!" he half-said, half-shouted. "We've gotta go before this prophecy thing starts to happen."

She shook her head sadly. "It's already started," she said. "And there's no stopping what's meant to be."

Beast Boy advanced another pace. "You can't just give up!" he exclaimed. "Just because of some prophecy you heard when you were a kid?"

"Beast Boy is correct," said Starfire. "For your own sake, you must not lose hope in such a way!"

"What if you're wrong?" asked Beast Boy.

"Beast Boy, I..." she didn't know what to say. She _never_ knew what to say about this. "I... know what I know," she finally said, knowing it wouldn't be enough to convince him. If anything would.

"We can't accept that," said Cyborg at his most big-brotherish. "Not after everything we've done. How many times have we all run into something that 'couldn't be changed'? That's _what we do_, Raven."

"This is _different_!" cried Raven, the words exploding from her throat without her consent. "It just... it _is_." Her voice degenerated to a soft plea. "Please... don't... don't make this harder than it has to be."

But even as she said it, she knew that Beast Boy was hellbent on doing just that. "Rae, it doesn't have to _be_ at all!" he said. "I know you, you can take control of all this. You can make it... not happen or something!"

"You don't understand," she said, lowering her head. "I've known my whole life that this day was going to come. I tried to..." she choked up, but pushed on, "I tried to control the dark side of me. I tried to do... good things. To fight evil. And I hoped that it would somehow make up for the horrible thing I'm destined to do."

"But..." Beast Boy stared at her, his emerald face as forlorn as she had ever seen it, grasping desperately at straws. It tied her insides in knots just to see him like this. "But you don't _know_!" he cried desperately, tears running down his face. "You don't _know_ all this, you just _think_ it's gonna happen!"

"There... _were_ some things I didn't know." She lifted her head again and stared at him, forced herself to do so even though it tore her apart. She spoke slowly, preventing her voice from cracking by force of will alone. "I didn't know that I'd make such wonderful friends. That I'd meet... someone like you." She barely knew _what_ she was saying, but she proceeded regardless. "All I wanted was to make your last day perfect," she said, slowly turning away. "But instead, you spent it worrying about me."

None of the others spoke, not even Beast Boy, who was staring at her like he was witnessing his own death, or those of his family. He said not a word, but instead rushed towards her all at once and threw his arms around her, burying his head on her shoulder, tears running freely, and she felt his tears soaking the fabric of her leotard. She clenched her own eyes shut to try and stop her own tears, but they leached out regardless, and gently she returned his embrace, no longer able to care what anyone else might think.

"Please," he whispered to her as he fought for breath. "Please don't. I can't take... not again... please..."

She wanted to stay here. She wanted to leave with Beast Boy and her friends. She wanted to force the demons to take her, to tear them apart for hours until they finally overwhelmed her. She wanted to hold him until the stars burned out. She wanted _this_.

But this was not a night where she would get the things she wanted.

Beast Boy held her like a drowning man holding a life preserver, and she held him more gently, carefully, as though he were a fragile thing that might shatter if she held on too tight, a dream that vanished once tampered with. She opened her eyes and looked at the others, at Cyborg, Starfire, David, even Jinx, who stood to one side watching the proceedings with a vacant, hollow stare. She knew the look. Jinx had lost everything tonight, her own makeshift family wiped out in the blink of an eye, and her gaze was that of one who sought to pour death and pain out upon her tormentors until she herself was overcome. It was the gaze of one who had nothing left to live for except death itself.

What Jinx was thinking now, Raven did not know. She did not even know what she was feeling. Empathically, Jinx was dead, her feelings non-existant, an automaton operating on adrenaline and motor reflex. Starfire had had much the same look for weeks after Robin's death. But for this new crisis, she still might have. They all had tasted that kind of despair in the past few weeks, but despite that, she still did not know what Jinx was going through.

But she could feel the demons waiting, and knew that if she did not act, she would find out what it was like. She'd known that all along of course, but Jinx was standing there, a perfect poster child of despair, more real than any threat Slade could offer.

And so Raven counted three seconds off in her head, three last seconds of contentment, willing them to last eternities, and then she did the hardest thing she had ever done in her entire life.

She released Beast Boy, stepped back out of his arms, and with a wave of her hand, she erected a barrier.

Less a shield than a wall of pure force, the barrier stretched from wall to wall, running between her and her friends, cutting them off from the rest of the room as though by divine fiat. Black and vaguely opaque, it sprang into existance with a whispered word of command, severing the others from where she stood, forever. And as the shield firmed up, touching the very ceiling, Raven felt something inside her die. She lingered for one final glance at the frozen, stunned forms of her friends, and then, for the last time, she turned away.

She did not look back. Not when Beast Boy screamed her name and raced up to the shield, pounding his fists against it. Not when she heard the others join in chorus, bringing out their most potent weapons to try and blast a hole through the translucent barrier. Cyborg blasted it with his cannon, Starfire with beams of energy from her eyes, and when those failed, they struck the shield with their fists. Beast Boy took form after form, each larger and stronger than the last, buffalo, grizzly bear, elephant, dinosaur, charging into the barrier with enough force to crush an armored car, yet it accepted his blows without breaking, repelling him. Of the teenagers arrayed on the far side of the barrier, only Jinx and David did not act. Jinx did not act because she no longer knew how to muster the will. David did not because he no longer believed that he could.

She walked towards the spire of rock in the shape of a hand, and at her command, the stones from the ground rose beneath her feet in the form of a staircase. Behind her, the attacks became ever more desperate, as Cyborg fired missiles into the shield to no effect, and Starfire uprooted entire statues and beat against it with them as though wielding an enormous hammer. Beast Boy switched to the form of a gnat, searching the periphery for a way through, anything, but at Raven's command, the shield was air-tight. She did not see Beast Boy desperately grab David by the arm and beg him to do something with his own powers, but she did notice when the stones she was using to ascend the statue began to explode like popcorn kernels. For a moment she teetered and nearly fell, but with a wave of her hand, she levitated above the exploding rocks, and let them fall back to the ground, floating up under her own power until she was hovering a foot above the top of the carven pillar, sitting cross-legged in mid-air as she repeated the damning words of the prophecy itself.

_"The gem was born of evil's fire,  
The gem shall be his portal,  
He comes to claim, he comes to sire,  
The end of all things mortal."_

One by one, red sigils appeared over her body, running down her arms and legs, circling her stomach and chest and branding the sides of her neck. They glowed with fierce intensity, like burning coals, and she felt the flames pulsing within them, hellfire, searing her very soul, beating against her mind to be let loose.

The chamber began to shake as invisible energies coursed through her. She could feel them, like poisoned rivers flowing into a lake, feel their corrupt energies filling her. The brands on her skin grew brighter and brighter and brighter still, as she fought to remain still. Her breath came in short gasps as the voice of her father rumbled through her head.  
_  
"My daughter," _he said, _"my creation, my blood, at long last, you are __**mine**_."

She screamed.

No sound emerged, for her lungs had seized, but she screamed nonetheless as power unimagined burst through her like a raging torrent. Her limbs stiffened as she floated unaided above the pillar, arms and legs splayed out wide, mouth agape, screaming and yet silent, as her father's energies coalesced. She felt as though she might burst into flame at any moment, or fly to pieces like an overwound clockwork toy.

And then she felt something gathering at her midsection.

She looked down, and saw a light, swirled blue and while, dazzling in intensity, shining from her stomach, as though she had been impaled on a shaft of light. She watched in mixed horror and fascination as it grew, encompassing more and more of her stomach until it covered her from her waist to her ribcage. Still further it grew, and as it did, she felt herself coming undone beneath its brilliance, the very fabric of her body disintegrating with such totality that it was almost painless.

Almost.

The light grew inexorably, and she clenched her eyes shut, biting the pain back, focusing all her thoughts on the others. She had no discrete plan, no last-minute thoughts of reprieve. She did not think of them in longing or sorrow, nor in a final attempt to impart power or avert the inevitable. She did not do anything rational.

Instead she prayed.

She had never prayed before in her life, and did not know how. She did not pray to a specific god, though she knew of many, nor recite a liturgy, though she had memorized thousands. No saint, no holy figure, not even Azar herself crossed her mind, nor did she conceive of a God or a faith among the others. She prayed to whoever might listen. She prayed to the universe itself, to the million Gods, or one, or none at all that might inhabit it. She prayed with no expectation of being heard, as the white-hot flare engulfed her chest and shoulders and rose up her neck. No words did she speak discretely, for her lungs had already disintegrated by then. All she did was focus on a simple wish, that somehow, despite the iron bonds of prophecy that ensnared her and the world entire, that her friends might be spared the apocalypse they had unwittingly accepted in the form of her friendship.

And then the radiance swallowed Raven's head, and she thought and prayed no more.

**O-O-O**

And in the end, despite all the protestations of the universe, it ended as it always had to.

Starfire turned away before the end, unable to watch another one of her friends being consumed forever. She took three steps and teetered and fell, all rage spent, the lightness of being that usually held her aloft having deserted her in the end. She fell against Cyborg, who held her up, silent now, watching all that transpired without comment or expression. Eventually he too could stand to watch no longer, and as his head lowered, his eyes fell upon Jinx, who stood to the side, a broken shadow of her former self, and not for the first time but for the last, he felt that perhaps they understood one another.

Of the original Titans, Beast Boy alone watched the entire proceeding.

The sphere of radiant energy floated above the upstretched hand like a thrown ball suspended in time, rotating at impossible speeds, the runes that had coated Raven's body spinning around and around in rings. Beast Boy watched, and next to him stood David, his hands pressed up against the shield for support if nothing else, watching the spectacle with eyes wide. Carefully, David turned to the others, one at a time, but Cyborg said nothing, and Starfire could not reply, and Beast Boy stood frozen like a statue, staring up at Raven's grave.

Slowly, the spinning sphere began to flatten, shrinking down until it formed a flat disk of flames, haloed by swirling red energies. The disk expanded slowly in mid-air, becoming brighter and brighter, filling the room with golden light. David winced and turned away, even Beast Boy was forced to shield his eyes, as the disk of fire slowly began to lower, consuming the tower beneath it in an orgy of pyrotechnics that sent bits of flaming rock hurtling in every direction. But for the shield, they might all have been torn to bits by the flying shrapnel, but it held firm. By then however, the disk had reached the floor of the chamber, and opened dozens of yards wide, a cauldron of flame and boiling sulfur that cast a flickering firelight across the accursed chamber.

But then a shadow fell.

A silhouette of darkness, of a black shadow, began to grow within the churning heart of the maelstrom. It grew by volumes, a dark figure ascendant, surging towards the surface of the fiery portal. Humanoid in the vaguest sense of the term, the silhouette was of a monstrous shape, antlered and hooved like some pagan devil conjured forth by blackest rituals. Yet still it grew, and grew, its features taking definition and shape, until it was no longer black but red, the red color of drying blood. Moments later, it erupted forth.

Red-skinned, white-haired, with four eyes aglow with malice, the monster loomed over them. Iron bands it wore around its arms and chest, and a loincloth of white fabric ringed with skulls human, alien, and bestial. It was _huge_, the size of a skyscraper, so large that the chamber, enormous as it was, had no prayer of containing it, and the creature burst through it, tearing off the roof, crashing effortlessly through the layers of catacombs and concrete that stood above it, and it hurled wreckage aside like an elephant shaking off insects. Blocks of stone the size of delivery vans fell to earth and shattered, striking the shield, which shook and bent but held out long enough to ward off the falling debris. And then it too collapsed, the agent of its will no longer present to maintain it, and the Titans were left alone.

For a moment, the towering devil stood, beholding its new surroundings, standing like a spire of red stone amidst the city, listening to the faint sounds of screams and panic as all fled before its face, save for the insects at its feet, too small yet to be of importance. And as the Titans stared helplessly at the incarnation of Evil, they saw, far above, a single figure standing on a balcony overlooking the ruins of the ritual chamber. He had not been there a minute ago, any one of them would have sworn to that, but he was there now, and alone amongst the denizens of Jump City, he was not running away.

And the man was dressed in Gold.

His demeanor relaxed, his face exultant, the Man in Gold stood at the balcony and stared up at the devil that had erupted into his midst, and his eyes sparkled as he stared at it, his hands clenched around the railing. Gold were his gloves and his boots and belt and helmet. Gold were his plated gauntlets, his greaves, the shining armor banded around his torso, yet he seemed unconcerned by its weight. In his chest was mounted a sphere of flawless gray metal, and another in the forehead of his helmet, and his face was drawn back in a ruthless smile, his black mustache and short-trimmed beard bristling in anticipation.

David did not know this man, he had never seen him before in his life, but despite that, he knew precisely who he had to be. One glance at Cyborg, at Starfire, at Jinx, told him that much. The name that Terra and Jinx had both given out came back to him all at once, and unbidden, he whispered it to himself.

"Warp..."

As though he had heard David speak, the demon lord lowered its four eyes to the balcony, staring down at Warp, who gazed up at it with no fear, no appearance of hesitation. Instead he raised his arms, like a parishioner venerating a sacred icon, and as the Titans watched, the Man in Gold knelt before Trigon the Terrible, and shouted words up to him that they could not hear for the roaring of the flames that foamed about Trigon's feet. But whatever was said, Trigon's reaction was to turn his head, and lower his gaze yet further, to the figures arrayed at his feet. His enormous eyes bored into each of them in turn, into Jinx, into Cyborg, into Beast Boy, into Starfire...

... and then finally...

Trigon's features twisted into a cruel smirk as he stared down at David, his red eyes like four gigantic headlights, paralyzing his will, shriveling him on the spot. He could not move, could not act, could only watch as Trigon opened his mouth and intoned words that sounded like the rumblings of a distant thundercloud.

"Devastator..." rumbled the devil overhead, and it chuckled darkly. "At last, you have nowhere to hide..."

David could not have responded to Trigon had he been granted a thousand years to do it in. He stared up at the four-eyed Devil in abject fear, paralyzed, unable to think. But as ever, his friends were made of sterner stuff.

"You _shall not touch him_," commanded Starfire, her voice quivering but not with fear, and suddenly she was in front of David, between him and the Devil, and her eyes and fists were coated with green energy. What she hoped to accomplish was unclear, perhaps she had not thought that far ahead, but she faced him regardless, her voice raising to a tone of challenge. "You shall _not_ have - "

Trigon raised his hand and struck them all down.

A cone of red energy materialized and blasted the area that the Titans stood in with such force that it scoured the stone clean and simply vaporized the debris in its wake. The blast threw all of them off their feet, hurled Cyborg, Beast Boy, Starfire, and Jinx away, swept them to one side of the room like a raging torent. Only one figure did it leave in place, transfixing him to the ground as though impaled, and even as the others shook themselves free of the rubble they had landed amidst, they heard David scream.

He lay in the middle of the cone of energy, his head thrown back, his limbs hanging limp, his face contorted in agony, and he screamed, screamed like a banshee, as whatever malice Trigon had unleashed pounded him into the stones. Cyborg and Starfire scrambled to their feet and raced towards him, but the edges of the energy cone were solid, and repelled them like a magnetic charge. Before their eyes, David was lifted bodily into the air, as though suspended from a guidewire or meat hook, convulsing and coughing up blood, as Trigon spread his fingers ever wider, jerking David's helpless form about like a puppet on strings.

"What possessed you to hide in such a place?" asked Trigon, taking no notice of the others. "What vanity drove you to this planet of weakness and febrility. What did you seek here? What did you think you would find?" He jerked his fingers back and forth, hurling David against the confines of his red prison, each movement producing fresh cries. "Was it absolution?" he asked, punctuating each sentence with a fresh pulse. "Wisdom? Serenity? Did you feel pity for these insects? Did you seek to play God with them? What motivated you to bring yourself so low?"

There was nothing that the others could do but watch as Trigon toyed with David before finally dropping him back onto the ground. He lay there, in a ruined heap, sobbing and convulsing in a pool of his own blood, and the energy beam narrowed and constricted until it ringed him like a spotlight

"It matters not," said Trigon. "Your time is at an end. Now come forth..."

Nothing visibly changed, yet David threw his head back and screamed once more, writhing on the ground like a live wire, arching his back, digging his fingernails into the broken stone until they cracked and bled. Starfire hung her head, each scream sending a sympathetic shudder through her system, as she uselessly beat her hands against the invisible barrier. Beast Boy stood next to her, his hands pressed against the same barrier, his eyes wide and tear-filled, helplessly watching. Beside them stood Cyborg and Jinx, who like the others could do nothing but watch. Neither of them spoke. There was nothing to say. All that Cyborg could do was to pray that the torture might end soon.

It did.

"Come forth," said Trigon, as David screamed helplessly. "There is no evading your destiny." The energy brightened, and David's scream sputtered to a halt, the agony so profound that his diaphragm no longer obeyed his commands. "All you are doing is prolonging the inevitable," said Trigon. "If you will not come forth, I will tear you from your hiding - "

"_Leave this one alone._"

The words were _deafening_, booming drowning out even Trigon's voice, shaking loose rock from the walls and echoing up through the open pit that had once been the old library, and like a switch had been thrown, the energy stopped, leaving David laying crumpled on his side. For a few seconds, nothing happened, and then slowly, a fine red mist began to lift off of David's fallen form. His eyes were closed, his breathing erratic, his hands trembling, but the mist emerged from nowhere in particular, fading into being around his body and lifting up slowly, inch by inch, before coalescing above him like a faint red star. He stirred slowly, lifting his head, shaking it weakly, and as he did so, the red mist firmed up beside him into a solid form. The color altered only by degrees as it condensed into a small humanoid form, slight and thin and dressed in red...

By the time David managed to roll over onto his side and look up at what was happening, he was staring at himself.

The simulacrum was perfect in every detail, save that unlike David, it was in peak condition, its uniform crisp and smooth, its face untarnished by dirt or blood. Its demeanor was calm, collected, and vaguely mournful, and it looked down at David as he slowly sat up and stared back at it in wide-eyed wonder. The clone looked from him to the others, one after the next, taking its time, before returning to David, its eyes downcast, sorrowful. And finally, without turning back around, it spoke to Trigon in David's own voice.

"Leave this one alone, Trigon."

Above and behind the clone, Trigon laughed, deep and throaty. "'This one' is not in question," he said.

"As ever," said the clone, and it shook its head sadly. "They're never in question, are they? All that is in question is you."

"And you."

The clone's features set, its jaw locking, its fists clenching into balls. "Is it never enough with you?" it asked, before turned around to face Trigon directly. "Three hundred _trillion_ dead?" he asked. "After all this, are you _still _unsated? What will the slaughter of this world afford you that the previous _fifty thousand_ did not?"

"You would presume to judge me?" asked Trigon. He did not sound offended. Rather he sounded amused.

"Judge you?" asked the clone. "I can barely comprehend you. Death _herself_ scarcely equals your score, yet here you stand."

"As do you," said Trigon. "Or have you forgotten the others."

"What of them?"

"You spoke of Death," said the Devil. "Where _is _Desolator? Where are Deceiver and Defiler? Where are your compatriots, weapon?"

The figure narrowed its gaze. "They have left," it said.

"But not you" replied Trigon. "Not you... you remained. You endured. Despite proving yourself incapable of fulfilling the role for which you were creating, you _lingered_. You subjected yourself to _gross _indignities. Was it out of fear? Guilt?"

"You have _no _understanding of these things." snapped the clone.

"Do not presume to define the limits of my understanding," said Trigon evenly. The clone fell silent as David slowly stood up, unsteadily, barely able to do that much, though Cyborg couldn't tell if it was because of his injuries or because his mind had simply frozen at the scene before him.

"The Great Devastator," said Trigon, taking no notice of David. "The Lord of Destruction. And where do I find you?" The four-eyed devil laughed before extending his hand down at David himself. "Bound to the will of a pubescent insect from a primitive _backworld_, who employs you like a primate would a stick."

"Your opinion on my selection," said the clone acidly, "was _not _solicited."

Trigon's mouth curled upwards at the corners. "Neither was his."

The clone said nothing, and for a moment, neither did Trigon. David by now had managed to steady himself on his feet, and, as Cyborg watched, he gingerly approached his identical counterpart. Shaking, stumbling, his eyes wide, his mouth slightly agape, he reached a trembling hand out to the other figure, as though unsure if he was real, and moved to touch his sleeve. But his hand passed through the clone's arm without encountering the slightest resistance, as though he was touching nothing more than a hologram, and only then did the other turn his head, and meet David's gaze.

"Did you ask him?" asked Trigon, as the clone watched David. "Did you ask any of them, prior to making your selection? Did you give them a chance to voice _their_ opinions on being made into hosts for forces beyond their comprehension? Did you pause at the threshold and ask permission before helping yourself to their deepest secrets and thoughts?" With every question, the clone's eyes lowered slightly, almost imperceptibly, until he was staring at David no longer, but through him, wearing the empty gaze of one whose accuser was speaking aloud his own inner thoughts. "Or did you enter like a thief in the night, like the parasite you are, and feed off their lives until you had drained them dry and led them to their ends?"

"I will _not _be lectured by _you _on morality." said the clone.

Trigon exploded. "_You will do as you are told!_" he thundered. "You have proven yourself fit for _nothing else_!"

The clone said nothing, but did lift its head once again. This time it did not look away from David, though Cyborg could read nothing in its expression, and from the looks of it, David was too far gone to try. It said nothing to him directly, did not approach or make a gesture, yet its next words, directed though they were at Trigon, were spoken as it stared right into David's eyes.

"I chose this one for a reason," it said. "Whatever else, I will not repent of that."

Trigon's features twisted as his eyes began to glow bright red. "Then let that be his epitaph."

All four glowing eyes discharged beams of red energies that fused into a single column red energy that swept across the chamber floor. David had enough time to cry out and bring his arms up in a last, useless defense before it broke over him. His cry was silenced instantly, as the wave front hid him from all view, but only for a second or so. Trigon's eyes darkened once more, and the energy wave ceased, and the smoke cleared to reveal David standing where he had been before, his arms still crossed above his head, eyes clenched shut, half-turned away.

It took Cyborg a second to realize what had happened.

He had expected Trigon to kill them all, frankly. Cyborg was no fool. With Raven gone, and Robin, and nothing they had even capable of stopping Trigon's _minions_, there was no chance of halting Trigon himself. But that didn't lessen the shock. One second, David was crying out in fear. The next...

The invisible barrier that held the other Titans back collapsed all of a sudden, and Starfire surged forward towards David. The light was bad from where she stood, and it took her three steps before it dawned on her what had occurred. She slowed to a walk, took the last few steps in a sort of daze, and stopped next to David. Weakly, she lifted her own hand, and laid it on David's shoulder, closing her eyes and lowering her head as she did so.

The lifeless stone beneath her fingers did not react.

Beside them all, the image of David remained for a few more seconds, eyes closed, head lowered. It did not stir at Starfire's approach, nor at Cyborg's, nor Beast Boy's, as all three of them gathered around the frozen statue. Starfire fell against Cyborg, as sobs forced their way out of her throat. Beast Boy clutched the back of his head with both hands and fell to his knees, and Cyborg found his own human eye wet with the same tears that the others were crying. For Raven, for David, for Robin, for themselves. As he stood there next to the petrified body of yet another one of his friends, he saw the clone raise its head, and in the brief instant that their eyes met, he could have sworn he saw a glint in its eye as well.

"I'm sorry," it said.

Trigon simply raised his hand.

A beam of red energy, sharper this time, and more narrowly defined, radiated down onto the image of David, which flickered like a television screen for a moment, before suddenly exploding into a red mist. Unlike before, the mist twisted and whirled like a boiling fluid, writhing in mid-air as it dispersed and condensed rapidly. But before long it was drawn upwards, ever upwards, ascending high into the night until its soft red glow merged with Trigon's own. And as it did so, Cyborg put one arm gently around Starfire, laid his other hand on BB's shoulder, and closed his eyes.

Far above, Trigon laughed, a deep, booming laugh that built and built like an oncoming avalanche. He raised his arms to the smoke-black sky, to the invisible stars and shrouded moon, and about him, a red whirlwind burst into being. He let it rise, swirling and dancing about him, towering into the skies like a tornado of fire, sweeping over everything nearby, over Cyborg and Jinx, Starfire and Beast Boy, over Warp, who raised his own hands to the sky in mimicry of Trigon, and over the lifeless statue that had once been David. Flaring like a beacon, the swirling energies covered Trigon himself, obscuring all vision, leaving only the uproarious, mocking laughter of the Lord of all Evil.

"The Earth is _mine_," roared Trigon, and then the blood-dimmed tide was loosed, and everything went red.

**O-O-O**

Jump City died in a tenth of a second.

The wave front radiated out from Trigon, a sheer, conical wall of red energy that stretched from deep below the ground to the highest reaches of the upper atmosphere. It passed over and through everything in its path, through houses of wood or brick, skyscrapers of steel and glass, moving like an elementary particle, penetrating all matter. Radiating out from its central point at fifty thousand miles per hour, it covered the entire city in the blink of an eye and in its wake left nothing but death. Buildings warped into ruins, as though gutted by fire and earthquake. Plants and animals withered and disintegrated, blown away like dust. Jump City bay, and the ocean beyond it, was instantly converted to a lake of searing magma, washing the shores of a barren wasteland. And every person in the city, every soldier, every civilian, every man, woman, and child, every single one was instantly turned to stone, frozen as a statue in perpetual monument to the last moments of their lives.

Having slain Jump City, the wave front erupted outwards, undiminished, flowing over hill and mountain, desert and forest, ending all life in its wake. Within twelve seconds, it had annihilated everything from San Diego to Salinas, blotting thirty million people out of existence as though by an act of God. Ten more seconds, and the rest of California followed, as the wave washed outwards, turning fertile land to ashen desert, teeming ocean to burning lava, and thriving city to sterile ruin. No act of war, no nuclear holocaust, no fevered imaginings of a disaster-minded pulp author, nothing could compare with this apocalypse. It spared nothing in its path, not the survivalist in his bunker, not the prisoner in his cell, not the child in his crib or his mother's arms, not those hiding in the deepest depths of the earth, or soaring high above in airplanes or orbit. It plumbed the depths of the earth as it passed, and scraped the very skies. It was undiscriminating, inexorable, total.

In Washington DC, the President of the United States had been speaking with his advisers, trying to make the terrible decision of whether or not to strike at the "disturbance" in Jump City with a nuclear weapon. His generals and advisers argued forcibly for one course of action after another. To strike, or to hold back, and see if the military could restore order by conventional means, to bargain with the agent of this cataclysm, or to call upon the Justice League, already hurrying back from their mission off-world, to deal with the threat. The first warning that the President received that all his options had been reduced to irrelevancies was when the video link to the Secretary of Defense cut out. The Secretary had been speaking from the fortified bunker at Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, when the screen flashed red and washed out to static. Technicians struggled with the video link, tried to place calls back to NORAD, to Peterson Air Force Base, to the State Capitol in downtown Denver. They had no way of knowing that the entirety of Colorado had just been wiped clean of all life, and that the Secretary of Defense was dead.

The President did not know what was happening, but on impulse perhaps or some other vague sense of dread, he rose without speaking and left the situation room, walking up the stairs and down the colonnades of the White House, arriving in the residency of the venerable building some two minutes after leaving his advisers behind. There he ascended the steps that led to his personal chambers, and opened the door to find his wife and children there waiting for him. The President had time to smile upon seeing them, had time to take two steps into the room as his youngest child ran towards her father. He had time enough to open his arms to receive her, and to notice a faint red glow on the western horizon. And then the wave front swept over him and the rest of the city, and he saw and heard no more.

The countries on the far side of the world had more warning. Satellites and early warning radars, designed to alert their governments to the outbreak of nuclear war, gave notice instead of an entirely different apocalypse. The leaders of Europe and Asia watched in real time as the wave-front passed over the oceans, converting them to magma in its wake, and reducing islands and continents alike to burnt cinders. Some ordered massive strikes against the supposed originators of this cataclysm. Some spoke to their people, informing them of their impending doom. Some ran in panic for fortified bunkers or aircraft. Some turned to alcohol. Some prayed.

None survived.

The wave front reached Britain and Japan at the same time and killed every living thing on both in less than thirty seconds. Moments later, it was China's turn, and Europe's. Billions died in minutes, left to sit silent and forgotten in whatever position their last instants had afforded them. In Beijing, a man fell from a window and died before he struck the ground. In Paris, a policeman was frozen forever in the act of striking a rioter with his truncheon. In Singapore, a newborn infant was killed along with its mother as it drew its first and only breath on the Earth, and with each passing second, the toll of slaughter grew. The Pope was in mid-prayer when Rome fell, perishing along with a crowd of the faithful in St. Peter's Square. A minute later, and Jerusalem followed, and Mecca, and Varanasi, extinguishing prayers to dozens of gods in hundreds of languages. Unchecked, the wave front rolled on, through India and Russia, Africa and the Middle East, racing around the entire planet towards its inevitable end.

The last men left alive on Earth were the crew of the Aircraft Carrier _Viraat, _flagship of the Indian Navy, on maneuvers fifteen hundred miles southeast of Madagascar. At General Quarters since the first alerts from Jump City hours before, the crew spent their last minutes in confusion and uncertainty, as one by one, their sources of information on what was happening to their world vanished without a trace. Both the government in Delhi, and the Indian naval command in Mumbai went silent at the same time, and further radio calls to them or other stations went unanswered. Satellite communication was down, and in the end, they could not even raise any other ship on the waters.

The only warning the crew of the _Viraat _had was the red glow that appeared on the horizon from every side, prompting sailors to crowd the flat deck of the warship, and speak to one another in hushed tones. As it brightened and grew in size and visibility, the Captain of the carrier stepped out from the bridge onto a small balcony from whence he was wont to watch firsthand the workings of his ship. As he beheld what he knew to be his impending doom, his mind wandered back to a passage of the _Baghavad Gita_, the Hindu scriptures he had studied as a child.

_**"If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst into the sky,  
That would be like the splendor of the Mighty One.**_

_**I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds."**_

As the fire on the horizon rose to cover the sky, and the waters began to boil around them, the Captain raised his hands to the sky. He had just begun to take a breath so as to call upon the name of God when the wave front swept over his ship from all directions at once, and all ended in darkness.

And on the other side of the world, surveying the ruins of what had once been Jump City, Trigon the Terrible permitted himself a cruel grin as he felt the last, frightened remnants of humanity flicker and die. He leaned back, resting himself against the skewed and burning tower that had once been his daughter's home, and gazed at the fires burning fiercely over his new realm, and saw that it was good.

_"Sic Semper Vitae," _whispered the Devil, and he settled back and watched the world burn.

* * *

**Author's Note:** There is a tempting case to end it all here. Truly, this story has gone on for time enough by most standards. Much has been explored, and much resolved. And while the above may not be the most cathartic of endings, it has the virtue of providing a credible stopping point. I could simply stop now, and be finished at long last.

But, for better or worse, the story does not end here. And the story, rather than my stamina in writing it, has been the driving force behind this endeavor since its inception. Where the story goes, I must follow, and though some of you may no doubt be tired of the whole thing, the story leads on, through other paths, towards a (slightly) different end. To those who have read enough and wish to read no further, I can only thank you in the strongest terms for having traveled this far with me. And to those few who, having read all this way, still crave more of this tale, I hope the above chapter will suffice for the moment as we move now towards the final resolution for this _endless _tale.

In all senses.


	33. Prisoners of Time

**Disclaimer:** I do not own the characters or premises contained herein. I simply am relating my rendition.

**Author's Note:** Hello again, dear readers. As always, it has been an unforgivably long time since I have been able to present to you a chapter of this story. I won't bore everyone with a long story about why this is the case, work and the like are culprits enough. The previous chapter ended on such a note of finality that I felt it best to let it lie there for a time rather than do so later. But with the chapter below, we are truly beginning the last stages of this story. In my mind, this story was divided into five "arcs", and this is the beginning of the fifth and final arc. We move now towards the conclusion of our story, and while the end is not yet upon us, I wish here to thank everyone who has read this story to-date, whether they have done so from the beginning, or started partway through. I'm sure by now it's redundant for me to say this, but if you have any opinions at all, of this or of the previous story, please leave me a review, be it ever so brief.

One final note before we begin again. A reader left me a review in recent days but did so anonymously, and thus I could not respond to them as is my custom. Accordingly, I enclose my reply herein: "Thank you so much for your generous review, and your time in having read this story. And as to that which you enclosed, I can say only Parva Scintilla Saepi Magnam Flamem Excitat"

_A small spark often ignites a large flame._

* * *

**Chapter 33: Prisoners of Time**

_"When you are at the end of your rope, tie a knot in it, and hang on."_

- Franklin D. Roosevelt

**O-O-O**

The earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

The sterile ruins of the city once called Jump had nothing to distinguish them from the rest of the burnt, smoke-swaddled planet they sat upon. Shrouded in fire, fumes, and ash, its buildings and skyscrapers seemed to huddle together under the magenta skies, like the weary survivors of some disaster. Dotted amongst the buildings, statues of men, women, and children stood, lay, or sat in every possible position, most of them wearing expressions of pain or terror. The hot, dry winds from the sea of fire to the west listlessly stirred the dust about the figures as they watched silently over the lifeless remnants of their cursed city.

Such was the setting when Beast Boy awoke.

He did not know how long he had been awake for, nor even that he _was_ awake. He did not remember waking up, nor passing out. The last thing he recalled was being in the ruins of the Library as Trigon's raging powers swept over him. It might have been ten minutes before he awoke again. It might have been ten years.

He was laying on his back on hard ground, asphalt or concrete or some other artificial material, and the rocks digging into his back hurt, and let him know that he was alive. For an eternity, for a glacial epoch, that was the limit of his understanding. All that had transpired, all the bloodshed and fighting, the tears and death and defeat piled on crushing defeat, such things were distant memories without the power to harm, recollections without meaning filed away in a book somewhere and forgotten. For an age he lay alone and motionless on the streets of the dead city, still like the petrified corpses around him, and thought not, and saw not, and felt not, and it wasn't until the smell struck him that he began to wake up.

Beast Boy's olfactory senses were those of a bloodhound, and what anyone else might have detected as a weak tinge in the air, hit him like a chemical weapon had been thrown into his face. A strong, powerful stench, like rotten eggs, galvanized his fragmented mind and cast him back into reality. He coughed, doubling over on the ground, wretched as his throat tried to expel the non-existent contents of his stomach. Gasping for air, and finding only noxious fumes, he opened his eyes involuntarily and saw animate darkness.

A shield, an opaque, black energy shield, was shrouding him like a tent, a hemisphere of dark force that he recognized instantly, and the shock of recognition was enough to stop his lungs from spasming. Even as he watched, the shield quivered in the wind, unraveling at its edges to admit the fetid air of the burning, dead city outside. In a matter of seconds it boiled away into nothingness, leaving Beast Boy curled in the middle of the street, all alone in the ethereal firelight.

He stirred then slowly, sitting up and coughing as his nose and lungs adjusted the sulfurous haze that pervaded the area. It hurt to breathe, stung his face like pepper spray, but plainly it wasn't actually poisonous, and before too long, he had recovered enough of an equilibrium to stand up, one gloved hand automatically reaching to the back of his head as he surveyed his surroundings.

"... dude..."

Around him stood the city, dark buildings crowded overhead and around, their windows cracked and drifts of ash piled in their corners and doorways. A flattened, nuclear wasteland would have been bad enough, this was a scene of abandonment and despair, as though Jump had been deserted by her inhabitants and leaders, and left desolate for a thousand years. He felt like he was standing in a lost city, on another planet, transported into an episode of the Twilight Zone or one of Control Freak's lunatic fantasies, anywhere but home.

But that wasn't the worst part.

The bodies were everywhere, not strewn about dead, but frozen; stone statues of men, women, children, scattered all over the street and buckled into warped and broken cars. Lifelike expressions of exquisite detail were frozen onto their features, fear, anguish, panic, their arms petrified in the act of shielding themselves or their loved ones. Worse, almost, than the street-turned-cemetery before him was the smell, or rather the lack thereof. Sulfur there was in abundance, and the pungent odor of volcanic minerals, yet beneath it there was nothing. No trace of any living smells, not of birds or animals, not of flowers, trees, cut grass, not of the millions of people who had called this place home. What to the others might have been un-noticeable was to Beast Boy as stark as the difference between thunder and silence. He could smell no living things, nor even dead ones. Save for himself, the city was as empty as the surface of the moon.

He felt... he felt drained. Empty. His world burnt, his friends all dead... these were things he could not process or react to. He fell to his knees in the street, head bowed, hands limp at his sides, and shut his eyes against the horror without. It didn't help. All he could see was horror within. He saw David, helpless, stripped of his powers, screaming as he was converted to stone like the rest of the city. He saw Raven encased in a glowing sphere of energy that swelled and grew to swallow her whole. He felt the steel grip of Cyborg's hand on his shoulder until a force unfathomable finally tore it away. He heard the rustling of wings as...

... wait.

His ears pricked, he raised his head and half-turned, back to where a dozen burnt-out cars were stacked like cordwood up against a shattered storefront. The firelight played tricks with his eyes, but he had heard something, he was certain of it, something other than the roar of flames and the whistling of winds. Carefully he took a step towards the stacked wrecks, and was rewarded with movement.

A bird, a small bird, pitch black but for red eyes like smoldering coals, fluttered up from behind the cars, landing atop them and freezing as still as a statue. It made no sound, gave no evidence for what it was doing there, but as far as Beast Boy could tell, it was the only living thing left on the planet besides himself. And his mind was so addled by the revelation that it took him a good ten seconds before he realized what kind of bird it was.

"R... Raven?"

As if by cue, the bird leaped into the air in a flurry of wings, spinning about and flying away . Beast Boy stood dumbstruck for a brief moment, then ran after it. "Wait!" he called, but the bird took no notice, flying up and around the corner and vanishing behind a department store.

Leaping into the air, Beast Boy took the form of a hawk and sped after it, rounding the corner and lancing down the street like a fired arrow, flaying at the dessicated air with his wings. ahead the raven flitted and danced, seemingly dawdling, yet effortlessly matching and exceeding his speed. He shifted forms again and again to faster and faster birds, teal, merganser, frigatebird, swift, yet no matter what form he took, or how fast he flew, still the black bird ahead of him seemed to pace him with ease, floating away like a feather borne on the wind, perpetually out of reach and receding into the distance.

Ahead loomed a spire, once a luxury hotel, now charred black and bent in ruin. The revolving restaurant at its pinnacle hung like an ornament on a dying Christmas tree, twisted and gutted by fire. With a shock, Beast Boy realized that he had been here before, in this place, in this form. Weeks ago it had been, yet it seemed like years, when Slade had first returned and chased Raven to this tower, before letting her fall. He had caught her then, in the nick of time, but no matter how hard he pumped his wings, lightning adamantly refused to strike twice. Clawing for altitude, he could only watch as the bird flew up and over the lip of the rooftop, vanishing from view.

Seconds later, Beast Boy burst onto the roof himself, but it was too late.

The restaurant's roof had been peeled back like a can of sardines, jagged fragments of still-smoking metal twisted into the sky like an abstract sculpture. The restaurant itself was a blackened ash heap, soot layered a foot deep around the sprawling, clumped statuary that had once been patrons, waiters, or chefs. Despite the fact that he had seen the bird fly out of sight over the lip of this roof, there was no sign to be seen of it, nor of anything else living. He alighted on the rooftop, resumed his human form, sniffed, listened, searched desperately with his eyes, but there was no sign of any other living thing, just ashes, death, and the sundered remnants of a once-living city.

Bent though it was, the hotel was still one of the tallest structures in Jump, and from up here, on a good day, the entire city could be seen. This was not a good day in so many ways, and the fires and smoke conspired to shroud much of Jump, yet much of it could still be seen. The skyscrapers of the burnt city loomed upwards like the fingers of damned souls stretching for the heavens, dark and misshapen, twisted on their foundations, some with cruel rents torn in them from which black smoke issued. To the north, Jump City Bay burned, now a lake of radiant fire, and through the mists could be made out the form of Titans Tower itself, canted to one side and half-melted to slag, yet still distinctive enough to catch the eye. A vast, dark shape reclined upon it, as though the Tower were a crucifix to which was affixed some dark messiah. As Beast Boy watched, the shape undulated and shimmered in a wholly alien fashion, and he tore his eyes away from it, and collapsed onto the roof on his hands and knees.

He didn't know what to do.

He wasn't prepared at this juncture to consider the question of why he was still alive, and failing that, he didn't know what to do at all, nor even what things he might consider doing, the last living thing on this burnt cinder of a planet, save for the architect of its demise. Everywhere he looked, he saw death, and even when he shut his eyes the smell and sound and presence of death invaded his consciousness. Half-remembered stories from science fiction comic books and magazines flooded back to his memory, the ones from the anthologies that Raven read and that he occasionally "borrowed" from her, ones that ended as often as not with the hero at the mercy of some god-like alien or insane defense computer that tortured them for all time by forcing them to view the destruction of the world forever. Idly, he wondered if that was to be his fate, if Trigon or someone else had specifically picked him alone to be tormented through the ages by witnessing the handiwork of his ascension. It was a thought that should have scared him to death, except that thinking about Raven's books reminded him that Raven, like the others, was dead, and that thought robbed him of his capacity to feel anything. He knelt on the side of the roof, oblivious to everything, and simply sat.

He might have sat there forever, save that right then, without the giving the slightest sign of prior instability, the remains of the roof of the damaged restaurant suddenly caved in.

Before he knew what was happening, he was falling, and before he realized that he was falling, he had landed, flat on his back, inside the restaurant, shrouded in a cloud of dust and ash. Coughing, he tried to get back to his feet, but debris from the collapsing roof landed upon him, broken beams and piles of loose plaster that knocked him back onto the ground. Half-consciously, he tried to shift into a smaller form, an insect perhaps or a rodent, but his mind was sluggish, and before he could even begin to muster the wherewithal to do so, the entire roof came loose from its moorings and collapsed inwards on top of him.

But it didn't hit.

He closed his eyes reflexively, and heard the screech of metal on metal, but nothing landed on him, and when he opened his eyes again, he saw the collapsed roof suspended two feet above his face. There was the sound of mechanical servos, and then suddenly the entire roof, girders, tiles and all, was hurled up and out of the restaurant, flying off into the distance. And before Beast Boy could even begin to register what had happened, a metal arm the size of a cannon grabbed him by the arm and pulled him free of the debris he had landed amidst. The next thing Beast Boy knew, he was looking up at a familiar face, covered in soot, ash, and God-knew what else, and listening to a voice he had been absolutely certain a moment ago that he would never hear again.

"Gotcha, grass-stain."

It was as though a faerie godmother had suddenly waved a magic wand over his head and commanded him to feel better. Not in ten thousand years had he considered the possibility that anyone besides himself had survived, and the relief was so _stark_ that for what was probably the first time ever, Beast Boy was struck dumb. It didn't last. After a few seconds of silence, his mouth started working on its own accord.

"_Dude!_" he exclaimed, his voice flabbergasted. "You're... I mean are you..."

"I'm all right, man," said Cyborg, giving him a weary grin and laying a heavy, metal hand on his head. "_Goddamn_, am I glad to see you."

Beast Boy had no chance to answer before someone practically crushed him to death from behind, squeezing him so hard that he subconsciously shifted into the gelatinous form of an octopus to avoid organ damage. He knew who it was without looking, and despite the crush, his guts loosened a notch at the realization, even before he heard Starfire's voice. "Beast Boy," she said, as though speaking his name made him real, "you are unharmed."

He couldn't respond, not without lungs, and by the time she released him, and he had resumed his normal form, Cyborg had cleared out a space in the middle of the restaurant for them to sit down, awkwardly moving several of the petrified patrons aside.

"I saw something," said Beast Boy as Cyborg settled himself down on the floor. "Out in the city. I thought it was..." he let the sentence trail off, but Cyborg and Starfire glanced at one another, understanding wordlessly.

"I believe I saw it as well," said Starfire. "It was... a black bird of some type."

"It led all of us here," said Cyborg quietly.

"But, how is this possible?" said Starfire, kneeling down next to Cyborg and Beast Boy, the three of them forming a rough circle in the dim light. "The others were... were destroyed, were they not?" she asked, looking from face to soot-streaked face. "How is it that _we _survived?"

"It was Raven," said Beast Boy. "It had to have been. She must have... saved us somehow."

Cyborg nodded softly, his head hanging low, as though oppressed by a great weight. "Back at the Tower," he said "when she knocked us all out... she just put me to sleep. She didn't shut down my mechanical systems. My audio recorders picked this up."

There was a soft burst of static, and then a playback, grainy and muffled though it was, of a voice that could only be Raven's. Beast Boy winced and shuddered, and Starfire put a comforting arm around his shoulders as the playback spoke only three words.

"Goodbye," said Raven. "Be safe."

Cyborg shut off the recording. "She did something," he said. "Shielded us from her father somehow." He sighed, long and slow, his head shaking back and forth in a ponderous sway. "Most of us, at least."

The three of them sat in silence for a time, before Beast Boy ventured to break it. "What..." he asked. "What do we do now?"

"There's nothin' _to_ do," answered Cyborg, bitterly, his hands clenching into metal balls, as though he were preparing to punch through a wall. "The whole damn world's toast. There's nothing left."

Starfire lowered her head. "Robin... would not wish for us to give up," she said. "He would..."

"Robin's dead," said Cyborg, silencing Starfire in a heartbeat. "Raven's dead. David's dead, _everybody's_ dead." He looked at Starfire and shook his head, as though in disbelief. "What the hell _can_ we do now? Nothing we tried to do made a goddamn bit of difference. Everybody died anyway."

"I will _not_ believe that our efforts have been wholly in vain," said Starfire, voice quivering like a steel razor. "So long as we are alive, we can continue to fight against Trigon."

With visible difficulty, Cyborg managed to retain his equilibrium. "Everybody I dragged into this is _dead_ Star. Jinx, David, the rest of the Hive, even JCPD. And what's it gotten us? What'd it get _them_?"

Starfire opened her mouth to respond, then plainly thought better of it, and paused for several seconds before answering. "You are our leader now, Cyborg," she said, "what would you have us do?"

"I don't _know_, Star!" snapped Cyborg, and immediately he grimaced and smashed his hand into the ground he was sitting on, hard enough to gouge a divot. "I don't know what the hell to do now. I didn't know what to do before, I just made up like I thought..." He did not say what it was that he had thought, but Starfire seemed to understand.

"We have _no choice_ but to fight on," said Starfire. "Even if we fled this planet now, Trigon would surely follow us."

"We should never have fought in the first place," said Cyborg, shaking his head. "I should have listened to Raven. I should have listened to my own common sense. But _no_, I had to get all obsessed with being the big man who was gonna stop it all from happenin'. I let this whole goddamn thing happen because I was too _stupid_ to - "

Beast Boy stood up.

Instantly Cyborg and Starfire fell silent, their argument momentarily forgotten as they watched him get up, and take a few steps away, walking over to the shattered window that overlooked the rest of Jump City. He could feel the stares of the others on his back, as though they expected him to deliver some sort of motivational speech or something, but he had no such intent or capacity. He didn't know what to do, nor what to say, nor did he have the heart to decide on such a thing, not presently.

He stood at the window for a minute or so, quietly, watching the burning city below him, and said nothing, lost in thought. It wasn't until Cyborg gently brought him back to reality that he even gave word to what he was thinking.

"... BB?" asked Cyborg, his voice calm once more, and concerned. Beast Boy closed his eyes but did not turn around.

"I just can't believe they're dead."

Starfire and Cyborg glanced wordlessly at one another. "Look," said Cyborg, "man..."

"I know we all saw them die," said Beast Boy, turning back. "All of them. But... it just doesn't... it doesn't feel like they're gone, you know? Especially..."

He trailed off, but the others did not need to ask who he had been about to name.

Slowly, Cyborg stood up, and walked over towards Beast Boy. "BB," he said. "I... I know this is hard, but she's... Raven's gone man. They're all gone. We gotta..." his throat caught and he paused to ensure that he would remain in control. "We gotta move on."

Beast Boy turned back to the window, his eyes downcast. "I know," he said. "It... I can't explain it dude, it just... it feels like Raven's still... here. Somehow."

Cyborg might have responded with any number of things. He might have tried to be consoling or hard-headed and realistic. He might have even agreed with Beast Boy. But he did not get to say any of the things he might have said, for no sooner had Beast Boy postulated this, than a voice that every one of the Titans prayed daily that they would never hear again, answered him.

"I can only speculate," came the voice, low and sinister, yet instantly recognizable to all three of the Titans, "but that might be because she is."

All three Titans froze for a second or so, and then turned to the source of the comment, some quickly, some slowly. Only once all three of them were on their feet, facing him, did the speaker slowly step into the light from the secluded shadows he had occupied previously.

"Unfortunately," said Slade as he stepped into the light, "at this point, Raven no longer matters in the slightest..."

**O-O-O**

The library was burning.

No sirens greeted another burning building in a world made of fire and ash. No tears were shed for the books incinerated, nor the tapestries and paintings that had lined its walls. Its flames cast shadows across the darkened ruins that surrounded it, flames fueled by nothing more than malice, for all fuel had long since been extinguished, and all that was left was the malevolent hate that had spawned this cataclysm. All across the planet, buildings such as the library burned, but none of them had served as ground zero for the end of the world.

The library had.

Around the library, death-fires danced in the murky twilight, the orange-red forms of Trigon's servants, magma demons of flame and hatred, swirling about like marionettes. Inheritors of the doomed world, they danced in the darkness, awaiting the commands of their risen lord, who even now gathered his strength upon a melted cross writ in glowing iron. They danced through the fires and ruin of the world of men, for their sole animation was the will of their creator, and his pleasure was theirs. They danced for victory and the triumph of Trigon the Terrible, danced at the ruination of the Earth, danced in delight at the slaughter they had wrought, and that which they would enact hereafter. About, about, in reel and rout, they danced that fiery night, swimming through the ash-choked air like a river of ambrosia, exultant, victorious, triumphant.

All throughout the building, and the city that surrounded it, the demons danced, alone, in armies, or in small groups, swirling through the air like ghosts. Through one chamber in the Library, the center of Trigon's victory, three such demons flew. The chamber had, at one time, been an underground storage facility, cavernous in size, used to store the library's exhaustive collection of periodicals, microfilmed newspapers, graphic novels, and trade paperbacks. The collection was gone now, ravaged with fire and burnt to ash, and the empty shelves and broken lights alone bore witness as the three demons spun and flew along the stacks, their passing disturbing the piles of ash that were all that remained of what had once been one of the foremost collections of the works of man, like their creators, ended forever.

And perhaps, in their mirth and rapture, the demons grew careless or clumsy, for as the three of them rounded a corner, something, perhaps their passing, perhaps the traumas of fire and devastation, disturbed one of the four-ton metal stacks that they were flying past, and it toppled all at once, landing atop one of the demons and smashing it to paste.

The other two paused in their rapturous flight, not out of concern for their fellow, for like their master, they knew no such thing. Rather they paused as any onlooker would from the unexpected nature of the thing that had happened, and to ascertain for themselves that such a fate was not about to befall them all. They turned and stared at the starkly empty shelves, like withered trees stripped of leaves, searching for any sign of instability amidst the soft groans of the chamber they were in and the shelving they were amidst.

It turned out to be a bad idea. All at once, with no sign or signal that anything was the matter, a block of stone the size of a delivery van fell from the ceiling like an enormous hydraulic piston, landing square atop one of the demons who scarcely had a chance to hiss in anger before it was summarily crushed like a wine grape.

The last demon now perceived a threat in what passed for its mind, and took to the air as another, similar-sized block fell from the ceiling aimed its way. This one missed by inches, shattering against the stone floor, and the demon flew up, towards the ceiling itself, howling like a damned soul, searching for its unknown assailant. The flames coating its body burst into riots of yellow and orange, casting flickering light over the room, yet the shadows played with the corrupt thing's diseased imagination, and no pattern or assailant could it discern.

Then it heard a noise from behind, the sound of rocks clashing against one another like giant castanets, and it spun round to see that the entire rear half of the chamber was progressively collapsing, as though leveled by an earthquake. Rocks and tons of loose soil fell from the ceiling in a waterfall, utterly destroying everything in their path. Section by section, the room collapsed like a chain reaction, trapping the demon with nowhere to flee to. And despite the violence, behind the cascading debris and the waves of sundered rock and masonry, somewhere beyond it all, in the darkest corner of the room, the demon perceived, just for the briefest instant, a soft flash of gold...

An instant later the entire room imploded, and the demon was crushed to nothingness. And then there was only silence.

**O-O-O**

Starfire shot Slade before Cyborg had a chance to decide whether to do the same.

A starbolt, white-hot and fueled by matchless Tamaranean fury, slammed into the bridge of Slade's nose, and felled him like a tree before a lumberjack an instant before Beast Boy smashed into him horn-first in the form of a rhinoceros, driving Slade into, and nearly through the wall. Cyborg's arm shifted into a cannon, and he waited for Slade to free himself from Beast Boy's clutches so as to nail him with the sonic beam, but Slade did no such thing, sustaining blow after blow as Beast Boy and Starfire tore into him. Before long, the wall behind Slade gave way entirely, spilling the supervillain backwards into what had once been the restaurant's kitchen. Even then, Beast Boy was not finished, hurling Slade into the air with his horn like a rag doll before spinning around, shifting seamlessly into a horse, and firing a double-barrelled kick from his hind legs into Slade, still in mid-air. Slade was hurled through several tables and oven racks before fetching up on the opposite wall against a dishwasher, which itself was blown to pieces when Starfire hurled another starbolt to meet him as he slid down to the floor.

Slade landed on the ground in a smoldering heap, but Cyborg grabbed Starfire's arm before she could hurtle after him to deliver yet more punishment. Beast Boy resumed human form as Cyborg stepped through the hole in the wall, flanked by his two teammates, his cannon locked on Slade's ravaged form. Slade lifted his head, and slowly got to his feet, but no flames did he conjure, no attempts did he make to counterattack. He stood up carefully, sending cascades of debris rolling off his blemishless surface, and faced the three Titans with equanimity.

Starfire moved to meet him with further punishment, but Cyborg tightened his hold on her shoulder, and she desisted, for the moment, in gainsaying his signal. "What's the matter, Slade?" asked Cyborg, perceiving something the matter but unable to tell what. "Givin' up already?"

Slade laughed bitterly as he brushed the ash and rubbed off of his shoulders and arms. "So sorry to disappoint," he said, "but I'm not here to fight."

"Then what the hell _are_ you here for?" asked Cyborg.

"Among other things," said Slade, "to have a question answered."

"We're not interested in your questions," spat Beast Boy bitterly at Slade. "We've got work to do."

"Yes, of course," responded Slade, his voice smooth and collected. "I forgot, you've a planet to rescue from the flames, a devil to destroy, an army of demons to defeat, and several billion people to bring back from the dead, all without the first idea of how to go about doing it. Have I missed anything?"

The mockery was hardly subtle, and Cyborg saw Beast Boy's face flush the darker shade of green he always went whenever he was lividly angry. He did not however get the chance to take his aggression out, for however angry he was, Starfire was moreso.

"_Murderer!_" she shouted, and she tore free of Cyborg's grasp, striding purposefully towards Slade with her fists sheathed in green energy. "_Vile betrayer!_ You _dare _dishonor our friends with your trickery and lies? Be _silent_ or I will _rend you apart_!"

Slade stared at the enraged Tamaranean with equanimity. "You are welcome to try," he said. "And to fail, as you have failed at everything. I cannot die, no matter how much you wish it. Trigon has seen to that."

"_You_ saw to it," retorted Starfire. "_You _planned for this all along! This was _your _handiwork!"

To Cyborg's surprise, rather than laugh, or attack, or even respond to Starfire's accusation with his usual dismissive sarcasm, Slade seemed to stiffen. His body went rigid, just slightly, and a hesitation visible even through his featureless mask came over him. When he responded, his voice was as calm and detached as ever, yet just _slightly_ lower in tone, more serious than it had been.

"Think what you like of me," said Slade, "but what Trigon did, even I would not wish on this world."

Starfire stopped before Slade, plainly unmollified, staring daggers up at the larger criminal. Cyborg advanced until he was next to her, and laid a hand on her shoulder, even as Beast Boy moved around them all to the side.

"It's a little late for 'I'm sorry'," said Cyborg.

"You mistake me, Cyborg," replied Slade, not taking his eye off Starfire. "I am not expressing regret. I am here because it suits me to be and for no other reason."

"Then talk," said Beast Boy, crossing his arms. "You said Raven was still alive. What did you mean?"

"No," said Slade, reciprocating the gesture. "I will tell you nothing, until you answer a question of mine."

"And what's that?" asked Cyborg.

"Is Robin actually dead?"

The three Titans blinked, glancing at one another in puzzlement at the question. "Are you _serious_?" asked Cyborg. "Did you miss the funeral?"

"A funeral means _nothing_," said Slade, with absolute conviction. "Robin once pretended to be a criminal at my behest for weeks so as to protect the rest of you, and heroes have a pronounced tendancy to treat death as a temporary state of affairs, as I'm sure all of you have noticed. Raven appears to be dead, and is not fully so. The same could easily be true of Robin, now answer my question."

Neither Starfire nor Beast Boy could answer that coherently, but Cyborg could and did. "He's dead," he said, his voice a low whisper. "Warp shot him through the heart with a railgun. He died in Star's arms." At Cyborg's side, Starfire shuddered visibly and lowered her head, and Cyborg squeezed her shoulder tightly. "Does that answer your damn question?"

To Cyborg's surprise however, to all of their surprises, Slade reacted to the news by taking a long, deep breath, and letting it out equally slowly. With infinite care, he stepped over to a low counter and sat down upon it, his eye narrowed, saying nothing.

"You helped to kill Robin," said Starfire, her eyes wet with tears. "Do you now expect us to believe that you wish he was not dead?"

"This may sound rather strange to you," said Slade, "but yes, I would prefer that, at this stage. It likely would not make a difference, but at least there would be a... _theoretical_ possibility."

"A possibility of what?" asked Cyborg.

"Of stopping Trigon, fool," said Slade, lathering his words with sarcasm, though still refusing to raise his voice a single decibel. "What precisely did you think we were discussing? The weather?"

"You _helped_ Trigon!" said Cyborg. "Every step of the goddamn - "

"Wait," said Beast Boy, and Cyborg and Slade both fell silent as he approached. "We answered your question. You said before that Raven was still alive. Is that true?"

"In a manner of speaking," said Slade, "yes."

"But - " said Starfire, "but we _saw_ Raven become the portal. She was destroyed!"

Slade nodded. "Raven has fulfilled the prophecy of her birth," he said. "That part of her existence is complete. But another part still remains," he shook his head and groaned softly. "For the moment."

That was all Beast Boy needed to hear. "Then we've... we've gotta go get her!" he exclaimed. "We've gotta bring her back, somehow!"

"You can't," said Slade simply.

"Why not?" demanded Beast Boy.

"Because Warp has made _certain _that you cannot," said Slade. "He knew that you would try to recover Raven in some way, and took steps to ensure that you would fail; just as he knew that you would try to fight Trigon's army off in a last stand at your Tower; just as he knew how you would respond to my provocations at the library and the bottling plant; just as he knew that you would be coming back from your confrontation with Brother Blood through Yellowstone Park right when you were; just as he has known, in advance, _every single thing_ you have done and will do."

The vehemence with which Slade insisted on this point took all three Titans aback. "How the hell would he know what we're gonna do?" asked Cyborg

"Because," said Slade, "it's exactly what you did the last time this happened."

Dead silence followed this remark as the Titans blinked wordlessly at one another. As before, Cyborg was the one to ask the question they all were thinking.

"What are you saying?" he asked, apprehension palpable in his voice, as though he were afraid of what the answer might be.

Slade however only sighed in what sounded like resignation, and slowly shook his head.

"I am saying, Cyborg," said Slade, "that this was all supposed to be different..."

**O-O-O**

Prior to this year, the corridors beneath the library had been unused for over a century, the relics of some forgotten cult of Trigon worshipers that pre-dated the foundation of Jump City itself. Layers of dust only partly disturbed by the Titans in their exertions and battles with Slade or the minions of Trigon lay draped over everything. So it was, that when one of the demons patrolling the lower corridors found a disturbance in the dust, its brain, ganglia, or whatever center of thought it possessed, directed it to investigate.

The disturbance was not footprints, not precisely at least, it was merely a disturbance, uniform yet scraggly, as though someone had made a half-hearted attempt to sweep the dust aside with a broom, and then abandoned the effort after a few paltry strokes. Intermittently the pattern was repeated, every forty or fifty feet or so, accompanied by strange divots that had been carved in the floor or walls or even ceiling. What these represented was unknown to the flame demon, who merely paused every so often to note their existence, before continuing to wend its way down the corridor, its molten body sizzling as it brushed against the cold stone walls.

Bare minutes after it had begun its search, the flame demon emerged into an antechamber ringed with carven statues in forms bestial and grotesque. The dust here had been disturbed far more violently than before, and actual footprints could be discerned, sliding and slipping over the cobbled stones. Divots there were in abundance in the floor and walls, and fragments of rock scattered about where said divots had come to rest. Yet none of these things attracted the demon's attention so much as that which lay in the center of the room.

There, on the floor, lay the smashed remains of at least two more flame demons. It could be determined that there were at least two, for the remains were too extensive for it to have been only one, yet beyond that nothing more could be said. They had been violently destroyed, as though the fist of Trigon itself had descended through the ceiling and crushed them to molten jelly without leaving any trace of its passing. Whatever had done this had to be extensive, for demons of Trigon were not struck down easily, much less crushed out of all shape, yet the agents or means of this violent assault were not apparent. No wreckage or fallen column was visible to show what had occurred or how it had come to pass.

Then something landed on its head.

It was a droplet, nothing more, a single droplet of liquid sulfur. The demon inclined its headless torso upwards to gaze at the ceiling of the room it stood in, seeking the source, and found it. There, on the blocks of solid granite that lined the ceiling of the chamber, a gooey mess of superheated sulfur and mineral rock lay splattered over the ceiling as though some demonic mosquito had been crushed there. Though the conclusion was perhaps obvious, the demon's thought organ took an inordinately long time to determine what had transpired.

And by then it was too late.

Suddenly the demon was moving, air rushing past it in a torrent, though it was confused, for it had not taken flight. And as it lifted its head to gaze once more at the splatter on the ceiling, it saw the ceiling itself racing towards it like an oncoming train.

**O-O-O**

"Trigon's ascension was always inevitable."

The Titans stood in a semi-circle around Slade, Beast Boy crouched atop an overturned steel refrigerator, as Slade explained himself.

"Raven was created to provide the mechanism for Trigon's re-birth into the world. Her destiny was set before she was even born, and so long as that destiny was fulfilled, Trigon did not concern himself with what else she might do. The prophecy itself was absolute, and so Trigon assumed that it didn't matter what Raven did with her life prior to fulfilling it. It never even occurred to him that someone might contest his coming _after_ he had arisen, nor that some element of Raven might survive her becoming the portal."

"As it turned out, this was something of a major oversight."

"Trigon's disdain for mortals did not equip him with a particularly accurate view of them. As a being comprised of pure evil, he has no understanding of anything but the dark sides of what we call human nature. He interpreted your attempts to defend Raven as motivated solely by self-defense, and your opposition to him after the end as nothing more than spite. Not until it was far too late did he appreciate the danger he was in, and by then there was nothing he could do to stop you."

"While the three of you held Trigon's attention fixed on yourselves, Robin and I were able to locate and retrieve what elements of Raven still remained. Raven then unleashed her full power against her own father, negating his presence on the planet, and utterly destroyed him and all his works. In doing so, she reversed his destruction of the Earth, and restored it to its pre-Trigon state, along with all of its inhabitants."

Slade paused, letting the story sink in to the three Titans, who watched him in silence, periodically casting glances at one another in wordless conference.

"What are you saying?" asked Cyborg. "Is that what's gonna happen?"

"No," said Slade, "That is what _should_ have happened. To the best of my understanding, it is what _would_ be happening right this moment if Warp hadn't interfered."

"What do you mean, 'interfered'?" asked Beast Boy.

Slade answered with another question. "What do you know of Warp?" he asked.

Starfire was still staring resolutely at the floor, and said nothing. "He was a time traveler," said Cyborg, covering for her. "Said he came from a hundred years in the future or somethin'. He came back about a year and a half ago, tryin' to steal some artifacts from the Jump City Museum. We fought him, and his time machine got damaged in the fight. He and Star got pulled ahead twenty years into the future."

"Not _the_ future," chimed in Starfire, still refusing to raise her head even as Beast Boy slid over to her and put a comforting hand on her shoulder. "_A_ future. One where I no longer existed, and the others had... ceased to associate with one another." She shut her eyes tightly as Cyborg finished the tale.

"Whatever it was," said Cyborg, "Star managed to get back to our time. Warp didn't."

"There was a battle," said Starfire. "Warp attempted to flee back to his time, but his time machine was further damaged, and it reverted him to the age of an infant. I left him in the care of the Titans of that time, and the portal he had created took me back here." She looked up at last. "Until the day with... Robin, that was the last I ever saw of him."

Slade said nothing, merely narrowing his eye as Starfire followed up. "What is Warp _doing_ here?" she said, finally raising her head. "What does he _want_? He was a... a _thief_, not a servant of Devils."

"He's no servant," said Slade.

"He _killed_ Robin," spat Cyborg. "You just said he's been 'interfering' this whole time. He's working for Trigon!"

"But not as a servant," replied Slade, deadpan as ever. "I am Trigon's servant, or at least I was. Cinderblock was Trigon's servant. Warp is no servant. He was a full partner."

"What do you mean?" asked Starfire.

"It's a dangerous game, making deals with the devil," said Slade. "I happen to know that much from experience. But it helps immeasurably if you have two things on your side. The same interests as the devil, and something to offer besides mere servitude. Warp had both. He was prepared to support Trigon's goal of annihilating the Earth, and he had the means to permit Trigon to do just that without being destroyed by his daughter in the immediate aftermath. It was a trivial matter for him to go to Trigon and make a deal."

"Wait a minute," interrupted Cyborg, "you're saying _he_ approached _Trigon_?"

"Yes," said Slade. "Warp had the advantage of knowing what was going to happen in advance. To him, this entire situation is ancient history. He knew that Trigon would arise, and when. He knew what would happen when he did. Where he was from, he could simply open a history book to learn that much."

Slade paused. "But more than that, Warp managed to find a way to ensure that it would turn out differently."

"How?" asked Beast Boy.

Slade's eye narrowed, not in anger but amusement. It was possible to picture the sly grin on his masked features as he answered. "David."

The name landed like a leaden weight. Nobody spoke. Nobody even moved. Slade permitted himself a dark chuckle as he continued.

"David was right about one thing," said Slade. "He was never meant to be involved in any of this. In the original history of this affair, you and he never even met. Matters moved towards Trigon's ascension without him participating, and the battles and events he participated in either did not occur at all, or occurred without his involvement. This entire sequence of events, everything that happened between Cinderblock's attack on the orphanage, up to this very day, all of it has been one gigantic divergence from the natural course of things. And the catalyst for this divergence, the agent of the changes in play here... was David."

Silence reigned within the restaurant for a good long while, before Beast Boy alone found the means to speak.

"I don't believe it..." he said, in tones that supported the claim. "There's... there's no _way_ that David was working with Warp this whole time."

Slade laughed, a deep, booming laugh that echoed in the silent streets below. "Well of course he wasn't," he said. "David was never anything other than what he appeared to be, that was the point. Warp didn't need a spy, he already knew what was going to happen. All he needed was to be able to predict what you Titans would do when placed in a given situation. And I'll admit, he was able to do that _flawlessly_."

"He contrived to have David transferred to the foster facility in Jump City. He then sent Cinderblock to attack it, knowing that you would respond and bring him back to your Tower, where, lo and behold, you would discover that he was a Metahuman. He also knew that once you had made that discovery, it was only a matter of time. This was, after all, only shortly after the... 'incident'... with Terra. He knew Robin well, better than I did when I tried to conscript him as my apprentice. He knew that eventually, as long as he prevented David from leaving the Tower, Robin would inevitably try once again to create an apprentice of his own." Slade chuckled darkly. "I suppose he and I had that in common. He also knew that David didn't have the strength of will to turn Robin down. And once Robin and the rest of you had decided to bring David onto your little team, he knew that it would no longer be necessary to ensure that he didn't leave it."

"He did all of this, just to ensure that David would remain with us?" asked Starfire

"No," said Slade. "That was merely the means to an end. His goal was to ensure that when Trigon arose, David would be on-hand for the event."

"Then why go through all that?" asked Cyborg. "Why not just... I dunno... _kidnap_ him or somethin'? Why would Warp wanna make him one of _us _if he just planned to drag him in front of Trigon?"

"Two reasons," replied Slade. "One was that he felt the most effective way of guaranteeing that David would be on-hand for the apocalypse was if he was one of those appointed to prevent it. If he'd simply kidnapped him, the police and FBI would have become involved, if not other heroes. He wished to take no risks of some lucky costumed do-gooder spoiling the end of the universe by tracking him down prematurely. Why do that when you can have Robin and the rest of you do his work for him?"

Slade paused a moment before continuing. "But the other reason was that Warp didn't do all this in a vacuum. This is, for him, an entirely personal matter, and you are the subjects of his ire. He did not simply want to destroy the universe. He wanted you to get to know the agent of that destruction, to make him one of your own, and then kill him in front of your eyes and let you all watch the world burn thanks to your own compassion."

Starfire and Beast Boy said nothing, their stares hollow as the chilling logic was spelled out item by item. Cyborg alone managed to retain the wherewithal to speak.

"So where do _you _fit in?" he asked.

Slade did not answer immediately, sitting down on a banister, crossing his arms and emitting a long, exasperated sigh. "Simply put, I learned of this plan of Warp's," he finally said. And I tried to stop it."

"You tried to _stop _it?" asked Cyborg, raising an eyebrow. "We're s'possed to believe that?"

"You can believe whatever you like," said Slade. "But a ruined wasteland is not exactly my choice of homes. And as I'm sure you've noticed, I don't enjoy playing second fiddle to anyone."

Whether satisfied or no, Cyborg made no further objection, and Slade explained.

"To be frank, I was lucky," said Slade. "Warp had done very thorough research to figure out what was supposed to happen, but it was focussed entirely on you Titans. He had no idea that I would ever dare to work against Trigon, or that I thought his plan was insane. Accordingly, he confided the details of it to me, and I was able to attempt to stop it."

"How?" asked Cyborg.

"Killing David of course," responded Slade, his voice as smooth as though he were discussing the weather. "Without David, none of Warp's changes would take place. I reasoned that killing him would allow history to turn out the way it was supposed to, with Trigon destroyed and the world restored to normal.

"So then why did you not do so?" asked Starfire, her voice bitter. "You had opportunities."

"I couldn't," said Slade. "Warp may not have been watching me closely, but Trigon was. As a pledged servant, my actions could be monitored at any time. Normally he didn't bother, but whenever I was near to David, I knew he would be watching. The instant I transitioned from fighting to killing, Trigon would have reduced me to ash."

"Then what did you do?" asked Cyborg.

"What any good manager would," said Slade, "I delegated the task to subordinates."

Beast Boy's eyes widened. "Terra," he whispered.

Slade nodded. "As part of our deal, Trigon infused me with a portion of his powers. Given that Terra was indirectly the one who got me _into_ this situation, I thought it fitting that she be the one to assist me in getting us all out of it. As you have no doubt noticed, Trigon has the power to turn the entire planet to stone. I simply contrived to turn one person back."

"You're lying!" insisted Beast Boy. "She'd never agree to help you! Not again!"

"With the fate of the world at stake?" asked Slade with a laugh. "Whatever she thought of me, Terra saw the wisdom of agreeing to help me stop doomsday."

"She agreed to help you kill David?" asked Beast Boy incredulously.

"Not at first," replied Slade. "She and I still had... unresolved issues. We _did_ kill one another after all, and that is not the sort of thing easily put aside. She agreed to _monitor_ David and the rest of you, but no more. For obvious reasons, David was the only one she could meet in person, and even that was a risk, but I assumed you would not be eager to dredge her memory up." Slade inclined his head to Beast Boy. "Out of sight, out of mind, I suppose."

Beast Boy jumped to his feet and took a step forward, his form already begining to ripple as he prepared to take another shape on, but Cyborg caught his shoulder before he could do anything violent, and the changeling slowly returned to his human form. "What happened to change her mind?" asked Cyborg.

"Many things," said Slade. "After the incident with Adonis, Warp began to get nervous. David was not as enduring as the rest of you, and Warp realized he might well get himself killed through mischance or random attack before Trigon could arise. Accordingly, he decided to implement a backup plan, and struck at the rest of you."

"Yellowstone," said Cyborg.

"Yes. He knew from his histories that you would engage and defeat Brother Blood, and knew that you would return to Jump City via Yellowstone. He set an ambush there, using robots I had left over from my abortive attempt on Jump City. He knew that originally, it had taken all of your combined efforts to stop Trigon once he arose, and reasoned that if he killed some of you, you would no longer be able to stop Trigon no matter what happened to David." Slade paused. "It might even have worked, save that he told me of his plans, and I was able to stop him."

"What?" asked Beast Boy. "You didn't stop him, Raven did!"

"Without me, you would all have assuredly died," said Slade evenly, "with or without Raven's temper tantrum."

"The shells..." said Cyborg. "When those robots attacked us, they were supposed to be firing armor-piercing shells, except that someone loaded them with lead instead of DU, fake armor-piercers. That was _you_, wasn't it?"

"Yes," said Slade. "Much as I would have loved to watch you all die remotely, doing so would not have suited my purposes. I managed to swap the ammunition belts with ones I had doctored. Raven did the rest. But with you all removed from the scene, I decided it was best to attempt to end the threat from David as well."

"Forgive me..." said Starfire, "I do not understand. _Why_ was David of such importance to Warp and to Trigon? What role did he fill in their destruction of this world."

Slade paused, turning his head to Starefire and saying nothing. Moments later, he resumed, speaking as if she had said nothing at all.

"Warp had been employing Cinderblock to ensure that David did not leave Jump City, but as Terra refused to kill David herself, I was forced to re-purpose him. Fortunately, Cinderblock did not have the wit to wonder at why his orders had changed. _Unfortunately_, it appears that David had learned more than I expected. Rather than being killed, David disabled Cinderblock, and instead of finishing him off then and there, Terra got cold feet and ran."

Slade adjusted his seating before continuing his tale. "After Cinderblock's defeat, things became much more dangerous. While David was still no match for any of you, he was clearly improving to the point where minor threats would not do the trick. And while I had managed to stop Warp's first attempt on your lives, the Cinderblock incident had made him suspicious of my motives. I was able to silence Cinderblock before either Warp or Trigon could find out what had caused him to attack David, but that still left me with no weapon to employ, and the clock running out. I had no choice but to have Terra act directly, despite her previous objections. It was only when I made absolutely clear to her that the stakes of killing David were the continued survival of the planet itself, as well as the rest of you, that she agreed to do it. We set up a sting for him using a pair of her old goggles and some Email messages, and took the opportunity of my 'revelation' at the bottling plant once more separate him from the rest of you. Terra was supposed to do the rest."

Despite everything, Cyborg smirked. "But she didn't kill him."

"No," said Slade, darkly. "She didn't. Whether through Raven's actions or her own, Terra failed to accomplish her mission. I tried to get Raven to kill David myself when I met her in the street, but her 'better nature' won out." Slade gave Beast Boy a withering glance before continuing. "Once that was done, it was more or less all over. I had no more agents to use against David, and no way of stopping Warp from trying to kill the rest of you again. By eliminating Robin, Warp all but guaranteed that nobody would be able to take effective action against Trigon. Either Robin's death, or David's survival, would independently have been enough to guarantee Trigon's victory. _Both_ of these things occurred."

Slade leaned back against the wall, placing his hands behind his head like a beachgoer preparing to soak up the rays of the sun.

"The rest, as they say, is history."

**O-O-O**

Ground Zero, the physical epicenter of Trigon's ascent, was empty now, quiet save for the soft wind and the distant crackle of flames. The chamber he had emerged in had once been underground, but was no longer so, for in manifesting physically upon the world, Trigon had sundered the layers of passages and rock above him and burst forth into the open air. Thus the chamber now lay open to the elements, a conical shaft of slagged rock descending hundreds of feet into the ground, where scorched and broken stones lay, surrounding the site of Trigon's emergence onto Earth.

Demons were here, of course, their primitive wills drawn to the taint of Trigon like moths to an open flame. Here and there they ran, their primitive wills set loose by Trigon, who was drinking in the novel experience of being alive, and had no need yet for his servants of sulfur and flame. Some sat idle, lounging in the darkness and the heat of the surrounding fires. Others flew lazy patrols around the room, searching for nothing in particular. Whatever the demons were, whether damned souls bound to Trigon, or extensions of his personal will, they had no purpose while their master brooded on other matters, no goals and desires of their own. Inheritors of the Earth by default, they had no notion of what to do with their inheritance, and so they waited for the time when Trigon would call upon them once more.

High above the floor of the ruined chamber, many dozens of passages terminated in abrupt drops, opening forth into the summoning room like passages in some giant termite hive. Dark and empty, these passages held no attraction to the demons, leading nowhere that they wished to be. On occasion, one would disgorge a demon that had been flying the halls of the former library, who twirled and danced like a mayfly as he rejoined his fellows. Whenever a large enough group congregated, they would clump together in a school and fly up and out into the city at large, leaving a dozen or two of their fellows behind to continue to wait.

It was a process without thought, automatic, like the workings of a water clock, and like a water clock, it took only the slightest disturbance in the system to interrupt it.

A single flame demon, moving down one of the warren-like passages to join its fellows, turned a corner at high speeds, intending to burst forth into the summoning chamber. Rather than an open hallway and quick passage to the chamber however, the demon found instead a single figure, standing in the corridor, blocking his path. The demon had only a split second to see that there was an obstruction moments before its own momentum carried it straight into the figure and bowled both of them over.

The demon fell, as did the figure it had impacted, and the speed of the impact sent them both rolling and bouncing down the corridor. The demon careened off the walls like a pinball, before finaly sliding to a stop near the very end of the hallway, where it opened up into the cavernous summoning chamber that yawned a hundred feet below.

In an instant, the demon arose, as a flash of light blinded it and it the loud sound of hard objects impacting one another echoed down the halls. Operating on other senses, it lunged for where the figure had fetched up, intending to burn it to a cinder or rip off its head. The figure ducked, and the demon missed, crashing into the wall an instant before a massive blow from the direction of the wall knocked it sprawling and sent it spinning dizzily towards the edge of the pit.

Yet the demon was not perplexed, and it lashed out again, this time with one of its limbs, cracking it like a whip as it managed to snatch at the ankle of the kneeling figure. The strike hit home, and the demon wrenched as hard as it could, plunging into the summoning chamber an instant before it pulled the mysterious assailant along with it.

It did not avail the demon.

Flashes of light, source undetermined, erupted all about the chamber, and before the demon could re-orient itself in mid-air, one of the leering statues that was positioned around the perimeter of the chamber came loose from its pedistal and toppled. Eighty tons of carven stone slammed into the demon in mid-air and crushed him to sizzling pulp against the floor of the chamber. Pieces of rock the size of small cars were cast into the air as the statue shattered, and the falling figure hit several of these, knocked back and forth like a rag doll before finally landing on the ground in a heap of gravel and dust.

For several moments, the figure lay motionless on the floor of the chamber, as the dust settled and the echoes of the enormous collapse began to fade out. Only after these had passed did the figure begin to stir, emitting a soft moan as it rose to its hands and knees and looked up.

What it beheld there was likely not encouraging.

More than a dozen demons had been waiting in the chamber itself for Trigon to turn his face to them once more. Two had been smashed to bits by the falling debris, but the others remained, lining the walls, facing the intruder who had suddenly inserted itself into their midst. And as the figure shakily managed to get back on its feet, the demons, who knew neither mercy nor fear, animated by the remorseless will of Trigon himself, all charged the figure at once.

**O-O-O**

It was a long time before anyone said anything.

Beast Boy stood at the side of the room, looking out a window. Once it had been glass-covered, but the glass had shattered or melted away, admitting the thin fumes that now cloaked the ruins of Jump City. The Tower could not be seen from this angle, but much of the rest of the city could, illuminated by fires, with occasional shadows passing over it as some unholy _thing_ flew into view for just a split second. In the far off distance, he thought he heard a low rumble, like thunder or the collapse of buildings, and closed his eyes, imagining some new devilry underway, unwilling to face the sight of his burning home any longer.

Behind him, Cyborg and Starfire sat on overturned furniture, saying nothing. Slade was reclined before them, apparently content to sit for the moment, having related the ways in which the world had come to this.

It was Starfire who finally broke the silence.

"Why Robin?" she asked, almost plaintively. She did not seem to be addressing Slade, but anyone who chose to answer it. "Warp... Warp could have slain me the day that Robin died, but he did not. Why did he choose only to kill Robin?"

Slade shrugged. "Because Robin was all he needed," he said. "Robin was the one who originally retrieved what was left of Raven and made it possible for her to destroy her father. He was the only one of you strong enough to make that journey. Without him, there is no stopping Trigon, even without David's involvement."

Starfire shook her head. "Even if that is so," she said, "it makes no logical sense that he would permit me to live when he had the - "

"Of course it doesn't," said Slade. "Warp is _deranged_, he is not operating in the realm of logical sense. He is obsessed with your obliteration, and is quite willing to drag the entire planet down with you. It would not at all surprise me to learn that he left you alive simply so that you would suffer."

Starfire's original words died in her throat, and she coughed several times before she could even begin to respond. "You... you mean that he has done _all this_ merely to hurt _us_?"

"In general, yes," said Slade, "but in specific, Princess, I believe his intended target was you."

Starfire's voice failed her as Beast Boy turned back from the window. "Me?" she asked, her voice hollow, her eyes wide and wet with tears.

"Of course," said Slade. "You were the one who trapped him in that future of his, who prevented him from living the history he was supposedly 'intended' to live. In my discussions with him, I heard more venom directed your way than anyone else's. I can't speak with absolute certainty as to Warp's motives, but I believe that he killed Robin and not you so that you would spend these last weeks in agony." Slade's eye narrowed and his voice sweetened, the honeyed stinger he employed whenever he was smirking beneath his mask, "Personally, I'd say he did an exemplary job."

Starfire leaped to her feet, fists clenched, tears streaming from her eyes. For a second, Beast Boy thought she might blast Slade with her starbolts, but as Cyborg stood up to prevent her from doing just that, she squeezed her eyes shut and turned violently away from him, stalking off to the other side of the room to weep in private.

Cyborg started after her, then thought better of it, and shaking his head, turned back to Slade. "Why the hell are you tellin' us all of this _now_? When it's too late to do anything about it? Why didn't you tell us _before_ Trigon woke up?"

"For the same reason I didn't kill David myself," said Slade. Trigon was watching my every move. Had I attempted to contact you, I would have instantly been caught."

"Bullshit," said Cyborg angrily. "You ain't some helpless victim. You could have sent us a message, through Terra or anyone else. You could have _warned_ us about all this!"

"And what good would _that_ have done?" asked Slade. "Would you have believed me? Consider it. Your greatest enemy contrives to send you a warning that the newest member of your team was actually sent there by the Lord of all Evil as a plot to destroy the entire planet, and the only solution is to kill him in cold blood. Are you _seriously_ telling me that you would have followed such an instruction?"

"Raven almost did!" insisted Cyborg.

"The key word being 'almost'," retorted Slade. "And Raven was always the most pragmatic of all of you. The rest of you would have reacted with sentimentality and stubborn refusal to face the facts. You would have insisted on 'finding another way' or some other inane stupidity, thanks to your idiotic belief that bad things should not happen simply because you do not _wish_ them to."

Cyborg might have contested this, but he chose not to, turning away with as much violence as Starfire had, grumbling to himself as he paced away to the far side of the room. Slade settled back into his ersatz seat, and Beast Boy merely stood and watched, unable to contribute anything further. A minute or so later, and Starfire had recovered enough to venture another inquiry.

"You did not answer me before," she said softly, standing in the shadows. "I asked you why David was of such importance in the annihilation of the world?"

"Not the world," said Slade. "Trigon managed that much by himself. But surely you can guess what Trigon would want with Mr. Foster?"

"Devastator?" asked Starfire.

Slade nodded. "David himself is meaningless. It was what he carried that Trigon wanted."

"Why?" asked Starfire, stepping back into the light.

Slade threw back his head and laughed. "_Why?_" he asked, his voice a mocking tone. "Devastator is one of the most powerful weapons in the universe. Why _wouldn't_ he want it?"

"He did not simply _want_ it," said Starfire, crossing her arms. "You said that Warp arranged for him to get it, because with Devastator in Trigon's possession, his victory would be assured, even if Raven and Robin were still with us."

"And?" asked Slade.

"And Trigon _himself_ is a force of raw destruction and hate," said Starfire, raising her voice to a barked command. "What _possible_ use can he have for something such as Devastator? He has already proven that he can destroy this planet by his own means. What does Devastator give him that he does not have already?"

To Beast Boy's surprise, Slade seemed to find this funny. The supervillain chuckled darkly and shook his head. "Do you truly have no notion of what Devastator is?"

"A force of destruction," said Starfire. "Raven told us as much."

"Not _a_ force," replied Slade. "_The_ force. As Trigon is the embodiment of pure evil, so Devastator is the embodiment of one of the primal forces of the universe itself. Devastator _is_ destruction, weaponized and made manifest. In terms of raw power, Devastator is easily Trigon's equal, if not his superior."

"So you say," said Starfire. "Yet David never showed any such levels of - "

"David was a _human_," insisted Slade, his voice echoing with authority. "There were discrete limits to what he could put himself through and survive. That little trick of his on the island was more than I thought him capable of, but even that was a mere _firecracker_ compared to Devastator's true power. That alone nearly killed him. Any greater effort, and he would have charred his brain to cinder and boiled the blood in his veins."

Slade leaned forward slowly, framing his words with expert care. "Trigon, on the other hand, is a _Demon Lord_. He is a cosmic being in his own right, and he has the raw fortitude to employ Devastator at _full_ power."

Starfire narrowed her gaze. "And what does that mean?"

"Devastator is the most powerful weapon of raw destruction in the known universe," said Slade. "Once Trigon recovers his strength, he will be able to use Devastator to unmake entire _galaxies_. He will carve a swath of annihilation across the cosmos the likes of which have not been seen since the Big Bang. Nothing, no spell, no empire, no warship, no divine being, _nothing _will be able to stop him. He will no longer need to play with the inhabitants of the worlds he consigns to the flames. With Devastator at his command, Trigon will be able to trigger supernovae with just a thought. He will be able to blast galaxies apart with the raw force of his own will. Nothing, not even your precious Tamaran, will be safe from his wrath."

Slowly, Starfire lowered her head. "Yet... Devastator claimed that he did not wish for this to occur. Can he not prevent Trigon from employing him thus?"

"Devastator is a weapon, not a living being," said Slade. "What he or it 'wishes' is beside the point. Devastator is commanded by will alone. And Trigon's will is to cloak the universe in pain."

Starfire had nothing more to say, and slowly she sat down, looking deflated, cupping her head in her hands. From behind her, Cyborg asked the only real question that mattered.

"So... you're sayin'... that's it?"

"In so many words, yes," said Slade. "Whether Trigon or Warp intend to kill the rest of you off quickly or leave you to watch the universe burn, the battle is over. And you have lost."

Silence.

Vague rumblings in the distance, like thunder from thirty miles away, were all that could be heard, as Starfire remained silent with head bowed, and Cyborg gently laid his hand on her shoulder, and sat down as well. Slade, taking perhaps some perverse sense of victory from this reaction to the news he brought, sat back and said nothing for himself, though surely his fate could be no better than theirs, having drawn the ire of Trigon, Warp, or both.

But right now, Beast Boy didn't care about Slade. He didn't care about the plots and plans that he had explained so painstakingly, Devastator, cosmic beings, Warp, any of it. He felt drained, the _scale_ of the disaster that had overtaken him and everyone else simply overwhelming. He slumped down onto the ground, gaze vacant, unable even to form the tears that still leaked from Starfire's eyes. The end of the world, of the entire universe, was more than he could process. His mind seemed to have reset, or reverted to an elemental state. If Slade was right, if the world was over, and Trigon had won, then there was no use in forming plans and plots, or in yelling at one another about what might have happened, or who was to blame for things. He no longer felt like asking more questions. All priorities, all responsibilities, everything seemed to have receeded from his mind.

All but one.

"Slade?"

Beast Boy's voice was quiet. Had not the others been in silence, nobody would have heard him. Slade inclined his head to the green changeling. "Yes?" he said.

Beast Boy was seated against the wall, his knees drawn up to his chest, his arms wrapped around them and hands linked. But his head was lifted, his eyes bright, and his voice extremely clear as he asked the only question that, in these circumstances, meant anything at all.

"Where's Raven?"

For the first time since he had approached them, Slade appeared to hesitate. Starfire slowly lifted her head, and Cyborg as well, as Slade seemed to consider the question for a moment.

"Outside of your reach," said Slade finally. "Thanks to Warp."

Beast Boy did not respond immediately, but took a deep breath, before he slowly leaned forward. "Slade," he said, as guileless as the first time he had pronounced the name, "where's Raven?"

Slade frowned. "Was I not clear that it no longer _matters_ where Raven is?" he asked.

Starfire answered before Beast Boy could. "Beast Boy did not ask you whether or not it mattered," she said, her voice barely a whisper, but easily understandable for that. "He asked you where she was."

Slade rolled his one eye and answered. "Some element of Raven remains," he said. "I do not know in what form, or exactly where. Within the city, I would think, but far from here in any event.

"But you _do_ know where," said Beast Boy, slowly getting up. "You said that the way this was supposed to turn out, you and Robin went there to get her back."

"I know _roughly_ where she might be," said Slade. "But it will be an area deeply penetrated by Trigon's minions and will. In the original tale, Robin alone managed to find her. I was..." he hesitated again, "... sidetracked."

"If you know where Raven is," said Cyborg, "then you could take us to her, couldn't you?"

"There are _so many_ reasons why that is not true," said Slade.

"Such as what?" asked Cyborg.

"Such as the fact that the instant we tried, Trigon would perceive it and act to stop us," said Slade. "Trigon is all-seeing. His mind can perceive whatever he chooses. The only reason that Robin and I were able to make the attempt was that the three of you distracted Trigon's attention while we were doing it. Even if you did so again, who precisely would be left to actually seek - ?"

"Me."

It took Slade a moment to realize that he had heard the answer correctly, and another moment to realize that neither Starfire nor Cyborg had spoken. Slowly, he turned his head to Beast Boy, who was standing away from the wall, his hands at his sides, staring into Slade's eye with wide and worried eyes. Yet there was no half-measure in his voice as he confirmed the answer.

"I'll go," said Beast Boy. "I'll find Raven."

**O-O-O**

The figure stood alone in the darkness, and beheld its handiwork.

All about lay demons, mangled, crushed, broken, their bodies churned to mulch beneath the fallen statues that had once lined the walls of the cavern of the damned. Pools of liquid sulfur bubbled on the uneven floor, leeched from the corpses of the fallen demons like wine trod from grapes. The air was still, the chamber silent as a tomb, but the figure did not move or lower its hands, breathing carefully and nervously, eyes darting from point to point, as though the very shadows on the walls augured more evil.

The shadows kept the peace though, and no further demons arose to resume the assault. The leering statues, toppled and smashed, remained quiescent, and gradually, the figure lowered its arms, breathing the fire from its lungs, still nervously watching the corners of the room, lest some slavering spawn of darkness leap out from nowhere. Only after the last echos had faded to nothing, leaving naught but watchful silence in their wake, did the figure dare to move.

Move and halt, and move, and halt again it was, shadow to shadow, darting through the firelight to take shelter in the dark, with nothing but the sound of footsteps on stone and curt, frightened breathing, to indicate that anyone remained. Any observer looking on would see only the dead demons and the ruin they had caused in dying, strewn about like the discarded toys of a child. The agent of these deaths kept to the shadows and hid.

Until finally, the figure found what it sought.

Fragments of stone ranging from pebbles to boulders lay scattered about, some rough and unworked, some exquisitely featured and detailed, yet it ignored them all, climbing over and around the detritus. Ahead, perched upon scorched rock, there stood another statue, this one lifesize and lifelike to a degree no stonemason or sculptor living or dead could ever replicate. Reclined, though not in repose, head at an angle, face contorted in pain, mouth frozen in mid-cry, the statue was bracing itself half-up with one arm, the other held over its head in a last, helpless gesture of self-defense. The very picture of agony, despair, and fear, the sight of the statue stopped the cautious figure in its tracks.

For a moment, neither moved. Then slowly, the living being approached the dead one, cautious footsteps resonating in the empty arena. The figure neared the statue carefully, crouching down to look into its face and pausing once more on the threshold. Yet again, it surveyed its surroundings, ensuring that no unspeakable abominations were about to interrupt it.

And then the shrouded figure gently laid one hand on the statue's shoulder, and closed its eyes.

**O-O-O**

"... You?"

Slade sounded like he was trying to decide if he should laugh or hit his head against something. His voice was a soulless monotone, as though the question made no sense, and yet needed to be asked, as though even in this ruined world, in the presence of demons, devils, and animate evil, the situation had _now_ become surreal.

It was not a view that Beast Boy appeared to share. He stood before Slade with his arms at his sides, looking up into the face of the mysterious one-eyed villain. He looked nervous and small, smaller than he normally did, but not joking. Beast Boy's serious side so rarely manifested itself, even in the midst of catastrophe, that it never failed to surprise everyone when it finally did appear. It was in full-view now, an indescribable "bearing", a clipping of words and straightening of posture, a more direct stare from a kid whose mannerisms were always slightly bestial, slightly evasive.

Not this time.

"Is this some kind of joke?" asked Slade in the manner of one who already knew the answer and wished that he did not. Such was obvious even to him. Beast Boy said nothing, did nothing, and neither did the others, leaving Slade to make of it what he would.

Slade's roving eye turned from Titan to Titan in turn, before returning to Beast Boy. "You are either insane or stupid," he said, with all the authority of the universe. "You cannot rescue Raven."

"Why not?" demanded Beast Boy. "You said that you and Robin - "

"Yes," interrupted Slade, "_Robin_ and I retrieved her. You are not Robin."

"I _know _that," said Beast Boy, "but Robin's not here, so - "

"So _what_?" demanded Slade, raising his voice just slightly, which for him was the equivelant of screaming in thunderous rage. "So you imagine that you are fit to serve in his place? I did not select Robin to accompany me at _random_. Despite all of your fanciful abilities, Robin was _always_ far and away the strongest of you. That's why I selected him as my prospective apprentice in the first place. And it's likely one of the reasons Warp decided to deprive us of his presence."

Slade leaned forward, his voice bitter and barbed. "You on the other hand, changeling, do not even have the advantage of useful abilities. Tell me, what will you do to the _legions of Hell_? Tell them jokes? Turn into a gorilla and beat them with your fists? You are the most negligible element in this equation, as you have been all along, a _millstone _around the neck of your teammates, a useless impediment in the present situation as in all others."

This was simply too much for the others. "Hey!" shouted Cyborg. "You _shut _your goddamn - "

"Or _what_?" asked Slade, turning his head. "I am impervious to your attacks, and we are at the end of the world. What will you do, _shoot_ me?"

Momentarily stymied, Cyborg might well have shot him anyway, but he did not, and Slade scoffed at him. "Overpowered _children_ playacting at the hero in the ruins," he remarked acidly. "Trigon operates on more than just the physical level. He attacks the _wills_ of his enemies. If you can't bear to hear the truth from me, how exactly do you propose to defy _him_? Besides, even if you _did_ find Raven, which you can't, with Devastator in Trigon's hands, she cannot save the - "

"_I DON'T CARE!"  
_  
Beast Boy's voice was like a gunshot in a dark room. Cyborg jumped. _Slade_ jumped, his smug rant terminated as though a switch had been flipped. And then suddenly Beast Boy was in the middle of all of them, facing Slade, eyes wide, gloved hands balled into fists.

"I don't want to find Raven because she can save the world, _I just want to find her_!" he shouted. "And I'm going to whether you come with me or not!"

Slade seemed unsure of what to make of this. "Why?" he asked. "Trigon cannot be beaten, even by her. Will you find her just so that she share in your own torture?"

Beast Boy stumbled over his words, starting and stopping several times before he managed to say something. "Because I want..." he finally managed to stammer, tears forming in his eyes. "Because if she's out there I _have_ to get her back. I have to..."

Nobody said anything for a little while.

"You _cannot_ find her yourself," remarked Slade finally. "No-one can, and you least of all."

"Then_ come with me_," said Beast Boy, quietly but urgently. "What, you've got something _else_ to do around here?"

"I can think of things to do besides _suicide_," insisted Slade. "The instant you set out to find Raven, both Trigon _and_ Warp will know if it, and stop you. It took all three of you to distract Trigon the last time this was attempted, and Warp was not even involved."

Beast Boy was about to answer, yet he did not get the chance, for before he could say a word, he was pre-empted by Starfire, who spoke softly, yet with absolute conviction.

"Warp will not interfere."

Both Slade and Beast Boy turned to Starfire, who was looking at neither of them, her head lowered, yet she neither explained nor retracted her statement, leaving Slade to ask the obvious question.

"And why exactly is that?"

"Because," said Starfire, slowly looking up, the drying tears from before still moistening her eyes. "While friend Beast Boy is retrieving Raven, I am going to kill Warp."

She said it simply, as though she was stating an immutable fact of nature, yet that served only to make it all the more disturbing. Beast Boy said nothing, neither did Cyborg. It fell to Slade to contribute a comment.

"And here I thought you Titans didn't kill."

Beast Boy shot Slade an ugly look, which he ignored, but said nothing. Starfire however answered. "We do not," she said.

"Then if I might ask - "

"Because he has reduced this planet to a cinder," said Starfire through clenched teeth. "Because he has given it over to the Lord of Evil to use as a plaything at the expense of its inhabitants. Because he slew Robin, and arranged to slay Raven and David, and because he has done all of these things to cause us to suffer, for _that_ reason I am going to kill him." She wiped tears from her eyes and clenched her fists together. "And I do _not_ care to be lectured by _you_ on my morality for doing this thing."

"Perish the thought," said Slade in a silky smooth voice. He might have said more had Cyborg not shot him a threatening gaze as he turned to Starfire and spoke as gently as he could.

"He's... right, Star," said Cyborg. "We can't... we'll fight him if he shows up but we can't just..." He foundered for an argument, frankly he wanted to kill Warp as well, but in the end the reason he cited was the one that mattered. "Robin wouldn't want us to. Not even Warp."

It worked, and he knew it worked the instant he said it. The knife-edge of Starfire's rage dulled slightly and she nodded slowly. "I am... aware of this," she said. She said nothing more. Cyborg did not push her.

"Fascinating as this is," said Slade. "None of it is important. You will never get an _opportunity_ to kill Warp while Trigon remains unfixed. He will eradicate you the instant he realizes what you purpose to do."

"Yeah, we heard you the first time," said Cyborg, slowly turning back, taking a deep breath and letting it out. Starfire had withdrawn to the side of the room, and Beast Boy was watching him, he knew. "But Trigon isn't gonna be watchin'."

Slade scoffed. "The two of you will distract him alone then?" he asked. "I can think of better ways to kill myself than to trust my fate to - "

"No," said Cyborg, and it was less the word than the way he said it that caught Starfire and Beast Boy's attention. "BB's goin' after Raven," he said, not as a suggestion but a statement of fact. "Star is goin' for Warp."

Beast Boy stared at Cyborg like one who suddenly had caught a glimpse of light in the tunnel. Starfire just looked puzzled, as did Slade. "You just said - "

"Not to kill him," said Cyborg, and rather than explain, he touched one of his forearms, opening a small storage compartment and retrieving a thin grey metal disk with a crack running from one side to the center. He held it up before Slade.

"Warp left this with Star when he killed Robin," he said. "It's a calling card, part of the time machine she wrecked back when we ran into him last time. He wanted us to know it was him doing all this, not Trigon. He wanted us to have this little talk. He wanted us to know."

"And?" asked Slade.

"You said yourself he's doin' all this because he hates us. Hates Star maybe. That's why he isn't killing us right now. He thinks he's won, and that there's nothin' we can do to get him back, just like you. If he just wanted us dead, we'd be dead, but he doesn't want that. He wants to hurt us." Cyborg glanced back at Starfire, who was looking down at the burnt floor. "He wants to hurt Starfire." He returned his eyes to Slade, and folded his arms. "You know better'n any of us, Slade. What's the best way to hurt Starfire?"

Recognition slowly dawned on Slade's masked features. "Robin," he said.

"But Robin's dead," said Cyborg. "And if Robin's dead, Warp can't hurt Star anymore." Despite everything, Cyborg smirked. "He wouldn't have that."

Beast Boy cut in. "Dude," he said, "are you... are you saying...?"

"You just told me a moment ago that Robin was certainly dead," said Slade, and Cyborg could detect the faintest hint of interest breaking through the emotionless monotone that Slade usually used. "You said you watched him die."

"He is," said Cyborg forcefully, "but look around you, Slade. The _Devil_ showed up. Everybody and their brother's comin' back to life. We watched _you_ die too, and Terra, and Raven, and they're all back. So why not Robin, if Warp wanted to use him to get at us? I think he _wants_ us to go lookin' for him. I think he knows it's what we'll do."

"And you intend to oblige him?"

"You're _goddamn _right I do," said Cyborg, with such certainty to his words that even Starfire began to look hopeful. "If there's even a chance that Robin's still - "

"Is there one?" asked Slade, cutting Cyborg off.

"We cannot know without attempting to find Warp," said Starfire quickly.

Slade groaned and covered his face with his hand. "Then I will repeat, while you are all gallivanting about searching for people who might or might not be dead, who exactly is going to distract the attention of _Trigon the Terrible_?"

Cyborg crossed his arms. "Me," he said.

Slade looked up. "You?" he asked, incredulous. "By _yourself_, you are going to hold the attention of Trigon?"

"That's right," said Cyborg.

Slade looked like he had just entered a madhouse, and was trying to determine if everyone around him had gone insane or if he had. "And... _how_ are you going to do that?"

"I have _no goddamn idea_," said Cyborg. "But I'm gonna do it anyway." He shrugged. "I'll think of somethin'."

"This is _insanity_," said Slade. "Trigon will reduce you to an abstract sculpture in moments. "You haven't a prayer of surviving more than five seconds."

Cyborg didn't dispute this. It was likely the truth after all, yet he managed to find the wherewithall to smirk.

"Hell, Slade," said the half-metal Titan. "It's the end of the world. Don't tell me you thought it was gonna be _easy_..."

Slade blinked several times, but plainly had no answer to this. Yet the proposal was so far beyond the pale that even Starfire was taken aback. "Cyborg..." she said, approaching him carefully. "This is... you do not need to..."

"The _hell_ I don't," said Cyborg. "I got us into this goddamn mess. I gotta _try_ to get some part of - "

"You did _not_ place us within this situation!" insisted Starfire. "This was the doing of Trigon and Warp, not you."

"It happened on _my_ watch, Star," said Cyborg. "I made the call to pull the Hive in. I said we'd fight instead of doing what Raven said and runnin' like hell. Everything we've done since Robin died has been on me. I tried to run the show, and look what happened." He forced his voice to be stable, forced himself not to get upset, as the words were shoved through his clenched teeth. "I'm not Robin, Star," he said. "None of us are. But that don't matter now. I can do this. I'm _gonna_ do this. And you're _gonna_ find Warp and Robin, and BB's _gonna_ find Raven. And I don't give a damn _who_ the hell's standin' in the way," he looked back over at Slade with a withering stare, "because that's how it's gonna be."

Slade frowned darkly. "Wishing for a thing to be does not make it so," he said.

"Maybe," said Cyborg. "But I'd rather be stupid about gettin' them all back, than smart about how it can't be done."

"Me too," said Beast Boy quietly.

"And I as well," said Starfire.

Slade watched them impassively, saying nothing, giving no sign. And then slowly, he raised one hand, and from his finger he slid a small ring. Plain and unadorned, comprised of some precious metal, gold perhaps or platinum it bore tiny sigils in an unknown language inscribed into the bands, runes of some sort, of meaning indeterminable. None of the Titans had ever seen its like before, but Slade simply looked at it for a moment, before slowly walking over and handing it to Cyborg.

"This is a Ring of Azar," said Slade. "Forged by the same order that imprisoned Trigon originally. It has some limited means of protecting you from Trigon's powers. I happen to know from experience that it works."

Cyborg took the ring carefully, and as he did, the ring seemed to swell in size, growing until it fit Cyborg's oversized fingers. With a last glance at Slade, who stood unmoving, he slid it onto his finger, where it seemed to glow faintly.

"Why are you here?" asked Cyborg. "Why are you even botherin' to help us if you think this is all impossible."

"My reasons are my own," said Slade, "and none of your concern. But if you insist on this madness, I will see it as far as I can." He turned away then, walking towards the exit of the room, glancing back at Beast Boy. "Are you coming?"

Beast Boy didn't answer him. Neither did anyone else. The three Titans stood together, none of them able to come up with what to say at this juncture. It was Starfire who finally made the appropriate gesture, placing one arm around Beast Boy's shoulders and another around Cyborg, and squeezing all three of them together not _quite_ tightly enough to break bone, but close.

"I shall see you both when I return," she said, and the others could _see_ the effort it took for her to keep her voice steady. "We shall retrieve our friends and return to one another."

Cyborg nodded. "I'll hold him as long as it takes. He ain't got nothin' on me." A preposterous lie, but who cared at this point. "Get back here with Rob and Raven, and the five of us'll show this guy why he shouldn't've messed with us."

Beast Boy looked pale, scared, hell they all did, but when he finally raised his head, it was with a sentiment that, given everything, the others had simply not had a chance to muse on.

"I wish..." said Beast Boy, "I wish there was... something we could do for David too."

Both of the others fell silent, Starfire and Cyborg glancing at one another with empty looks, but it was Slade who responded.

"There isn't," said Slade. "David was merely the carrier for Devastator. He is of no consequence in and of himself. And neither Warp nor Trigon has any personal stake in keeping him around. He is now no different than the billions of civilians that Trigon has slain. And even if there was some way to retrieve him, there is no-one left to do so, nor would he be able to assist you if they did."

Beast Boy nodded sadly. "Yeah..." he said, as Cyborg laid a hand on his shoulder and he raised his head.

"David was a good kid," said Cyborg. "And whatever else happens, we're gonna give Trigon one back for him."

Slowly, Beast Boy nodded again. And then, unable to think of anything else to say, he slowly turned away from the others and walked after Slade. At the threshold he stopped, and turned back for a second.

"I'll get her back," he said. "Whatever else happens, I promise I'll get her back."

"And we shall be here when you return," said Starfire. She looked up at Cyborg for a moment. "All of us."

"Good luck, man," said Cyborg, and then Beast Boy turned away and exitted the room, catching up with slade and falling in alongside him. Slade was shaking his head, muttering something inaudible to himself, but Beast Boy did not have the stomach to ask him what it was, not at this juncture. He walked with his head downcast, ignoring Slade, to the point where Slade finally glanced over and contributed a comment.

"It will require a miracle to save even Raven, let alone Robin," said Slade. "I would not waste my time pining that you cannot find a third miracle for David if I were you. The road ahead will be difficult enough."

"Don't worry about me," muttered Beast Boy, glancing up at Slade. "I just... I wish we could've done something for him. He didn't... he didn't deserve to get abandoned like this."

"No more than the rest of the planet 'deserved' it, I should imagine," said Slade. "But if it makes you feel any better, David's fate was sealed the moment he entered this tale. You could not have saved him. Nobody could. For better or worse, his part in these events and the affairs of this world, is over."

**O-O-O**

Neither figure moved for an eternity. They stood together in the darkness and the silence, one's features contorted in horror and pain, the other's calm and relaxed. One's hands were stretched to the sky, as though to ward off a blow unseen, the other's lain carefully on the first figure's shoulders. Neither one moved so much as a muscle, one because it could not, the other because it would not. And for a time they stood like this, and were still.

And then there was light.

Faint at first, then slowly growing in intensity, the light was soft and golden, eminating from the dark stone of the statue as though gilding had been plated over it. Dull though it was, it shone brightly in contrast to the dark surroundings, and grew in strength until it was bright enough to flood the chamber with light, gleaming like a polished effigy writ in shining gold. No detail was lost as the light flooded, and the statue seemingly changed from one of stone to one of radiance, yet the other figure still did not move, and as the light began slowly to fade once more, suddenly a sound shattered the silence of the empty chamber.

A gasp.

The noise startled the figure who had wrought this work, and as they stepped back, suddenly the statue collapsed. But rather than crumble to pieces, it fell to the floor like a boned fish, as the last of the light faded away, and lay there, prostrate and motionless, save for the unmistakable sounds of wheezing, gasping breath, mixed with soft moans of pain.

Slowly, the figure standing by approached, as the statue on the floor coughed and clawed for breath. For the first time, the figure chanced to speak, whispering quietly.

"David?" said the figure. "Can you hear me?"

More coughing, more ragged breath was the reply, as the fallen being rolled over onto its back, unable to move further. He tried to answer in words, but could not, every attempt simply bringing more agony to his tortured lungs and body, and the effort caused him to lapse into another coughing fit, and fall into near-convusions on the ground.

"It's all right," said the other quickly, running over and kneeling down beside him. His head hung limply, and she carefully lifted it, feeling him trembling, his hands shaking, his breath coming only in ragged gasps as he tried to force his lungs to function. His eyes were open, but blinked spasmodically, unfocused, and she waited for them to clear, for him to finally recognize who it was that was staring down at him.

She knew when he did by the sudden shudder that went through him, and the strangled gasp that substituted for words from a throat that simply could not obey, so soon after having been restored to flesh and blood. She knew it was coming, indeed she expected it, given everything, and having been recognized she carefully laid one hand on his shoulder and looked into his wide, frightened, eyes.

"It's okay, David," said Terra. "You're gonna be okay..."

* * *

**Author's Note: **From here on, we run straight for the finish line, for while there remain a half dozen chapters or so to go, the sounding bell has rung, and all must stand aside before the clatter of keyboard or scratch of pen. I hope you have liked the chapter above, and that you will like the next one. But whether you do or not, please let me know your opinion, that this last few chapters may be as good as I can make them.

Thank you.


	34. The House of Stone and Fire

**Disclaimer:** I invite anyone who thinks I own the Teen Titans to have their heads examined.

**Author's Note: **These things always take longer than they're supposed to.

Hello again everyone, and I hope this chapter finds you all well. I have no great speeches to give, nor grand excuses for why this chapter took so long to finish. It's a long one, certainly, but mostly it was an agonizing one. I re-wrote it from scratch several times, and I'm still not totally satisfied with it, but I think it will nonetheless stand as is, and thus I submit it for your approvals. As ever, I beg and plead that if you like (or hate) the chapter (or story), please leave me a token of your opinion that I may continue to improve, be it ever so brief. I shall of course try to get the next chapter out as quickly as possible, but until then, I hope you find some enjoyment from this one. Thank you all once more, my cherished readers, and may you find success in every endeavor.

* * *

**Chapter 34: The House of Stone and Fire**

_"He who has a thousand friends,  
Has not a friend to spare.  
And he who has one enemy,  
Will meet him everywhere."_

_** - **_Ali Ibn-Abi-Talib_  
_

**O-O-O**

In a world made of fire, one more flickering light went un-noticed.

The structure had once been an underground parking garage, and in a way it still was, for the cars within it were more or less still there, the occasional cracked windshield or broken mirror the only signs of what had transpired to the world above. Eight levels of ferro-concrete sat overhead now, enough to eliminate even the slightest traces of sound, for the power was out, and the ventilation fans were quiet, and the garage was thus more silent than it had ever been since it was first gouged out of the earth.

To anyone else, eight two-meter-thick layers of solid concrete might have seemed oppressive, especially in the eerie stillness of a preternaturally-silent garage, where every creak and groan hinted at some hideous purpose lurking just out of sight. Most people got claustrophobic in such surroundings, expecting the walls to cave in, or feeling as though the very air around them was heavy and leaden.

Terra did not. To her, this place was too _exposed_, a bare two dozen yards of building material separating them from the open sky, where Trigon reigned and demons flew. Though a thermo-nuclear weapon would have been hard-pressed to shake them this deep in the Earth, to Terra it was not deep enough by a longshot. A large part of her wanted to be a dozen miles below the surface right now, safely cocooned inside a pocket of stone. Instead, this was the deepest she could get, close enough to the surface that she imagined she could feel and hear the fires raging above.

Irony of ironies, it was actually _cold_ down here, at least relative to the rest of the planet, the furnaces of Hell not having yet penetrated the bunker-like subterranean chamber. Indeed it was chilly enough that she had built a small campfire in an empty parking space, assembling it out of wooden signs and lighting it with flint dug up from the ground and gasoline siphoned from an abandoned motorcycle. It was a risk of course, some passing flame demon might see the fire or sense it somehow as a kindred spirit, but one she felt she had to take.

The fire wasn't, after all, for her sake.

No sound, save the crackling of the flames. No light, but for the flickering yellow of the firelight, for she had turned off her flashlight to conserve its battery. The flames cast deep shadows over the cars to either side, and occasionally a flare would reveal the silent cement walls that ringed them in. But mostly it sufficed only to illuminate a tiny patch of bare asphalt, alone in a void of interminable darkness. Terra sat perched on a carstop, her knees tucked up against her chest, trusting to the earth and stone that surrounded this underground chamber to warn her if anything approached. And whispering as loudly as she dared in this cement nightmare of an amplifier, she tried, for what had to be the tenth time, to get her counterpart to say something.

"David?"

She might as well have spoken to the walls.

David sat on the ground on the opposite side of the fire, and stared through it unblinking, motionless save for his hands, which trembled almost imperceptibly, like the nervous shakes of an old man. His expression was hollow and dead, his eyes downcast towards the crackling flames. He looked as though he had been coated in a layer of volcanic ash. His hair, his uniform, his very _skin_ was tinted a sickly, slate gray, gray like an overcast sky, gray like a corpse drained of blood or a golem made of river clay.

When first he had awoken, she had taken it to be some kind of coating, dust or ash or pulverized concrete, and tried to brush it off of him, only to realize her mistake. He wasn't covered in gray soot, he had actually _turned_ gray, like Frankenstein's monster re-animated from the grave. No mere change in skin and hair pigmentation, the change had affected his uniform as well, his flame-orange and fire-red suit, his shoes, his belt, dying them all various shades of gray as though the color had been leached out of them with bleach. She had no idea what could have caused such a thing, if it was some side effect of the depetrification process, or something else entirely. She had no idea if she had made a mistake, or forgotten something. It was not as though she had done this often.

He paid no attention to her, not to her words or her questions. When she had brought him back, she had expected him to fight her, attack her, argue or denounce her, do all of the various things he had done the last two times they had encountered one another. David was a weakling by many standards, but there had been enough of an iron core to him for him to reject her desperate request to come with her to meet Slade that time in the library, following which he had managed to fend her off, with Raven's assistance, and nearly impale her on a shard of her own rock. She had expected something similar this time.

She hadn't gotten it, and that almost made things worse. Instead of erupting or accusing her of further betrayals, he hadn't said one word, not one single word, and beyond an initial agonized look of recognition, hadn't resisted her in the slightest. She had led him out of the burnt remains of the library like an automaton, supporting him when he collapsed, which was often, simply leading him by the hand when he managed to walk under his own power, which was not. She had led him here, to this garage, and down into its depths, and he had followed her like a sleepwalker or a shell shock victim. She could not tell if he even knew where he was.

"David?" she repeated, to the same lack of reaction. He didn't appear to be ignoring her so much as unable to hear her, deaf perhaps, or too far lost in whatever he was staring at. She remembered that he had once explained to her how in times of indecision or stress, he often liked to draw on Devastator and view the world through the parasite's eyes. He'd described it as a mosaic of particles of some sort, entrancing, almost hypnotic. Carefully she got up, walked around the fire, and knelt next to him. "David, can you hear me?" she asked, as she gently reached out and touched his shoulder.

He turned his head to face her, and she screamed.

His _eyes_...

She fell back in an instinctive, jerky reaction, and caught herself on a promontory of rock that she dug out of the ground subconsciously as she fell. He made no move towards her, nor any indication that he understood her reaction, staring directly at her with _blood-red _eyes, red like burning coals, washed out and glowing, with no features visible therein, no pupils, no irises, just solid red like a pair of stoplights mounted in his head. His eyes had looked bloodshot when first she had re-awoken him, but _nothing_ like this. Not infrequently, when a metahuman gave full reign to their powers, their eyes, the most direct channel to their brain, would begin to emit a shining glow. It had happened to Terra more than once, to Raven, to Jinx, to Starfire whenever she called on her Tamaranean powers, but Terra had never heard of it happening to David, nor did it look like he was in the throes of absolute power.

She half expected a barrage of explosions, but nothing happened of the sort, and indeed slowly, David lowered his head again and shut his eyes, plunging the room back into campfire-lit twilight. Slowly, Terra picked herself back up, and closed with him again, kneeling down once more.

"David?" she asked, "are you all right?" An absurd question to ask with the world in ruins and himself turned into whatever the hell he was now, but the only one she could think to ask. "What _happened_?"

No reply, once more, though this time he clearly did hear her, slowly opening his blood-colored eyes again and looking up at her with an expression of confusion and apprehension. His mouth worked a few times, no sound emitted, and he blinked, his trembling hands more pronounced now.

She composed herself, wanting to shake him like a toy to get the information she desperately needed, but knowing that in his state, it might well kill him, if it didn't induce him to kill _her_ that is.

"David, _listen to me_," she said, taking him by the shoulders and staring directly into the red glow. "Where are the others?"

Deep inside, _something_ was working, she could see that much, even with the un-natural color. He blinked several more times, as though trying to dredge memories out of an unwilling brain. She could practically read the answer he was trying to give. 'Others... _others_...'

"The others," she repeated. "Beast Boy, Starfire, Cyborg, Jinx. When I found you, there was nobody else there. We _need _to find them. Did Trigon take them somewhere? Did they get turned to stone?"

His breath came in ragged wheezes, and she saw tears welling up in his molten eyes. He mouthed the word several times before he found the means to actually vocalize it.

"Gone..."

She fought down the urge to scream again. "Gone _where_, David? Did you see anything before Trigon - "

He doubled over all of a sudden, his hands clutched over his stomach like something was trying to eat its way out of his body, and collapsed onto his side. Soft muffled moans of pain or duress forced themselves between his clenched teeth, as he held his stomach with one hand and closed the other into a fist which he used to grab at his collar as though he was being choked. Terra's questions died in her throat and she hesitated for a moment, unsure of what to do. Yet moments later, the fit seemed to pass, and slowly David unclenched his tortured body, laying spent and exhausted on the asphalt like the victim of a car accident.

"I don't know..." he said, and his voice was raspy and thin, like a wraith's, yet he visibly _forced_ the words out, one after another, at God-knew what cost in agony, for she could see his entire body shudder with each one. "I... don't.... know... where they are..." he said.

She let that sit for now, watching him lay on the ground, wheezing for breath, tears pooling on the oil-coated asphalt next to his head. "Are you all right?" she asked for the second time, but this time she actually meant it.

He shuddered, curling up on himself. "C... cold..." he whispered.

"Hold on, I'll move the fire," said Terra, and she raised her hand to do just that, but he shook his head to stop her.

"No," he rasped, and he laboriously rolled over onto his stomach and struggled to his hands and knees, one hand still clutched over his midsection as though he was afraid his guts would spill if he did not hold them in. "In... inside..." he stammered, voice flecked with pain. "Like I... swallowed ice..."

Unsure if trying to help might make it worse, Terra waited as David slowly calmed down, and managed, with difficulty, to sit up. Slowly, he caught his breath, before opening his unearthly red eyes and turning his head back to her. "What... what did you _do _to me?" he asked.

She couldn't tell if the question was a rebuke or just fear-fueled confusion at what had happened to him. It didn't really matter. "The same thing Slade did to me," she said. "Trigon gave Slade the power to turn me back from stone. I... _know _stone. I remembered how."

It sounded so easy in words. There was no way to describe what the unspeakably intricate process was like, nor had she an explanation for what had _happened_ to him when she did it. The red eyes, the machine-gray skin and hair and clothing, she had no idea what had caused that, if it had been something of her doing, or how to reverse it if it had.

Still semi-delirious, David raised his head slowly, his red eyes unfocused as he tried to collect his thoughts. "I was... _dead_?" he asked.

"Petrified," she said. "Trigon turned you to stone, same as everyone else. I guess you could call it dead."

"But then... the others...?"

"You were the only one I found in the library," said Terra. "Trigon might have taken them somewhere else or..." she shook her head. "I don't know what happened to them."

He seemed to sense the various things she refrained from saying in her explanation, and lowered his head, covering half his face with one hand as he breathed with what appeared to be great difficulty, wheezing like a sprinter trying to catch his breath. "So... _now_ what?" he asked.

"I have no idea," admitted Terra. "I thought the others would be there, and if I turned them all back then maybe we could..." she trailed off, staring into the small campfire before lifting her head again. "We have to find them."

He didn't agree or disagree, in fact he didn't do anything, still shakily taking one breath after another, one hand clutched firmly over his midsection. When he finally did speak, it was to ask a wholly unrelated question, his voice a thin whisper.

"You were working for Trigon," he said, but all malice had been burnt out of him. He had not the strength left to curse her, just to state facts. "Why did you come back for us?"

"I was working for _Slade_," she corrected. "He didn't want this to happen, and neither did I. We tried to stop this." She closed her eyes, bitterness bringing the words to her throat unbidden. "If you'd just let me... if you'd _listened_ to me instead of..."

She couldn't finish the statement. They both knew how this might have been prevented. They both knew why it hadn't been. She had been angry at him for so long before the world ended, and even afterwards. Yet now here, in the darkness, watching him writhe ever-so-slightly in whatever torment he was shot through with, she simply couldn't sustain her anger any longer.

Apparently, neither could he.

"It doesn't matter now," she said. "You've got to help me find the others."

Her anger had not drawn so much as a peep, but this did. He raised his head, his expression such a perfect image of futility and anguish that she almost laughed. Tears were rolling down his face, his eyes still capable of that much despite their discoloration. It took him several tries, but he finally managed to vocalize his refusal.

"I can't," he said.

A sudden wave of bile rose in her throat unbidden. "They're your _friends_," she spat at him. "They're in trouble. You have to - "

"I _know_ that!" he half-shouted, half croaked, and the effort doubled him over. He lay on his hands and knees for a moment, trying to catch his breath, fists clenched tightly as he fought for breath.

She watched him fight with equanimity, the bile withdrew as quickly as it had risen. This was the boy, she reminded herself, who had fought her to a standstill _twice_, who had once told her that he was willing to have the other Titans kill him rather than go with her to meet Slade.

What the hell had Trigon _done _to him?

Carefully, she crouched down in front of him, taking his shoulder and helping him to sit up against a concrete pillar. "David, what _happened_? What's wrong?"

He lifted his head, pain visible even through the red fog of his scorched eyes. "He... took it."

"Took... ?" she knew the answer before she even finished the question, and her eyes widened as she suddenly understood.

"Devastator," he said, confirming it, clenching his teeth as he forced the words out. "He... _took_ Devastator."

The implications all hit her with a rush. Her expression went blank, her arm fell limp, and she felt an icy chill grip her heart. "How?" she asked, blankly.

He shook his head. "I don't know," he said. "There was a light and... and pain and... then he just... _ripped_ it out. I could _feel_ it. I can _still_ feel it missing. He winced and shuddered and lowered his head.

Terra didn't know what to say. She had known for months that Trigon had plans for Devastator, but not in a thousand years had she ever imagined that it might be this. She had no idea what Trigon could do with Devastator, but she had sufficient imagination to be able to guess. As images of galaxies on fire swirled around her, she wondered idly if Slade had known that this might happen.

Then again, at this point, did it matter if he had?

"Oh god..." she said, her voice hollow.

"Without Devastator, I can't help them," said David. "I can't help _you_. I can't even _see_."

The comment shook her out of her reflection. He was staring right at her. "What?"

He ground his teeth in frustration. "Not... _see_ see, I can't..." He waved his hand around at their surroundings, his voice turning thin and desperate. "I can't see the air. I can't see the walls, the carbon in the smoke, it's... I _know_ it's all there, but I can't _see _it! I've _always_ been able to see it. Even with no light, but now... I feel like someone ripped my guts out with a scoop and..." His grip tightened on his stomach as he knotted his shirt through his fingers. "I can... _feel_ where it ought to be, and it's not there. I never even knew it _was_ there until he..."

He trailed off, breath coming in ragged pulses, and his hands shook harder than ever. Terra had no idea what to say. She sat mutely as he tried to compose himself and failed.

"I can't..." he stammered, quieting to whispers, "I can't help them. I'm not a metahuman or a kinetic or... or whatever you are. I was just a _host_. And he took it away and... I can't... I can't help them. I can't help anyone... I... I can't..."

His voice disolved into formless sound. He fell to his side and and dug the fingers of one hand into the sides of his temples, and for a second she thought he was coughing until she saw the tears leaking through his hand and saw him convulsing softly with the effort of keeping them in, and before she knew it, he was crying.

Nothing showy, nothing extreme. He did not wail to the heavens or pound his hands on the cement floor, and indeed she didn't even realize what he was doing at first, and then he was already doing it, and she was sitting there watching him, and she hadn't the first idea of what to do now.

Not in any sense.

She didn't move, didn't say anything, just watched him in silence as he visibly struggled to stop and failed, whatever pains, imagined or real, guessable or wholly unknowable he was suffering simply too much to bear. There had been times of course when Terra would have given everything to let some devil rip her powers away. Most metahumans had such moments. But to actually have it happen...

... not to mention everything else.

She felt a lethargy descend on her shoulders like a leaden weight. What few plans she had managed to scrape together had all been predicated on the assumption that, no matter how bad things got, she had the one ace in the hole, the capacity to reverse Trigon's petrification process. She had gone to the library seeking to use it, but found nothing there, nothing but ruin and death and the rubble of men, and David, whom Trigon had broken more thoroughly than any Dantean hell she had been imagining lay in store for them all. Trigon had stolen everything that he defined himself by, his powers, his friends, his world, and left him to stand a silent monument to the futility of resistance to the Lord of Evil.

The fate of the others could be explained away with ease. Trigon had cared nothing for them, insects and protozoa scurrying beneath his cloven feet. David, former host of the Devastator, had been a matter of personal interest to the Devil. The others had not. Whether by conscious act, or as a mere side effect, the other Titans had simply been destroyed.

Until that very moment, Terra realized all of a sudden, she hadn't truly believed that it would come to this.

David was quiet now, still lying curled on his side on the bare floor, his blood-red eyes squeezed shut and veiled behind his knotted hand. In the stillness of the subterranean chamber, he could still be heard, breath hissing softly through clenched teeth, the occasional stifled sob still wracking his tormented frame. Whether he was mourning his burnt world, or his dead friends, or trying to alleviate his own pain, or perhaps all of the above, could not be determined. Nor did it matter.

She knew what Slade would have done here. She also knew what she probably should have done. And in a twisted way, she knew what would likely be the kind thing to do. But rather than any of these things, all Terra did was to slowly reach one hand out and laid it as gently as she could on his ashen-gray shoulder. She wasn't sure what reaction she would get, if he would throw her hand off or ignore it altogether, locked down in his own grief. Yet a few seconds after she did so, he reached around with his far hand, and took hers, and squeezed it as tightly as he could, like a vice, like a handhold above an abyss. He squeezed so tightly that it hurt, that she bit her lip to avoid crying out herself, but she didn't try to pull away, and when she raised her head, she found to her surprise that there were tears welling in her eyes as well.

The certainty of what Slade would have said in this situation hung before her, yet as she closed her eyes, and felt the tears start to run down her face, she took a wordless breath, silently prayed forgiveness for what she was about to do, and lied.

"It's okay, David," she said. "It's gonna be okay..."

**O-O-O**

The path wound down, down, down, endlessly down it appeared, to the point that Beast Boy was sure that sooner or later they would emerge in China. A sheer rock wall on one side, a bottomless pit on the other, and rough, uneven steps to descend. Despite the fact that he could fly, Beast Boy hugged the wall and kept well away from the yawning pit. Who knew what lay within it, or how things worked here after all?

Slade didn't seem to give it a second glance, but that didn't make him feel any better.

The darkness was _total_, no starlight, no moonlight, no reflections from some other, better lit place. His night vision availed him not at all, and he would have been walking blind had not Slade and he both been carrying burning torches, which served to illuminate their immediate vicinity. Not that there was any change in the scenery to mediate on. There was no sound except for their shuffling footsteps, not even an echo from somewhere else in the shaft, and despite the fact that this was _Slade_ after all, Beast Boy finally had to say something, if only to end the oppressive silence.

"So... where're we going?" he asked, trying to sound nonchalant.

He'd have bet even money that Slade was not going to answer him, having taken him on this trip under protest to begin with, but to his surprise, Slade answered cordially, or at least as cordially as Slade ever was.

"I'm not entirely certain," said the supervillain. "Into grave danger, regardless."

"Yeah," said Beast Boy. That much hardly needed saying. "But... is Raven near here? Do we have a long way to go?"

"Raven no longer exists on the same level that you or I do," said Slade. "She is not in a specific location. Finding her is as much a matter of instinct and desire as it is diligence."

Somehow, that actually made him feel slightly better. "Dude, I know instinct," he said. "And I _want _to find her. Should be easy, right?"

Slade only groaned. "We'll see," he said, darkly.

Beast Boy frowned. "What, you don't believe me?"

"Let's just say that Trigon has a way of altering people's priorities," said Slade.

Beast Boy might have asked more, but at that moment, they found the bottom of the shaft.

The staircase ended abruptly in an enormous open cavern. Beast Boy raised his torch, squinting as he struggled to see in the oppressive darkness, but could discern no features on any of the walls except for bare rock. Slade however didn't so much as hesitate, but turned halfway to the left and moved off into the darkness. Beast Boy followed, and presently they came to a pair of doors in the solid wall.

Carved from the living rock, and inscribed with meaningless sigils, the doors towered overhead at least twenty feet. No handle or knocker was visible, but a sliver of reddish light was _just_ visible around the margins of both doors. Slade walked up to one of the two doors, but paused at the threshold, before turning back to face Beast Boy for the first time since they had left the library.

"Before we continue," said Slade, "a warning. Even if Cyborg is successful at diverting Trigon's attention from us, his will permeates this entire place. Behind this door, you will find threats both physical and mental, and even if we succeed, I can't guarantee you'll like what you come upon."

Privately, Beast Boy wondered what was in the water that supervillains drank that led them all to throw out cryptic threats every ten seconds. He folded his arms, intending to look resolute and committed, but succeeded only in burning himself with his own torch before yelping and dropping it. Slade didn't react, though Beast Boy was sure he saw the supervillain's one eye narrow appreciably, and he quickly snatched the torch back up and tried to pretend that nothing had happened.

"I'll take my chances, dude," said Beast Boy.

"Hmph," was all Slade had to say to that, and he turned back to the door, bracing his shoulder against it. Beast Boy tossed his torch aside and shifted into the form of a cape buffalo before trotting up to the opposite door, lowering his head and touching it to the stone.

"One, two..."

The two of them shoved in unison, and with a loud grinding sound, the doors slid open enough to admit them onto a balcony overlooking the river of fire.

There was nothing else that this place could conceivably be called. Before them loomed a huge chasm, rent in the earth as though cloven by an axe. Despite the untold depths to which they had descended in the spiraling shaft, this place was deeper still, its vaulted ceiling lost in the darkness above, as would have been its depths had they not been flooded with molten lava, which flowed turgidly onwards like a slow-moving river. The sheer walls were lined with spigots of stone, carved in elaborate shapes bestial and monstrous, from whence poured further liquid fire to feed the molten river.

Beast Boy stood on the edge of the balcony, looking down into the pit of flowing flame, feeling the heat that, even at this height, could still be felt wafting off of it. He stared unblinking at it, mouth slightly ajar, conscious of Slade, who was watching him silently, and only after a few moments did he turn away from the river of fire and back to Slade.

"Slade, where... _are _we?" he asked, hesitantly. An underground catacomb made by Trigon worshipers beneath the old library he could perhaps accept, but there was simply no way that _this _place had existed all this time beneath Jump City.

Slade only shook his head. "Perdition," he said.

Before he could ask anything else, Slade gestured downwards. Beast Boy followed his pointed finger, and saw that directly below them was a small stone landing on the banks of the fire river. On it was located a small spire of rock, to which was tied a small boat. How a boat could possibly have survived sitting in the midst of a river of lava was unclear, and yet it bobbed there calmly, as though sitting on nothing more dangerous than a slow-moving river in some urban park.

Slade did not offer any explanations of what might be going on. Instead, in one, swift movement, he leaped off of the balcony and plunged down towards the landing, landing on his feet two hundred feet below with the balance of an acrobat. By now, Beast Boy didn't even wonder at how Slade hadn't shattered every bone in his body, and instead shifted into a hummingbird, and quickly flitted down to the landing, switching back to human form as Slade calmly stepped into the boat and took up position at the bow.

Though the boat accepted Slade with ease, Beast Boy was not so eager to leap into molten lava. "Um..." he asked, "are you positive we're not about to just melt?"

"If you're having second thoughts, changeling..."

Beast Boy frowned at the implication. "No way," he said. "This just isn't what I was expecting."

"It's the end of the world," said Slade, "what exactly _were_ you expecting?"

He had no answer to that question, and so changed the subject. "Look, _where _are we going?" he asked testily. "You said Raven's around here somewhere, right? If you don't know where she is, then how do you know that this is the right way?"

"Do you see another way?" asked Slade. "If so, you are welcome to follow it forever if you like. I will move down this river until another road presents itself."

Beast Boy rolled his eyes, but Slade seemed to consider the matter concluded. He took up the enormous pole mounted in the front of the boat and turned towards the front of the boat, leaving Beast Boy to board or not as he saw fit. Though he hated to prove Slade right, in the end there _wasn't_ another obvious path to take, even if he had felt like trying to fly over this river, and so grudgingly he climbed into the back of the boat and sat down, muttering as he took the rudder. No sooner had he done so than Slade drove the pole into the lava and pushed them off.

The boat bobbed and rolled, but took to the magma stream as though it were water, floating along without the slightest sign of structural damage. Beast Boy crouched lightly in the stern, half-expecting the floor of the boat to melt out from under him at any moment, yet it didn't even seem to heat up, and after a few minutes, even he had to admit that it seemed unlikely to do so.

The lava flow was slow and gentle, and Slade poled the boat forward like a gondola, moving at a steady pace. They passed tiny islets of rock sticking out above the turgid lava, some no larger than checkerboards, others larger than the boat they were in. The sheer rock walls that bordered the lava did not vary, and neither did the monstrous spigots that continuously vomited fresh lava into the river. Beast Boy steered them well around the apertures, having no desire to take an abrupt magma shower, but the pace was slow and the spigots sparse enough that this hardly took most of his concentration, and as the river rolled on and on, despite his best efforts to remain alert, his mind wandered.

And as always, heaven help whoever happened to be with him when that happened.

"So if you didn't want all this to happen, how come you were working for Trigon in the first place?"

They had been traveling for what might have been fifteen minutes in complete silence before Beast Boy asked the question, and for some time afterwards, Slade said nothing, indeed he did not even seem to acknowledge that Beast Boy had said anything. Beast Boy frowned and wondered how exactly he had wound up stuck on a boat in the middle of Hell with the world's only _non_-talkative supervillain, when suddenly Slade answered.

"It was something of a complex situation."

This, of course, was no answer at all, and Beast Boy snorted. "Right," he said. "I guess the powers and the demon armies were just side benefits?"

"Not everything is as cut and dry as you would have it be," said Slade. "Thanks to you and your friends, I wasn't exactly left with much choice."

"My friends," repeated Beast Boy. "You mean Terra."

Another pause. "I suppose I _do _mean her," said Slade. "It was her that got me into this, after all."

"What are you talking about?" asked Beast Boy. "She told David you were making her do all this, not the other way around."

That elicited a hollow laugh. "That much is true," said Slade. "Terra never had the stomach to operate on her own behalf after all. If she had, she wouldn't have needed you all."

Suddenly Beast Boy wished he _had_ been stuck with a non-talkative supervillain. "Shut up," was all he could say.

Slade, as always, saw right through it. "Not so eager to talk now, are we?" he asked in a sickeningly sweet tone that made Beast Boy want to throw him overboard. "It's been what, a full year? Does it still bother you, changeling, that she chose me over the Titans? Over you?"

"You _tricked_ her," he said. "You lied to her and manipulated her into doing all that stuff! Just like you did while you were working for Trigon"

"Use me as a scapegoat if it makes you feel better," said Slade, "but even _I'm_ not that good. Terra made her own decisions. I merely informed them." Slade returned his gaze to the lava ahead, poling the boat forward as he continued. "Besides, I think it's unquestionable that she did far better for herself with me, than she ever did with you."

Bitter anger rose like bile in Beast Boy's throat, but he managed to supress it as he twisted his face into a feral grin. "Oh yeah?" he said. "Way I remember it, she _killed _you and saved the city from your little volcano trap."

"And look how well _that _turned out," said Slade, his voice just a shade testier than it had been, which Beast Boy took as a victory. "She managed to kill me, and herself, and thereby condemn us both to the service of the Devil for the purposes of ending the world. I offered her status, power, and training in the control of her abilities, not to mention a share in my new world order. You offered nothing but a cheap box held together with duct tape."

Beast Boy's eyes shot open, and his voice died in his throat as Slade slowly turned his head back. "Oh yes," said the supervillain, voice whisper-quiet and dripping with arrogance, "she showed it to me. If _that's_ your idea of romanticism, it's no wonder she tossed you aside."

It took _everything_, everything Beast Boy _had_, to remain seated. It took everything he had to _not_ act, to _not _adopt the form of some eldritch nightmare from the darkest corners of a horror novel, to _not_ smash the boat to splinters in a frothing rage. What with everything, with Raven and Robin and the crises piled upon crises, he had almost forgotten how bad the pain was, but right here, right now, it came back like an old friend, like a spike driven through his chest that brought tears back to his eyes. It was still just as bad as it had been the day, the hour, the very _instant_ that he had hung there, clinging by his fingertips to the side of a bottomless chasm, as Terra brought a massive rock down to seal him off, his last sight of her a twisted, mocking grin that bored through him like a mining laser.

He fought himself, he fought the presence that he called "the Beast" that lay within him always, and now roared like the caged animal it was and beat its fists against his psyche in pure outraged pain, ready to tear Slade apart and festoon the walls with his entrails. He dug the fingers of his gloves into the seat and clenched his teeth tightly enough to bite through a steel bar, and let the tears run down his face as he fought it off. A year, a _full_ year it had been, with chaos and adventure and triumph and agony and pain and joy all its own, and still, even now, it took Slade no more than a dozen words to turn him back into a raging animal. And he hated himself for that almost as much as he hated Slade for it.

_Almost_.

He had no idea if Slade knew how close he had come to provoking Armageddon redux, but for whatever reason, Slade didn't push it further, returning to his task in smugly satisfied silence. And after a few minutes, once he was calm enough to speak again, Beast Boy pronounced his final judgment.

"You're a monster," he said simply.

Slade didn't even bat an eye. "Yes," he said. "We have that in common don't we? _Beast _Boy?" He let his voice slither over the name as though it were some delectable liqueur, just long enough to be noticeable. Beast Boy didn't answer, refused to let himself answer, just sat in the back of the boat in stony silence, until Slade spoke again, and suddenly his voice was back to normal, no nonsense, no inflection, no emotion at all, just hard practicalities.

"You think I do this to amuse myself?" he asked. "If you _really _want Raven back, you must deal with much worse than that. If you can't control yourself, you're of no use to anyone, least of all me. Trigon is not as _nice_ as I am, and he will place obstacles in your path far beyond anything I can do."

Beast Boy had _had it_ with this 'ominous cryptic warning' crap, especially from Slade. "I don't need _your _advice," he snapped at Slade, "and I don't _care _what you think about me! What _is_ all this stuff Trigon's got to throw at us that you keep pretending you know so much about?!"

Suddenly, the boat lurched to a halt, nearly pitching Beast Boy over into the gunwales. He grabbed the side to steady himself, and looked up to see that Slade had jammed the steering pole down into the bottom of the river, and brought the boat to a sudden halt.

And before Beast Boy could open his mouth to ask the question, his eyes widened as he saw why.

The river ahead of them was boiling, writhing, as though a school of demonic fish were trying to rip their way out of it. A moment later, and they were no longer trying. First one, then five, then _dozens_ of fire demons, the same legless floating figures of sulfur and magma that had assaulted the Tower and carved a path of ruin through the streets of Jump City, erupted into the air like startled birds. Screaming and roaring like damned souls, they twirled through the air for a moment, before spinning and diving towards the small boat, and the two occupants thereof.

Things got somewhat chaotic after that.

Beast Boy jumped out of the boat, an action which, given what the boat was presently sitting in, was not something he would have ever envisioned himself doing, and only the instinctive choice to opt for the form of a small bluejay rather than a massive pterodactyl saved him from being diced to sushi by the lashing tendrils of a dozen screaming demons. Behind him, the boat was instantly cut to ribbons by demons aiming at either him or Slade, he couldn't tell which. Slade however had also opted to be elsewhere, pivoting off of the pole and vaulting through the air like an acrobat. Two of the demons tried to interrupt his flight, and he smashed them to paste with the fireproof pole before landing on a table-sized rock island in the middle of the river, brandishing the lava-dripping boat pole like a quarterstaff.

For a brief moment, Beast Boy was reminded of Robin. And then the demons blocked his view, and he had too much else to worry about.

They lunged at him from all sides and he clawed for altitude, evading a dozen strikes at a time as the demons flayed the air with their flaming tendrils and elongated arms of molten rock. His feathers wilted as the searing heat passed within milimeters, and he downsized again and again, to a hummingbird, then a dragonfly, then finally a mosquito, so small that the demons could barely see him, let alone attack. A good half of them gave up, and shouldering over like fighter planes, dove at Slade, who was trying to fend two dozen demons off by himself with nothing more than an iron stick.

Monster or not, Beast Boy didn't even hesitate.

From the smallest of insects, Beast Boy suddenly turned into a furious grizzly bear, surprising the nearest four demons, three of whom were ripped apart by claw and tooth before they had a chance to register what had happened. The fourth lashed out, but its tendrils struck empty air, as Beast Boy shifted into a Python in mid-air, spun his body into a loop, and grabbed the demon's extended arm-tendril in one of his coils. He half-hissed, half-cried out in pain as the demon's fiery skin scorched his scales, but a moment later he swung his weight hard to the side and launched the demon like a slingshot straight into the rock wall with enough force that it exploded against it like a water balloon.

The lava river loomed below, but a second later, and Beast Boy was an eagle, not normal but gigantic, an primordial eagle the size of a Cessna airplane, and his talons lashed out and tore another demon to pieces even as his great wings beat the air and carried him towards Slade.

Slade had relocated to a larger rock, impaling a demon and forcing it back under the surface as a pivot in order to do so, but three more demons had seized his pole with their tendrils and were now trying to drag him into the lava with it. Perhaps a dozen more were moving to try and intercept Beast Boy, to prevent him from interfering. But if there was _anything_ Beast Boy was good at, it was interference, something Slade knew, and the demons were about to find out.

In an instant, Beast Boy was simply _gone_, gone as though he had teleported away. Two demons, unable to abort their lunge, collided in mid-air and spiralled down into the river like shot birds. The others sliced the very air apart, but caught nothing whatsoever, and a second later, Beast Boy re-appeared _beyond_ them all, having traversed the intervening space in the form of a gnat so small that it was nearly microscopic. Now he took on the shape of a peregrine falcon, and before any of the demons behind him could so much as react, he folded his wings and dove at the three accosting Slade.

He hit one of them at nearly two hundred miles an hour and caved its head in like a piece of bubble wrap, bouncing off of the demon's crumpled form and back up into the air so fast that the splashing sulfur and magma didn't even have time to burn him. Another one released Slade's weapon and lashed at him, but he switched to the form of a Rhinoceros and shrugged the blow off with thick armor before landing atop the unfortunate demon and splattering it all across the cavern. The last demon had no chance to even act before Slade planted his feet and hurled it towards Beast Boy, who simply impaled the sulfuric monster on his horn before hurling it off into the river of lava with a shake of his head.

The remaining demons, having lost half their number in less than thirty seconds, fell back to regroup, and Beast Boy switched back into his human form, crouched low, as was his wont. Slade had selected the largest and most stable-looking island in sight to make his stand, a flat slab of immobile granite the size of a tractor trailer, and he now moved into the middle of it, brandishing his ersatz staff, cherry-red at both ends where he had used it to cleave demons apart or plumb the depths of the river of fire. Not without hesitation, Beast Boy backed up towards him, half-expecting to feel Slade plunging the business end of the staff into his back at any moment. Slade however, managed to restrain himself. Whatever the business between them, the demons were plainly a more pressing threat.

Yet rather than resume the attack, the demons held back. Though they still numbered at least twenty, no further demons were surging forth to join their ranks, the lava beneath them once more in calm state it had been in prior to their rising. Wherever the endless legions that Trigon had employed before were, this group plainly was finite, and bereft of the advantage of endless numbers, they seemed more subdued, waiting for an opportunity rather than blindly charging.

"Is this one of those 'obstacles' you were talking about?" asked Beast Boy without turning around.

"_This_?" scoffed Slade, planting his staff in the rock at his feet. "This is just a minor inconvenience. Nothing two old friends can't handle."

For a brief second, Beast Boy forgot all about the demons, rounding on Slade in righteous fury. "I am _not_ your friend!" he yelled, loud enough to echo through the cavern.

Slade seemed almost bemused by his reaction, and no doubt would have responded with some pithy comment or other, save that, at that moment, someone else beat him to it.

"Of course not!" came a voice from far above, raspy and mocking and instantly familiar, and as both Slade and Beast Boy turned their heads, they saw, far _far_ above them, perched atop one of the stone spigots, a small, lithe figure, crouched on all fours like a cat preparing to pounce. At the distance they were at, so small a figure would not normally have been discernible, yet despite that, Beast Boy's eyes popped and his heart froze, for he recognized the silhouette instantly without need for a second glance. And as he watched, the figure leaped from the spigot and plunged down, landing in a crouch on another rock island, the orange glow of the river of fire revealing its ash-gray skin and clothing, its red eyes burning like coals, its fanged teeth bared in a twisted grin, gloved hands crossed as it stood up and faced itself across the stream of magma.

"You don't _have_ any friends," said the perfect duplicate of Beast Boy in a mocking laugh, and then all the demons charged at once.

**O-O-O**

Life comes down to a series of choices.

Some of them are hard. The kind that keep you up at night, waiting for inspiration, divine or otherwise, to strike you. They burn at your mind in the quiet hours of the night, second guessing, telling you all about the verdant green of the grass on the other side of the fence.

_He stands on a lump of sterile rock that was once part of the waterfront. His systems are telling him that everything is in perfect readiness, within normal threat tolerances. Several encyclopedias worth of information are being beamed through his optic nerves every few seconds, but he's really not paying attention to any of it. When the readouts finally realize this, they switch automatically to a standby mode, waiting for him to call them back up. And then it's just him. And the Devil._

Those kinds of choices will kill you if you let them. They'll drag you down into your own personal Hell, crying all the time, those most horrific of words in the English language: 'If I had only...' They come back at you, years after the fact, gnawing at your mind like rodents in the darkness, when time has worn the memories down to raw fact, and the context is lost, and all you can think about is why... why did you do that... why didn't you do this.

They're enough to drive a man mad.

_It looms ahead like the shadow of Death itself. A vast, nebulous figure, diffused by the haze, indistinct, even with polarizers and cutting-edge image amplification software. Draped over the ruined Tower as though it were a cross between a crucifix and a throne._ _ His arms draped across the Tower's. His body resting on its slanted form. His head is invisible, hunched, hanging down where the smoke is thicker. And from across the sea of flames, there is the distinct sound of something breathing._

_Cyborg is standing on the shores of Hell, looking across the Lake of Fire at the Devil himself._

_And he's got a cannon._

_For a brief moment, he's reminded of one the video games Beast Boy used to play..._

Most choices though, are a little different.

_His arm begins to change, shift, morph. His fingers fold in on themselves and slide back over his forearm, and his wrist expands and slides forward, becoming an aperture rather than a limb. The blue glow that permeates his entire being becomes more pronounced, more concentrated. His forearm glows bright blue, like the skies used to be before the Devil arrived, and he doesn't even need to glance down at it to know that it's ready._

We make choices every day. We make them in split seconds, without even thinking about them. Hundreds and thousands of them, every minute of every day of our lives. Sometimes they're so routine that we don't even need to think about them. Sometimes they're not of any particular importance.

_He raises the cannon, taking his time, for what can a few more seconds matter at this point? His targeting sensors are useless in the dust and smoke, but he doesn't need them. Not at this range, not at this target. He sights along the barrel of his cannon by eye, aiming at the center of the black mass, his mechanical joints locking into place to prevent any last-second twitch. Seven hundred and twenty four diagnostic systems perform their checks in less than a quarter of a second, and all of them report back green. Mechanically-speaking, everything is ready._

The great paradox of our lives though, is that sometimes the choices we make are so important that we don't let ourselves think about them at all.  
_  
He fires_.

_His fusion battery has long-since allocated power to the task at hand, transfered through networks of superconductive Magnesium Diboride fiber-cabling chilled with liquid helium to four hundred degrees below zero. Twelve different ultrasonic emitters switch on, and two thousandths of a second later, the micro-distortion field attains criticality, and a brilliant blue-white glow emerges from the end of his forearm, swirling and dancing through the dust-loaded air like a magical spell. It's the light of a hundred billion particles of dust, pollutants, individual molecules of argon and CO2, all undergoing spontaneous nuclear fission as they're subjected to an ultrasonic wave thirty times stronger than that of the most powerful jet engine in the world. In the blink of an eye, the visible beam of ultrasound stabs across the gulf like the finger of God, and slams straight into the Devil's chest with enough power to punch a hole through a battleship._

_Trigon notices._

Our brains are selfish, relentless calculators, a thousand million chemical microprocessors churning at once in a remorseless rhythm. Complex simulations running through a hundred probable outcomes a second and discounting ninety-nine of them before they even break the surface of our conscious mind. We analyze, deduce, predict, estimate, all in our own interest, all without even trying to, trying constantly to figure out how best to serve ourselves.

But once in a while, we decide to stop.

_The haze closes back in over the ionized trail left by the sonic cannon, and shrouds the target, fogging sensors, obfuscating analysis. None of it matters in any event. Powerful as the sonic cannon is, Trigon is simply beyond it, even in his weakened form. It is as the finite pitted against the infinite.  
_  
_Low growls, rumbling in the distance like heavy machinery. A shimmer in the polluted air, and then the vast, Dantean shadow begins to stir. It seems to swell, rising like a fume of poison, looming into the air as tall as the Tower itself. An indistinct red glow emanates from the top of it as Trigon opens his four red eyes and turns towards the shore on which Cyborg stands. And then, with a footfall that sounds like the thunder of heavy artillery, he approaches._

We are not creatures of logic and reason by nature. We are animals of instinct and reflexive reaction. Our affectations of calculation are learned, not inherent. We learn as children to think before we act, to draw conclusions from the world around us, to operate the computers of our minds. From our earliest years, we practice with the faculties of reason until it becomes rote, and we no longer know how to set it aside, until one day something compels us to learn.

That something can be anything. Revelation, fear, anger, depression, anything that makes us throw aside our cultivated rationality and revert to base instinct. The veneer is so thin that a thousand things can tear it, even rip it to pieces, sometimes never to be repaired, a single powerful emotion bringing us back to the basics of our humanity all at a rush.

_Step by seismic step, Trigon approaches, looming up out of the darkness like a nightmare given form. The fire laps at his cloven feet, and the smoke clouds wreath his head like a coronet. He stretches to the heavens, vast, unimaginably vast, taller than the tallest skyscraper. Still hundreds of yards from the shore, he stares down at Cyborg with four eyes of glowing hate_, _like charcoals set in a statue of blood._

This is different.

_**"Insignificant insect,"**__ comes a voice that could only be the devil's. It rumbles and rolls like boulders crashing down from great heights, deep and twisted, a voice of animate hate that bores into his metal skull like a drill bit. Despite the ocean of lava not five steps away, he feels the air chill as Trigon speaks._

_**"Do you think yourself wise?"**__ says the Devil. __**"To attack me while I gather my strength? Did you deem this to be to be wisdom of a sort? You are a fool, Victor Stone, and your soul shall dance in agony for the rest of time."**_

He's not here because he's enraged.

_All four of Trigon's eyes glow bright red, and beams of purified death manifest from them, blending together into a cone that strikes the sea of fire and parts it like a blade, sweeping over the flames towards Cyborg, who stands on the shores of Hell and watches it come._

He's not here out of fanaticism or desperation.  
_  
There's nowhere to run. The cone is fifty yards wide and approaching at speed, and he can't get out of its way fast enough to make a difference. He doesn't even brace himself for the impact, staring up past the cone at the devil who looms overhead, arms at his sides. The sound and the fury of the destruction that Trigon is wreaking before him becomes blinding, deafening, and the ground beneath his feet shatters from the force of it. And then a second later, the cone overtakes him, and everything vanishes._

He's here, in this place, at this time, because he made a choice.

_The red beam combs over the promontory where Cyborg once stood several times, methodically reducing it to ash and ruin. And then, when it is done, and complete, the Devil's eyes dim, and the cone of death vanishes, and there's nothing left but a shroud of smoke._

_A sudden gust of wind tears the smoke aside, and reveals the results of Trigon's handiwork._

And it was the easiest choice in the world.

_Nothing._

_The promontory is gone now. Melted and vaporized and cast away into the atmosphere like sand in a dust storm. Yet Cyborg still stands where he was a moment ago, his arms still limp, his eyes still fixed on Trigon. The ground beneath his feet still remains, now carved off into an island in the sea of fire. And all around him, like a bubble manifested from nothingness, vaguely tinted red like the rest of the world, is a translucent shield._  
_  
And on Cyborg's finger, a small ring of gold sparkles in the unearthly twilight._

_Trigon does not react at the failure of his powers. He does not rage or act in surprise, nor even fire anew. For a second or two, devil and teenager stare at one another. And then Trigon's mouth curls back into a sneering smile, and he laughs._

_**"You carry a ring of Azar,"**__ says Trigon. __**"No doubt a relic from a former minion."**__ Trigon seems amused, almost pleased by this turn of events. For a moment he laughs, a horrifying sound, like that of a tidal wave drowning a village of innocents. And then his face is stern again._

_**"It matters not," **__says Trigon,__** "fighting you is beneath me."**_

_The lava begins to boil._

To stand before the Devil, and to try and fight him is not rational. To do such a thing is not self-interested, not even in the wider sense that people use to justify living by codes of heroism or justice. It does not advance the causes to which Cyborg has dedicated his life, nor does it permit him to think of himself in a better light. It does not expiate guilt or vanquish doubt. It does not bring him peace. It does not bring him closure. It does not matter.

It is not meant to.

_The boiling lava begins to surge, splashing at the rock near Cyborg's feet, as though within it, things were writhing in the deep. A moment later, and the truth of this statement is made manifest, as numberless creatures, demons, beings of flame and sulfur, begin to claw their way out of the fire sea. All around they surge forth, like raindrops in a hurricane, and they rise into the air, damned souls or demons or some other creature of darkness brought forth by the will of Trigon._

_Cyborg crouches and jumps backwards, landing back on the shore and backing slowly away from it as the demons form up in phalanxes a hundred wide and sixteen deep. Trigon too is backing away, moving back towards the island, where he sits once more, leaning against the Tower as though it were his throne, barely visible through the haze, yet his words are loud and clear as clarions rung in the morning.  
__**  
"Die with your world, hero, and know eternity as my slave."**_

_What use is there in shouting defiance at the Devil? The Devil who no doubt has heard every curse and vile malignancy ever pronounced by the living a hundredfold. And so, as the armies of Hell form up before him, Cyborg does not respond to Trigon's taunts. He does not scream a warcry or repeat the words of learned men. Yet despite this, words come to him unbidden. Words he has pronounced only once in four years, welling up from within him, from a place he had thought no longer existed, from a life he left behind years ago. Words that he left behind ages ago, but that he finds, now, here, in this present of death, are with him still._

_"Our father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name."_

_It has been two and a half years since Cyborg entered a church, and longer than that since he prayed. Indeed, __Cyborg__ has never done so. The half-remembered prayers he uttered so long ago were those of Victor Stone, and like so much else, he gave them up when he became what he is now. He did not miss them, liturgical nonsense recited by hypocritical liars who thought themselves holy for pretending to work on behalf of others. He had been drifting away from it before the accident, and the transformation only made it permanent. Rather than listen to a paid spokesman preach morals to him, he put them into practice by himself, and with his friends, and left God to see to his own affairs. It was an arrangement he never regretted, ever._

_Nor does he regret it now._

_"Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven."_

_There is no rapture. He does not feel the light of God gracing him. Angels do not descend from on-high, to challenge the Devil and defend their champion, if indeed that is what Cyborg is. Yet he does not stop, and he does not falter, his voice ratcheting up in volume and intensity as he recites the words buried deep in the corner of his mind. The demons range themselves around him in a semicircle, advancing onto the shore, as he continues to speak, louder and louder, stretching tall, his mechanical limbs shining silver and blue in the twilight of the Gods._

_"Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us."_

_He steps to the side, and grasps a street sign, eleven feet tall and topped with a metal board painted to indicate no parking along the waterfront. With one tug, his robotic servos uproot the entire sign like a tree, and he smashes the concrete divot on it against the ground, shattering it like pottery, leaving bare metal behind. He turns it over in both hands, feeling the weight, and turns back to the demons, advancing at the will of their master in lock-step, and he hefts the sign like a poleaxe and steps towards them._

_"And lead us not into temptation," says Cyborg, "but deliver us from evil."_

Cyborg made a choice, not long ago. Faced with the situation he was in, he chose to consciously set his calculating mind aside. He chose to fight Trigon alone, not because he could win, not because he wished to make a game ending of it, not because he had staked his very self-worth against the notion of acting heroically, and not because he felt it would save the world. He chose to fight Trigon, knowing full well that by no metric anyone had ever invented, did this choice make rational sense.

He has chosen to fight Trigon because every second that Trigon must send his armies against him, is a second in which they are not being sent at Beast Boy and Starfire, and another second in which his only remaining friends in the world, will live.

It is the easiest choice that Cyborg has ever made.

_The demons close, yet they hold back out of reach of his ersatz poleaxe, and he does not open fire on them, not yet, for he wishes to save his power for where he feels it will be of most use. But before he can determine whether to strike now or to wait, the demons stop in their tracks, and he hears a loud "crunch" behind him, as though something heavy has just fallen from on high and landed on the ground._

_He turns, and he sees himself. A perfect replica, identical in every way save color, for where Cyborg's skin is dark brown, and his metallic components blue and silver and indigo, the duplicate's skin is ashen-white, like a vampire or animate corpse, and his cyborg parts a gunmetal gray, washed out, like a picture denuded of color, save only for his eyes, both human and mechanical, which shine like burning coals in the darkness of the ruined shore. And as Cyborg watches this perfect replica rise to a standing position, and fold his arms in the way that he knows is his own, he hears the duplicate finish his own prayer... in his own voice._

We make choices, every day. Some are important, and some less so. But common to all of them, and to all of us, is one simple truth as creatures of reason: We make the choices, whatever they might be, and we live with the consequences. Sometimes for a moment. Sometimes forever.

_"For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory," says the duplicate, and his arm shifts into a cannon, as he crouches low and grins in anticipation. And part of Cyborg is surprised, shocked even, to see this __thing__ here before him, and wonders what it is, and how it came to be here, and why, but the rest of him, the part of him immune to surprise and calculation, the part he has consciously placed in control, only narrows his eyes._

_"Amen."_

Such is life.

**O-O-O**

Starfire didn't know where she was going.

The landmarks were still there, but they seemed to have been re-arranged, as though somebody had taken the buildings and moved them, like children's block towers. The familiar grid of streets no longer was familiar, and not merely from the smoke, yet she pressed on regardless, flying over ruins that had once been houses and apartment buildings, factories and office towers. Had she been trying to find a specific place, it would have been utterly maddening, but she had no idea where to look, and so one place was as good as any, no matter where it was in relation to anything else.

The shroud of ash and smoke closed behind her as she flew, blocking out her view of Trigon and Cyborg and Beast Boy and whatever else might be about tonight. She was glad that it did. Had she been able to see the others, she likely would not have been able to muster the necessary joy to propel herself in flight. Indeed, she was only able to manage as she was by dint of memory, dredging up the memories of happier days, of the days before Trigon had arrived, before his minions had reached out, the days when things were still as they had once been. Compared to now, these memories were like ambrosia.

A roar, a sharp, angry roar, was all the warning she got, as suddenly three flame demons descended on her from out of the smoke-cloud, and by pure instinct she rolled to her left as they slashed past, biting through the air she had occupied an instant before with razor-sharp tendrils of living flame. Passing her elevation in a rush, the demons split up, one flying on ahead, as the other two came about for another attempt.

They didn't get far.

Joy required memory, required denial and longing and a host of other emotional exercises to conjure up. _Fury _however, was close at hand, a hair-trigger away at even the best of times now, and she called on it so quickly that the demons never had a chance to regret their decision. Beams of energy lanced forth from her eyes and skewered one of the flame demons, blowing it to steam and flecks of rock. The other managed to evade her thrown starbolt, and lunged at her like a thrown spear, but she jackknifed in mid-air and met it head on with her fist in a downward swing, tearing a deep gouge straight through it and letting it pinwheel towards the ground below.

The last demon saw what had befallen its fellows, and turned tail, fleeing into the city at best speed. Starfire flew after it, shaking the molten sulfur from her hand like rainwater as she chased it down streets and around corners. Fists extended forward, she conjured starbolts and fired them, splitting the air all around the demon, yet it twisted and twirled and evaded her shots, turning again and again and preventing her from aiming correctly. On and on they flew, Starfire neither knowing where they were nor where they were heading, yet no matter how fast she urged herself, the demon matched her speed, though it did not exceed it, remaining within view at all times, until finally she ceased firing. The demon was plainly not trying to evade her entirely. It wanted her to follow it.

She did so.

Several minutes passed in silence, as the demon flew on, and Starfire followed, until all of a sudden, there loomed an _enormous_ edifice, appearing through the smoke and haze quite out of nowhere. The size of a major skyscraper, it was black and crenelated, carved from what seemed to be a solid block of volcanic stone, rising into the air like a soaring cathedral of the damned. Towers and spires emerged from it haphazardly, reaching far into the sky, and illuminated by bright fires that burned ceaselessly atop their pinnacles. Where this monstrous eyesore had come from was beyond her, for it resembled no other structure she had seen on Earth, let alone in Jump City, yet she did not pause to determine its origin, but flew after the demon as it closed on one of balconies opening up on this side. A moment later and it landed, and turned about, looking up at her, waiting.

She landed next to demon, touching down on the balcony of stone lightly, not trusting that it wouldn't crumble at her touch. An instant later, the demon flew off into the darkness, so quickly now that she lost sight of it in moments, as the smoke closed behind it, and then she was alone.

A pause on the threshold, and then she entered the building.

The balcony led to a short corridor, unadorned with tapestries or any other hanging or decoration, and ahead loomed a massive door made of rusted iron, from which loose chains hung attached to empty manacles. She brushed these aside gingerly, and placed her hands on the door, pushing against it to open it. It weighed more than the T-car, yet she shoved it open without undue difficulties, and stepped inside.

Before her stood a large, vaulted chamber, carved from the same stone as the rest of the place, but with infinitely more care than the outside had been. Reliefs were carven into the walls, spiraling up the freestanding columns that dotted the chamber, representations of horned devils and other monsters devouring numberless beings, humanoid and otherwise, or casting them into cauldrons of flame to be boiled alive. The room was enormous, the size of a temple or the great hall of a Tamaranean castle, and archways, and columns loomed overhead like great trees, yet there was no roof for them to hold up. The chamber was open to the scorched sky, and the clouds of ash that danced overhead.

Carefully, she walked into the enormous chamber, alert for the ambush she was certain was in order, yet nobody appeared to be present, be they demon or otherwise. The only sound was that of her footsteps on the stone floor, and the soft rumblings that augured any number of things, periodically emanating from the rest of the city.

And then suddenly, she saw him.

A light materialized from overhead, a light that came from nowhere, for there was no ceiling to bear it, and the sun remained hidden. Yet light there was, and it illuminated the far side of the room. There stood a dais near the far wall, looming above the rest of the chamber, with steps leading up to it. And atop the dais, there stood a man in Gold.

He was facing away from her, bent over an object at waist height, a basin of some kind mounted on a pedestal, from whence soft light emitted. Initially, he gave no sign that he had seen her. Then slowly, he raised his head, stretching up to his full height, though he did not turn.

"Hello, Princess," said Warp, his voice smooth and calm, barely more than a whisper. "I was hoping that you would come."

She did not answer in words.

Before she could speak, before she could _think_, a spike of bilious fury shot through her like a spear made of light, and her vision clouded over a radioactive green. With a roar of incandescent rage, she stepped forward and hurled a white-hot starbolt at Warp's back, powerful enough to reduce a man to ash. It sailed towards Warp like a meteor, singing the very air as it passed, yet an instant before it struck, Warp simply disappeared.

The starbolt hit the far wall and exploded, blasting a divot out of the living stone and scattering fragments over the room, yet before it had even struck, Warp simply _materialized_ five feet in front of Starfire, facing her this time, his arms still folded carefully. No flash or burst of power accompanied this sudden appearance. He simply was atop the dais one moment, and the next he was directly before her.

"And here I was hoping we might have a pleasant conversation," said Warp.

Once more, her rage boiled over, and she lunged forward with her fist, tears streaming from her glowing eyes. But as before, Warp simply dissolved before her eyes, and her fist struck nothing but the air. Before she could even recover from the strike, an energy blast hit her in the back, throwing her off her feet onto the floor on her stomach. She rolled over onto her back to find Warp standing behind her, one arm raised towards her with fist extended, and atop his forearm was a glowing laser.

"It's been a long, _long_ time, Princess," said Warp. "Longer for me than you I suppose, but then that's to be expected."

"Warp," she said, spitting the name out as though it tasted terrible, and she got back to her feet carefully, watching him as she prepared new Starbolts. He did not act to stop her, but neither did he lower his hand. She considered how best to hurl them this time, but as she was considering it, he seemed to read her intentions, and shook his head.

"That would be a grave mistake," said Warp, "one I am hoping it won't be necessary to correct."

"You have _nothing_ with which to threaten me, Warp!" she spat back at him. "It _was _a grave mistake for you to permit me to find you."

"Ah, but some mistakes are worth making," said Warp, a cruel smile crossing his face. "This one most of all. Believe me when I tell you that you have _no idea_ how long I've been waiting for this little chat."

"I will _not_ countenance your lies," said Starfire through clenched teeth. "I do not care to hear them!"

"No!" barked Warp sharply, "No lies! No lies between us, Princess, I won't allow it. Not now. Only the truth. The unvarnished truth."

She didn't know what to make of this. "Why did you bring me here?" she asked, trying to determine if any of the golden material covering Warp's body might be the source of his ability to vanish and re-appear.

He smiled conspiratorially, as though he could read her mind, but chose to play along with her. The thought was unsettling, to say the least. "Because, Princess," he said, as he casually extended his hand back towards the softly glowing pedestal, "there are things I wished you to see."

For a moment, she thought he intended for her to look into whatever the light source on the dais was, as though she were mad enough to do such a thing at his behest. Yet a moment later, the light flared up like a bonfire, and all of a sudden a picture appeared above it, like a projector or holographic display.

And in the picture, she saw Beast Boy, and the relief that she felt in seeing him alive and apparently unharmed, unsuppressible, indisguisible relief, was suddenly overcome by shock.

There were _two_.

Two Beast Boys, both in the form of great birds, flying high above a river of molten fire. Identical in form, apparently identical in capacity, she watched as both of them shifted again and again, form after form both monstrous and mundane, as they sought advantage over one another. They ducked and wheeled, darting in and out, seeking openings, both endowed with the miraculous shapeshifting powers that the original had possessed. Yet there was no question which was the original, for one of the two Beast Boys was as she remembered, a thousand shades of green, emerald and viridian and harlequin and evergreen by turns. The other was like nothing she had ever seen. No matter what it shifted into, scaled, skinned, or furred, it remained the same sickly gray, like a corpse animated from the dead, its eyes a molten, fiery red. Yet even without the color-coding, she would have known which was the Beast Boy she knew. The gray changeling had Beast Boy's powers, but did not make use of them as he did, his attacks too feral, his motions too aggressive, too sudden, as though someone had amputated Beast Boy's reason and restraint and left only the raging bestial force that lay somewhere within his core.

"Trigon may be the Lord of Evil," said Warp, watching her watch the pictures, "but as with all heroes, you are your own worst enemies."

The picture pixilated, and then suddenly she saw Cyborg. He stood in a ring formed of living flames, and in his hand was a pole of iron, beaten and bent out of all recognition and glowing cherry-red at both ends. Demons lay broken at his feet in numbers unguessable, yet the demons were not the focus of his attention, for before him stood another Cyborg, and it too was gray, as if formed from bricks of ash, staring at the original with red eyes both human and mechanical, a cruel sneer on his face, and his hand replaced with a glowing cannon.

It took great efforts to suppress her initial urge, which was to fly off as fast as she could to find Cyborg and Beast Boy and help them. That she did not do so was more or less only because she had no idea where they were now, and because Cyborg had told her that if there was any chance to find Robin...

Steeling herself, she turned back to face Warp. "Is this all you have to show me?" she asked, loading her voice with regal contempt. "Parlour tricks and cowardice? Is your master so unimaginative that he can face us only with pale imitations of ourselves? Or were you hoping you might break our wills by showing us twisted simulacra and make us fall down and beg you for mercy?"

Warp seemed to find this funny. "They are not mere copies," he said. "Raven was not the only one possessed of a bad side, after all."

"Then am I to assume you have prepared a similar version of me?" she asked, crossing her arms, and looking about, half-expecting a gray-skinned, red-eyed copy of herself to appear from behind some column or archway. "Did you bring me here to watch me do battle with myself?"

Warp however merely shook his head. "No," he said. "Nothing so crass. I've brought you here to offer you a chance at redemption."

"I wish for _nothing_ you have to offer!"

"Not even Robin?"

She froze, silenced as if by fiat, and when she managed to resume speaking, her tone was quieted somewhat, a near-whisper like his.

"Where is he?"

"He's here," said Warp with a soft smile. "I had him brought here as part of my arrangement with Trigon. I was hoping that his presence might induce you to come looking for him. Perhaps, if you give me what I am owed, I will even let you see him."

Her rage boiled up once more. "I owe you _nothing_," she roared at him, "save for justice!"

"_Justice?!_" exploded Warp, his eyes suddenly wild with unmistakable fury of his own. "Justice!" he repeated, "you would _dare_ to speak to _me _of justice?! You know _nothing_ of justice! _Nothing_! You are a _liar _and a _hypocrite_ and you will _not speak of justice to me! EVER!_"

So furious, so explosively enraged was Warp that Starfire actually took a step backwards, yet her own fire did not quench before his. "You are a murderer and a traitor!" she shot back at him. "You murdered Robin, you betrayed your own world, and you have sided with the Lord of Evil against all of creation! _I will speak to you of what I choose!_"

"Yes," said Warp, staring daggers as he circled her slowly, Starfire turning to match him as he did so. "I did those things. But nothing I have done or will do changes what _you _are, nor your responsibility for all that has happened."

"_My_ responsibility?!" asked Starfire incredulously.

"Yes, _yours_," he said. "You were the one who turned me into what I am today."

"You have always been a murderer!" said Starfire. "You attempted to kill us the first time we met!"

"I was _never _a _murderer_!" shouted Warp, brandishing his laser. "I was a _thief_! A _THIEF_! A _petty thief_ who stole _antique clocks_ from museums! I stole inanimate objects locked away in _vaults_ and curator displays. I only used force to defend myself! And for my crime of petty theft you condemned me to life imprisonment in a hell the likes of which you have _never imagined_!"

"I did no such thing!"

"You regressed me to the age of an infant and _abandoned_ me in a dystopian hellhole of a parallel universe! You used _my_ time machine to return to your world and left me there as a helpless child in one you _knew_ was an inhospitable disaster zone! And this after _your_ interference was what stranded us in that hellhole to begin with! Do you deny it?!"

"That is _not what occured!_" shouted Starfire. "Your time machine was damaged during the battle. _It_ reverted you to that age!"

"And who damaged it?" retorted Warp. "And then ran away to your comfortable universe leaving me to rot in the greatest prison ever devised!"

"There was no time!" insisted Starfire. "The portal was collapsing, I... I _had _to leave!"

"You found sufficient time for touching goodbyes," spat Warp venomously. "Yet not enough to bring me with you." He continued to circle her, eyes aflame with indignation. "And why would you? After all, I was a criminal! A _thief_! Sufficient reason for a Tamaranean _child_ to condemn me to an eternity in _HELL_!"

The last word was practically a scream, punctuated by a laser blast that struck inches from Starfire's foot, scoring the floor of the cathedral and causing her to reflexively jump back. Yet though he raised the laser back to aim at her face, Warp did not attack, prefering instead to stare down the barrel at her with eyes wide and unblinking.

"Have you felt _pain_, Princess?" he asked, lightning flashing from his maddened eyes. "Since Robin died? Have you known anguish? Agony? Have you felt it burning within you like an unquenchable fire? Have you stalked the streets pouring vengeance and rage out upon your unsuspecting foes to try and empty yourself of its neverending flames? Was that the cure you sought for the hell that your life has been these past weeks?" Warp suddenly spread his arms wide, sweeping them over the entire chamber, over the burning city beyond, and raised his head like an emperor overseeing his realm. "Behold _my_ cure!" he said.

Starfire's mouth opened despite herself, her eyes widening in horror and disgust. "You are _insane_," she said.

"I come from a world of insanity," said Warp. "One you know as few here would."

"Then you have done all this for what? Some twisted sense of _vengeance_? Against _me_?"

"Among others, yes, against you" said Warp. "You were the one who caused me to suffer as I have. You were the one who so cavalierly played God with my fate. Now it is _your_ turn to be played with, Princess. _Your _turn to suffer. I have _long_ since paid for whatever crimes I did commit. Now you will do the same."

Starfire said nothing, staring at Warp as though unsure of what she was looking at. Warp continued to circle, lowering his arm and managing to make the gesture contemptuous, as though he cared nothing for what tricks or impotent attacks she might launch.

"Tell me," he asked her, "did you ever even spare me a moment's thought after you abandoned me there? Did it even cross your mind to look in and see what had become of me? Or was I out of your mind the instant you left that place?"

"I had no _means_ of returning to that world!" cried Starfire. "Even had I wished to! And I did not _abandon_ you anywhere! I left you in the care of the remaining Titans of that world!"

"And it never occurred to you what a poor idea that was?"

The anger returned. "You will _not_ dishonor my friends with your lies!" shouted Starfire. "They would never have permitted any harm to come to you, no matter who you were or what you had done!"

"Perhaps not," said Warp, "but that would be contingent on their survival, no?"

She stopped short. "What are you - "

"They _died_," said Warp, brows furrowing as his eyes bored into hers. "All of them." He paused, letting that sink in, and a grim smile came to his face as he beheld her surprise. "You never considered _that _possibility, did you?"

Before, spikes of anger had shot through her like molten arrows, but not this time. This time a guttural, bitter savagery materialized in the pit of her stomach, a mixture of rage, disgust, and indignant fury. "You... _vile betrayer_," she spat at him. "You... you slaughtered the Titans of your world, and then came here to do the same to ours?! Did you burn that planet to cinders too? Or was that treatment reserved only for this one?!"

She did not want the answers to those questions. She had asked them only to feed her anger, the righteous fury that in turn would fuel her starbolts when she leaped at Warp to strike him down. Yet rather than ignore them, or answer them, or even attack in his own turn, Warp did something she did not expect.

He laughed.

He stepped backwards, throwing his head back, howling in laughter, so intense that he had to gasp for breath and nearly fell over. Half of Starfire wanted to shoot him while he was thus distracted, yet before she could resolve whether to do so or not, Warp doubled over, hands on his knees, and shook his head, a broad grin on his face as he lifted his gaze to stare her straight in the eyes.

"You just _can't_ do it can you?"

"Do what?" she asked.

"_Perceive._" he said, his voice low and gravelly, and he stood up slowly. "All your vaunted empathy, all your pretenses at mercy and compassion, and you simply _can't_ see past your own hatred to perceive what's been _sitting in front of you_ the entire time!"

"What are you _talking_ about?!" demanded Starfire. "I am _tired _of your - "

"I was _eight_," said Warp, voice booming. "I was eight years old when the Titans died," he said. "_Eight_. Even if I had _wanted_ to kill them, do you seriously believe that I could have done so at that age? You _saw_ that I was unable to defeat them as an adult. How would I have done so as a child?"

Starfire watched Warp in silence as the man in Gold turned slowly about her. "I didn't kill the Titans of my world, Princess," he said. "They were not the ones against whom I desired revenge."

"Then... if _you _did not kill the Titans of that other world," asked Starfire, "who _did_?"

She expected more verbiage and self-justification, but Warp said nothing. Rather, he smiled, a soft and almost endearing smile, and shook his head, chuckling softly to himself at some private joke.

She was having none of it. "You will not answer me then?" she taunted him. "What is so amusing? Have you run out of lies to tell me?"

"No lies," he said softly. "Not between us. But what is amusing, Princess, is you."

"Me?"

"Yes... you," said Warp, stopping and crossing his arms. "All this time, and you still insist on asking all the wrong questions."

She raised an eyebrow. "Very well then," she said. "What are the _right_ questions?"

"Only one," said Warp, a feral grin beginning to grow on his face. "One question. The most important one of all. The question that answers all of the others. The one question you have studiously failed to ask anybody, yourself, your friends, even me. The question you refuse to ask, because deep inside, you know what the answer could mean."

The lights seemed to dim, the ambient glow of the horizon flickering down as though commanded to, as Warp took a step towards her, his twisted smile bearing down like a predator.

"Princess," he said, his voice a malevolent whisper, "if I am the one who set all of this in motion, then tell me, how could I possibly have known about any of it in the first place?"

**O-O-O**

"Why did you come back?"

How much time had elapsed since last any words had been spoken by either of them? She had no idea. Ten minutes? An hour? Three? Two days? There was no sense of time underground, one of the reasons she enjoyed being below the surface, Her mind had been lost, wandering blindly as though through a labyrinth, seeking answers that did not exist to a situation whose conclusion was foregone. And she knew it.

"What?" she asked. The fire had died to embers now, a bare glow that served only to cast inky shadows over everything. Even with his glowing red eyes, she could barely make David out by silhouette, yet she made no move to re-ignite it. Neither did he.

"You..." he ventured, not tentative but hesitant, as though his mind was having trouble converting his thoughts to words. "You didn't come back for me," he said, though he didn't sound upset or angry, or even surprised. "You were trying to save them?"

"Yeah," she said quietly, wondering idly if he would believe her. "I thought..."

She let that one sit. She had thought, idiotically, that Trigon would be fool enough to leave the Titans petrified like the rest of the world, and that she would thus be able to restore them to life. She had not thought far enough ahead to decide what should come after such a rescue. Her assumption had been that the Titans would know what to do. Not in a thousand years had she considered that this assumption might not be accurate, for never, not even in the throes of her most furious hatreds, had she ever ceased to think of the Titans as anything but ultimately invincible. The notion died hard.

Very hard.

"I can't believe they're gone," he said, and his voice reflected the stunned shock implicit in that sentence, though she couldn't see him well enough to see his reaction in the near-total darkness. At this point, it was probably a mercy.

"Me neither," she said, "but..."

"Yeah," he replied. "I know."

They sat in silence for a time, before David broke it.

"I thought you hated them," he asked.

She took her time before answering. "I don't know," she said. "I guess I did, for a while. Slade, he..." she stopped. What use now, hiding behind Slade, when both he and his principal enemies were dead. "I was... afraid of them," she said finally, speaking to the darkness more than to David. "I was afraid of... what they'd do to me. What they'd think of me."

The last time they had spoken, he had accused her of all manner of turpitudes and moral questions over this very question, yet plainly he hadn't the stomach this time to do so. He didn't say anything, until finally she followed up with a question of her own.

"I guess they hated me for it?"

There was a pause, for decorum perhaps, but when the answer came it was solid and unequivocating. "No," he said. "They didn't."

"They had to have," she said. "I... I tried to..." she clammed back up. Why the hell was she dredging back over all this _now_ of all times?

"They didn't hate you," he said, and as before he sounded certain. "They didn't understand, but... they didn't hate you."

Perhaps there was something in the air. Perhaps it was just exhaustion, or the recognition that it no longer mattered. "Do you?" she asked.

Another pause, long and pregnant, before he finally answered. "Maybe," he said. "The others couldn't... they didn't hold it against you, after what happened, after you... died. But I wasn't there for that. And... I'm not like them."

"No," she said, staring off into the darkness that concealed him. "You're not. You're like me."

Two red pinpoints of red light appeared in the darkness, as David raised his eyes. The lights held steady for a moment or two, and then slowly nodded up and down.

"Yeah," he said. "I'm like you."

It was neither comforting nor chilling, neither a blessing nor a curse. It was just a fact. And they both knew all that it implied, all that it said about both of them, summed up in a simple statement.

"But you didn't leave," she said.

"I couldn't leave them," he replied. "I tried. Twice. But... I couldn't..."

"We stopped you," she said, and she lowered her eyes. "_I_ stopped you. And Cinderblock, and Warp, and Slade..."

"It wasn't that," he answered, and the lights were once more extinguised, as he either closed his eyes or averted them. "I... used you and Cinderblock and all the rest of it as excuses. So that I could let myself stay."

She shook her head. "Why did you need to _let_ yourself stay?" she asked. "They wanted you to stay, didn't they? Even after what I did? And you wanted to. So why did you need an excuse?"

She heard him take several deep breaths as he tried to conjure the words up to explain what he meant. "I don't... know how to _do_ this. I don't know how to be part of a group. A... family, a team, whatever the Titans really were. I never learned that. I didn't know how to do it. I always... I always took care of myself, you know? I wasn't strong or tough or adventurous or whatever, but I knew how to not get in anyone's way. I... _hated_ owing people things, money or gratitude or just... anything. I hated being... _dependent_ on other people, like I was getting in their way, or making their lives harder just by being around. And... I _knew_ I was doing it, even before the Titans, I mean I lived in foster centers and all that. There were dozens of people just taking care of me and the other kids, but... it was different then. It was a _system_, and it was designed for this sort of thing, and it wasn't _personal_. Nobody thought less of us for being there. It wasn't our fault we were orphans."

He paused for a few seconds.

"But then I got to the Tower, and I couldn't pretend anymore. And they were... well you know what they were like. It was like, all of a sudden I realized that _this _sort of thing existed. And more than just that, they... they shouldn't have let me into it, but they _did_. _Me_. I wasn't anybody special. I mean had powers, yeah, but so did fifty other kids they knew. And they let _me_ in. And they didn't resent me for bringing all this fire down on them, or make me feel like I had to measure up or _anything_. I kept... waiting for the other shoe to drop, or something, and it never did. They never made me feel like I owed them."

"They made you want to be a hero?" she asked.

"No," he said. "I never wanted to be a hero. I didn't even want to be a Titan, really. I just wanted to be one of _them_."

She couldn't think of anything to say to that, and silence closed over them once more. Yet the conversation had set her to thinking of the past, perhaps as a way of escaping the Hell she had been plunged into, who could tell, but the memories it dredged up were powerful enough in their own right that she didn't even react with surprise when he finally asked the ultimate question, the one she knew he had wanted to ask since first he had found out her true identity.

"You're more powerful than I ever was," he said. "And you were there before me. They gave you everything they gave me. Without any questions." He paused for a second, as though unsure if he should ask it, but finally gave in. "How... How could you just _leave _them like that?"

She felt like she was half in a trance of some kind, all the justifications and obfuscations burnt away, leaving nothing but the truth as she knew it.

"I was scared," she said. "I was... scared of everything. They... they wanted to make me into one of them. A Titan, a hero, you know? I was afraid of it. Of the responsibility, of what my powers might do..."

She hesitated once more on the cusp of admitting all, and looked up, and saw David's red, glowing eyes watching her, like the eyes of the judge on the day of doom.

"But... mostly I was... afraid that I was going to hurt them in the end. They were gonna give me all this stuff, just because they wanted to be my friend, and I was gonna hurt them. I wasn't even afraid of it, I _knew_ it was going to happen. Because I've killed or hurt _every_ person I've ever met. And I knew I was going to do it to them, and so I left." She felt like laughing and crying at once. "And I wound up with Slade and did it anyway."

If she was expecting judgment or forgiveness, she was to be disappointed she knew. David had neither to give, and certainly not now. All he had was another question.

"You and Beast Boy," he said. "You guys were... together?"

Terra prayed to every God that might exist that the light had been too dim for David to see the shudder that passed through her as he asked her that. "For a while," she said. "Before I left, yeah." She shook her head, though she knew he couldn't see her do it. "I wish we hadn't been."

"Really?" he asked. He sounded almost surprised.

"Not like that," she said. "But if we hadn't been together maybe..." she sighed. "He took it hard is all. Harder that he would have maybe otherwise. I wish I... I wish I could have spared him that much at least."

David said nothing, and there was silence again, before she broke it herself. "Did," she said, hesitating before asking on. "Did Beast Boy... did he ever _say _anything? About..." she couldn't finish the question, but David understood anyway.

"Not to me," he said. "I didn't ask, really... I didn't want to know what happened before. I mean I did, but..."

"You were afraid they might not let you stay?"

She saw him raise his head, as if the question surprised him. "No," he said. "I knew... something had happened. And I knew that they were afraid it was going to happen again, and that they'd... made themselves let it go, and trusted me anyway, so that I could stay. I just... I didn't really want to know just how hard it had been for them to do that."

He fell silent for a moment, but just a moment, before continuing. "But I heard him talking a few times," he said. "When he didn't think anyone was listening. And after you... re-appeared, he went looking for you."

"Yeah," she said, "Slade told me. But I didn't know what he was gonna do if he found me."

"I don't think he knew either," said David. "But he never hated you. I don't think he even blamed you."

"Not even when I tried to kill you?"

"No, not even then." David shrugged limply. "I don't know what he thought," he said, "but... he never hated you. I know that much."

"Were... were he and Raven... you know..."

Of all things, that seemed to generate a soft laugh, and she could imagine, rather than see, the smile on his face. "Yeah," he said, "sort of. It was... _complicated _I guess. It's always complicated."

Despite everything, she smiled at the thought. "I always thought she couldn't stand him."

"I'm pretty sure she thought that too," said David. "Least that's what she said a lot, but... well..."

"You saw through it?" she asked.

"I think _everyone _did," he said. "Who knows, maybe not. But yeah, I did. Raven wasn't hard to figure - "

A growl.

Deep, full-throated, and unquestionably malevolent, like the sound of concrete blocks being dragged over one another., the growl seemed to emanate from nowhere and everywhere at once, and before she even knew what she was doing, Terra was on her feet, eyes wide as saucers, her heart in her throat. She heard rather than saw David doing the same thing, as the hostile growl faded out, leaving only cruel and hostile silence in its wake.

She scarcely dared to breathe, and if the sound were any indication, David did not dare even that much. The last embers of the fire were dying out now, leaving them in pitch darkness. She could not have relit it now, not even if she had been willing to chance moving, which she was plainly not. She settled for remaining as still as she physically could, staring into blackness, listening for any sign of whatever had produced that horrible sound, and praying that David would do the same.

Nothing. No sound, no sign that anything had occurred, and yet Terra remained frozen as if turned to stone, and as to David, he might as well have vanished into thin air for all the sound or sign he gave. Her mind played tricks on her, imagining that whatever had made the sound had abducted him in perfect silence and was now preparing to do the same to her. Her doubt and fear fed on itself and grew, until she heard it again.

The growl was louder this time, and more prolonged, a lengthy, sinister growl, accompanied by swishing noises, like a tail or wing slicing through the air. Faint shuffling sounds could be heard, as something slid over the ground. Something coming closer.

As the growling sound reverberated through the garage, she chanced a soft whisper.

"David?"

Her voice had deserted her, and she could barely hear herself speak, yet instantly she heard David's reply, from closer than she had expected. No words, just a sharp intake of breath, laced with fear.

But before she could answer, something _shrieked_ right in front of her.

It sounded like a bat or mouse, or hissing cat, but amplified a hundredfold and infused with audible venom and malice, and it was suddenly _there_, right in front of her, so close that she could feel hot breath on her face, and she cried out and threw up her hands in automatic reflex, her mind blanked by the sudden eruption as she stumbled backwards in an automatic, paltry defense. Golden light poured forth from Terra's body automatically as her powers took commands from her racing heart, suddenly casting everything before her into view.

She took one look and _screamed_.

A vast, chiropteran horror loomed before her, less than a foot away, broad and tall and leathery, with immense wings spread out five feet in either direction, hooked with wicked claws. Its face was a horrific network of black leather, culminating in a pendulous mouth that seemed to unfurl from beneath its jaw like a toothed octopus. Its eyes were glistening and wide, whether from surprise or anger or some other unfathomable reason, and it lunged forward at her, slavering and shrieking, its clawed feet scrabbling over the asphalt floor as it reached towards her with a hooked appendage.

Without so much as a command, her powers raised a column of stone right through the ground underneath the horrible thing, and smashed it into the ceiling like a hydraulic ram. An awful squishing sound, a splatter of fluids and mashed up parts, and the rock fell back down, now coated with a pungent yellow goo. And then, just as quickly as they had flared up, her kineticist's powers subsided, and they were plunged back into darkness once more.

Moments later, Terra raised the golden glow of her powers once again, this time of her own volition, and turned to see if David was all right, yet before she could speak a word, they heard further bone-chilling howls from deeper within the garage, and the rustling of wings, as though a swarm of locusts were approaching them. And without a word or a moment to think, Terra grabbed David by the wrist, and ran for her life.

**O-O-O**

"How could I possibly have known?"

The pedastal beside Warp was glowing, burning even, like a torch in the darkness, casting multicolored light into the sky and off of the walls of the open chamber. It radiated upwards, hundreds of feet, soaring like a beacon into the ashen skies, spreading out in three dimensions, forming patterns that could not be discerned, like a projector out of focus.

"The world you abandoned me to live in recorded only that Trigon had come twenty years before, and that the Titans had destroyed him, shortly before disbanding. That world knew him as nothing more than an interruption, a momentary destroyer who arrived and was dealt with and was never heard from again. Against the backdrop of misery that pervaded that place, Trigon's coming was nothing more than a footnote, and the Titans themselves, the only ones who knew any better, said nothing of it"

The lights continued to dance as Warp spread his arms wide. "Yet I pieced _all of this_ together. Devastator, Slade, Terra, the mark of Scathe, the cult of Trigon. Rituals, sigils, cosmic entities and the ancient histories of dead planets. I enmeshed you all in a net of labyrinthine complexity, and you _never bothered_ to ask how. How could I know about Raven's heritage, something she never even spoke of to you, her dearest friends? How could I know how to cross dimensions and contact Trigon, when Trigon himself had been dead for eons, and his very memory lost in the mists of time? How could I know about Devastator, when David himself had no idea that Devastator even existed, and when, before I interfered with them, he was never a part of these events, either in my world or in yours."

Starfire clenched her fists, summoning starbolts to them as she stared at the madman on the dias. "Did you bring me here to brag then?" she asked him, largely automatically, for she knew that he had not. Starfire had met her share of villainous braggarts, evil men who used villainy to cloak grave insecurities, who enacted grotesque and convoluted plots less for the sake of causing misery, and more because they wished others to think them brilliant and clever for having thought them up. Such men could not help but brag, boast, explain their evil plots in exacting detail, often foregoing perfectly valid opportunities to simply kill the heroes trying to stop them in favor of lengthy monologues extolling their own genius. It was a well-known phenomenon.

On the surface, this appeared to be yet another case... but yet... something was wrong...

"No," answered Warp. "Merely to see. To ask, to question. And perhaps, for the first time in your life, to understand."

The light show behind him swirled and twisted, colors running together like water-paints in the rain. Abstract constructions of impossible color and patterns without form spun together. Like a hypnotic dance, the light commanded attention, demanded she watch it, until she had to tear her eyes away by main force.

"Enough!" she shouted. "I did not come here to listen to your justifications! Tell me where you have hidden Robin, or I shall pry the knowledge from you by force!"

Warp laughed, lightly, as though the threat were a thing of no weight, no concern. Perhaps it was not. "Is that what you truly seek, Princess?" asked Warp. "Or is possibly that you fear the answers to the questions you refused to ask?" The golden supervillain smirked as he folded his arms.

"After all," said Warp. "That was Robin's reason for avoiding them."

Starfire stood stock still, face motionless, like a statue writ of living flesh. Warp waited patiently, as she slowly, with infinite care and precision, lowered her hands to her sides, and in a clipped, bitter tone, asked a single question.

"How did you come to discover all of this?"

No expression of triumph. No visible sign of relief. No waterfall of self-praise to butress his own insecurities. Warp, having finally received the question he had theoretically sought, simply took a deep breath, reached his hand to the pedastal at his side, and spoke.

"I watched the Titans die."

**O-O-O**

Breathless, heedless, Terra ran like she had not run before, as a maelstrom of noise exploded from behind her, screams, roars, howls bonechilling and unearthly, and the sound of naked claws scratching over asphalt and concrete. She did not turn back to see what was chasing her but ran in blind panic, practically dragging David along with her. Though he was running too, fatigue and the aftereffects of his traumatic shift from flesh to stone and back slowed him, and he stumbled over carstops and jagged cracks in the cement floor. She had neither the time nor the inclination to be gentle however, and physically dragged him forward until he found his footing and could run on his own again.

Behind them, all manner of bowel-quaking monstrosities screamed hatred to the scorched skies above, as leathery wings beat at the air and grasping claws gouged at pavement. Terra did not spare a glance backwards, running flat out for the stairs that led out of the garage, trying desperately to recollect where they were. Around corners and cars, past piles of rubble and fallen I-beams, she ran and twisted and ducked and ran some more. Yet before she could find where the exit she sought was, everything went straight to Hell.

There was a crack, and a swish, and a chitin dart flew past her head, six inches long and cruelly barbed, disappearing off into the darkness ahead. She turned to shout a warning, but it was too late. David gave an aborted cry as a second barb struck him square in the back like a throwing knife. What noxious toxins it might have carried went un-discovered, for the dart did not penetrate his ashen-gray uniform, bouncing off of the micro-woven composite-fiber like a rubber ball, yet the kinetic force of the impact hurled him off his feet and threw him forward onto the ground on his face, where he rolled and slid into a parked car with a crash, fetching up on his side.

He shook his head, rising shakily to his hands and knees, yet seconds later, a bat-beast landed before him, mandibles clicking and oozing a foul substance that scored the very concrete beneath it. Clawed wings reached for his throat, and he scrambled back in the only direction open, the corner formed by the car and a concrete pillar. The terrible thing pursued him, grabbing his foot and trying to drag him out of the corner. He kicked at it in vain, panic and terror clouding his mind as the thing pulled him out into the open air, snatching him up off the floor by the collar, and ignoring his frantic struggles, leaned forward to deliver a fatal bite with jaws of dripping acid.

It did not succeed.

A rock the size of a volleyball flew out of nowhere and hit the thing square in the side of the head with such force that it tore its head clean off and left its truncated corpse to crumple lifelessly to the ground. David fell backwards, landing awkwardly on the ground on his back, seconds before the ground itself heaved and the parked car beside him was swept aside by a wave of stone, and then suddenly he saw Terra.

But it was not the Terra of a moment before. She stood where the car had been moments before, her eyes blazing with golden light, hands raised forward, palms extended, and about her the ground shifted like a liquid, like a living thing, as stones and clods of earth burst through the pavement and spun about her like electrons around a nucleus. Undaunted, the monsters charged her in unison, a writhing, screaming pack of nightmares given form, but she hurled herself forward, falling to one knee, shooting the fingers of her right hand towards the legion of the damned, and then her entire body exploded into golden light, and David could see no more.

There was the sound of screams, not wrathful but terrified, and the unholy roar of collapsing masonry and exploding stone, and David could only crouch on the ground like an earthworm and cover his head with both arms. He might even have screamed, the noise was such that he couldn't hear himself. Slabs of stone the size of bicycles crashed to earth around him, pelting him with wasplike fragments, yet as before, the bonded micro-weave that Cyborg had made for him held fast. And then, bare seconds later, the roar of rushing air, of flying stone, of undifferentiated chaos, drowned out all else, and he heard no more.

And then it all stopped at once.

The silence was so profound that it was almost deafening, save only for the ringing in David's ears. Carefully he peeked out of the ball he had almost instinctively curled himself into, raising his head to see what was left.

The monsters were gone. All gone, save for ichor stains and bits of carapace and sodden leather that decorated the walls and ceiling and the floor. Everything nearby seemed to have gone with them, cars torn to piles of twisted scrap metal, motorcycles wrapped around support pylons, the pipes and broken lights that lined the ceiling vanished as if by magic, and in their place lay a knee-deep carpet of dirt and chipped stone. Terra stood nearby, barely a pace or two away, standing up once more, but doubled over with one hand on her knees and the other holding her forehead. She looked exhausted, bent over and breathing heavily, yet she retained sufficient alertness to lift her head once more as David stirred, and turn completely about, seeking more enemy. She found none.

"Are you all right?" she asked then, turning back to David. Though the glow had faded elsewhere, her hands still retained the golden energy that heralded her powers. For his part, David could not remember how to speak. Though he had seen Terra's powers in full force before, indeed he had seen them directed at himself, the stark display of power unbridled, coupled with the gaping hole that he felt within him where his own powers should have been, reduced him in an instant back to the days before he had been a hero, when he had been nothing but David Foster, the civilian, who stood in the presence of Gods and Titans and watched them do battle at the ending of the world.

Another distant roar served admirably to focus his attention.

Both of them turned sharply, expecting to see further monsters loom out of the darkness. Yet all they heard was distant rumblings and the sounds of what might have been footsteps in the darkness. And just as David was about to ask if perhaps they ought to leave, Terra turned, grabbed his arm, and ran for the exit.

The carpet of dirt parted before her with a wave of a hand, and she ran ahead, nearly dragging him off his feet, her grip like a gloved vice, not that he was tempted to wrestle away from her now. When last they had met, Terra had tried to kill him. Now that he was helpless, she was exerting every effort to save his life. The irony would no doubt have been funny had he retained the mental facilities with which to laugh.

Ahead loomed a door, metal, and they burst through it into a stairwell. Terra pushed David through, and slammed the door behind them, leaning against it with her hands aglow once more and her eyes closed. He was about to ask her what she was doing when it became pattently obvious, as a muted roar, thunderous and abrupt, sounded from the other side, instantly aborted as something thudded against the door and was still. Wet earth leaked through the seam at the bottom of the door as Terra slowly stood back. "Come on," she said, and she grabbed him once more and began to ascend the stairs.

They double-timed the stairs, legs burning and lungs aflame, sixteen stories in all without a pause, for neither one of them were inclined to stop. Still groggy and weak from the transformation, David felt his heart thundering in his ears and his vision turning red as they ascended endlessly, before, at long last, they reached topmost landing, burst through the main doors, and entered the windswept hellscape above.

It was hardly an improvement. They stood on an empty street, lined with ruined buildings and burning cars, beneath a smoky sky of slate gray. The air was tinged with sulfur and volcanic gas, and low rumblings on the horizon testified to new tortures that might well lie in store. Yet right now, David's mind simply could not process more devastation and death, and he collapsed to the ground next to the entrance, panting like a dog, one hand still clutched to his stomach, where the cold nothingness that had once held Devastator continued to gnaw at him like a parasitic worm.

Beside him, Terra managed only the comparative dignity of sliding down the side of the garage entrance to a seated position, if not as tired as David was, still blown from the effort of the fight and the ascent. They both sat there, like runners at the end of a race, simply breathing and recovering their breath for several minutes.

"Thanks," he finally said, the word coming out semi-automatically. She let it sit for a few moments before answering.

"Don't mention it," she said, and from the sound of it, she meant it. Why she had turned back to help him, he didn't even bother to ask. He didn't know how.

Slowly, Terra stood up, looking up and down the street carefully before walking over and offering him a hand, pulling him back up to his feet. By now he needed the help. If she noticed him lowering his eyes as she looked him over to see that he was all right, she didn't mention it.

"Come on," she said. "We've got to find somewhere to..." her voice trailed off. Somewhere to what? The question was implied if not asked, for David by now had no means to question her, the absent pain in his midsection and the bitter one in his chest from the twin losses of Devastator and the other Titans had robbed him of all sense of agency. Had Terra suggested they go jump in a pit of lava, he might well have followed her there.

"We'll find somewhere to hole up," she finally said. "Come on." And without waiting for him to protest (as though he would have), she put a hand on his shoulder to guide him towards one of the empty buildings.

But they never got there.

There was a roar, a low roar like thunder rumbling over the mountains, and both of them turned to see a black cloud forming up on the horizon. Twisting and turning like a living thing, it erupted into the air from some source so distant that it could not be made out, yet the cloud itself was easily visible, and it darkened quickly, a null-space in mid-air. Flashes from deep within served to illuminate, of all things, brilliant colors, purples and greens and deep reds. And then suddenly the colors burst forth in a riot, swirling around one another in a technicolor wonder, before they all ran together like watercolors in the rain, and then a picture began to form.

And as Terra and David watched this wonder with wide eyes and silent tongues, they saw, so far away that it was barely a speck, a single, lone figure, slowly walking up the empty street towards them.

**O-O-O**

A void, like the inky blackness of interstellar space. It surrounded her, encapsulated her, yet it was all an illusion, and Starfire knew it. Yet she did not look away. The fountain of light had projected an image of dark nothingness so vast that it encompased the entire chamber, and indeed most of the castle, visible no doubt from miles and miles away. Yet despite the omnipresent darkness, there was no malice here, no intent to frighten or scare. This was not darkness for its own sake, but merely a default, as the worker of this wonder waited for the artist to fill it with imagery.

And sure enough, it did.

"When you left me in that future world," came Warp's voice, neither near nor far away, a presence unfixed in location, like a narrator's voice over a documentary film, "I was a helpless infant. You were the one who placed me in the charge of the Titans of that world."

"They were my friends!" she shouted to the inky black. "They agreed to take you in, and they would never have permitted you to come to harm. Never!" She turned in circles, as though expecting to see Warp behind her, or at her side. "After all your protestations, did you bring me here to tell me such obvious lies?!"

"No," said Warp's disembodied voice, calm and collected. "You are correct. They did not allow me to come to harm, until the night that choice was taken from them, and from me."

And then suddenly there was light.

Not much light, granted, but light nonetheless. A cityscape at night, viewed from overhead. Buildings loomed like the shadows of giants, barely visible against the darkened skies. They arched upwards, in shapes both familiar and alien, but all dark. The city was without power, and not a light could be seen, save for pinpricks of the lights of vehicles below, and a dull, red glow somewhere off near the horizon.

The buildings were unrecognizable, particularly under these conditions, yet the topography from above was still sufficiently similar to the one she knew for her to realize which city it was that she was looking down into. And when she turned around, looking out over the water that formed the enormous bay in to the north of the city, she saw proof in the form of a golden tower, perched on an island, the only structure that still seemed to have power, shaped in the unmistakable form of the letter T.

When last she had seen this world, the Tower had been a shattered ruin, long abandoned save by Cyborg, whose systems he was unable to decouple from. Evidently the years between then and this scene had given it new life, for it blazed once more as resplendently as ever, shining like a beacon in the overcast darkness.

"For eight years, they tried to reverse the tide of darkness in this city," came Warp's voice, as the view panned about the dark metropolis. "They rebuilt the Tower, they fought back against those who had ruined the city. They even credited you as the inspiration for it. And for a time they even thought they were succeeding."

The vision swept downwards, through the clouds and below them, into the storm-lashed city, as torrents of rain poured down past her sight. Below ran a massive open boulevard, one she did not recognize, lined with darkened buildings and dead streetlights. Cars sat abandoned on the side of the road, empty and forlorn. No lights were visible in any direction save one, for approaching at rapid pace were two lit vehicles that Starfire recognized instantly.

It was not that she had seen these vehicles before specifically, for she had not. Indeed she had never even seen anything like them. One resembled a motorcycle with the wheels removed and replaced by massive electromagnets that sparked and crackled as they levitated over the street. The other was a six-wheeled automobile, long and sleek and low to the ground, with lights mounted atop and in front of it, painted in neon blue, chrome and glistening white. Yet despite this, she knew instantly what they were and who was riding them, for the design, the style, all the thousand little details that added up in her head, revealed that much beyond question, and despite everything she felt her pulse start to pound as the vehicles approached and she caught sight of the man on the hovercraft, a man with dark flowing hair, his face obscured behind a black mask, his clothing entirely black, save for a blue symbol, a double-headed eagle, emblazoned on his chest like a heraldic crest.

"Robin..." she whispered before she could stop herself.

"Not Robin," said Warp's disembodied voice. "His life as Robin had long-since ended. When I knew him, he called himself Nightwing."

The hovercraft screamed past, followed a second later by the automobile, and Starfire's vision turned after them and followed as they raced towards a red glow on the horizon, one that could be no sunset or dawn. She had seen such a glow enough times herself to know what it was. It was the glow of raging fires unchecked, ravaging some distant part of the city. The darkened city cast the hideous glow into stark relief, and Starfire realized suddenly that she heard no sirens, no flashing lights of emergency vehicles, no helicopters or other flying craft. The city was burning, and save for the Titans themselves, there was no sign of response at all.

"There were no alerts by then," said Warp. "No signals save for the occasional furtive call from a private citizen seeking some desperate measure of succor. The police had long-since ceased to call on the Titans. Half of the time, they were the ones the Titans were deployed to fight. But that night it was different."

The vehicles screamed down the empty road towards the flames, their engines the only sound in the silent city, as the glow on the horizon loomed higher and bighter.

"Crime was omnipresent," said Warp. "Violence, murder, gang assault, even metahuman attack, the city was rife with these things, but not like this. This attack struck the Green zone, the fortified heart of the city, where the wealthy and powerful had retreated to erect impenetrable barriers against the suffering of the rest of the city. The banks, the corporations, and what few government agencies or utilities still maintained a presence in Jump, all these were sequestered within a small, impenetrable sector of the city, defended by police and private security forces. It was the most heavily defended location within five hundred miles. Even the Titans themselves would have been hard-pressed to secure entrance to the Green zone had it been opposed. And now it was burning."

Through canyons of darkened buildings and high rises, some gutted by long-quenched fires, some abandoned to squatters and vagrants, the Titans raced ahead, squealing around corners and through impromptu barricades built across various streets by unknown forces. Ahead loomed the so-called "Green" zone, now dyed the red and orange of wrath and war, smoke and flames vaulting into the leaden skies. Yet the Titans did not slow or falter, screaming through the dead city like ancient heroes riding chariots of fire and magic.

"I was a child," said Warp. "I was not permitted to go with them, but I went anyway. I hid myself within the transport's storage trunk and accompanied them because I wanted to watch them triumph. I wanted to see them at their most resplendent and glorious, defeating the forces of entropy and driving back the darkness. Nightwing knew who the attacker had to be, and told the others, yet to me, it was nothing but a name. I had no conception of what lay in store.

"Who was it?" asked Starfire. "Who attacked the city?"

Warp did not answer.

One last corner, and suddenly the Titans were there. Ahead loomed a massive gate of wrought steel, like an armored shutter blocking out all comers, set into a fortified wall of concrete and iron, encrusted with towers and sensors and posts for armed robots or human guards. Yet it had availed nothing, for the gate had been torn apart and cast down in ruin, the wall gouged out and holed in half a dozen places. Shattered fragments of what had once been security robots littered the street, along with the bodies of security personnel, their weapons deformed and broken and in some cases cast vast distances into the surrounding topography. Several bodies had been physically torn apart, limbs and heads adorning nearby cornices or swept into debris-choked corners, still sporting the useless fragments of body armor that their owners had vainly sought to protect themselves with.

Slowing at last, the Titans drove over the ruined threshold and into the formerly beating heart of the city, following a path of ruin and violence unimaginable that led towards its core. Vehicles lay overturned and shattered, some hurled through the windows of nearby buildings, others simply ripped to pieces with such violence that fragments were embedded in the surrounding walls like thrown darts or fired arrows. Here and there, there were signs that someone or some group had tried to fight back, and their dead bodies were heaped in piles or strewn about in a carpet like fallen leaves.

Starfire was no stranger to scenes of death, yet this was beyond the pale even for her. Her mind raced with the thoughts of who might have been the agent of this catastrophe. The signs were those of a massive monster, of Cinderblock or Plasmus or Overload or some unholy combination of the three, or perhaps of Slade with his armies of robots. Yet this was nearly thirty years in the future. Who could tell what bestial horrors could have arisen in the meantime, what monsters from the darkness had been conjured forth in the absence of the Titans or municipal governance? The agent could be anything, she knew.

And then the Titans finally came to the focal point of the disaster, and all was revealed.

Ahead loomed an open area, a hundred yards long and as many wide, in the center of which had once stood a grand fountain of marble. The fountain was gone now, amputated as though felled by a lumberjack, and the cars that had lined it now lay crushed against one another along one side, leaving the plaza empty. The ground was cracked and run through with fissures that zigzagged across the concrete and asphalt, and pockmarked with great craters. To the right of the plaza loomed an enormous building, a power plant of some sort, filled with electrical equipment, from which electrical lines radiated out towards the rest of the city. The plant was quiet and dark now, the power lines torn town in a heap and swept to one side as though by a gigantic broom. Yet the plant was not the source of the firelight.

That was the enormous edifice before them.

Directly opposite the Titans stood an structure imposing even within these surroundings, built like a government building or embassy, faced with stone and festooned with flagpoles and statues. Yet tonight it commanded attention, not from architecture, but from fire. The entire building was in flames, which poured from every window and danced across its roof, producing an unearthly roar as internal structures warped and gave way. Around its collapsed front entrance, more bodies were heaped, but these were not soldiers or police. The bodies were dressed in the remains of business suits and evening gowns, their hands and arms thrown out to defend themselves from whatever had struck them down, their faces contorted with terror.

The hovercycle skidded to a stop, and Nightwing leaped off of it before it had even done so, landing with perfect grace on the broken ground, a small cylinder of metal in one hand. A second later, and the cylinder expanded a dozenfold, telescoping out into a tempered metal staff.

Behind him, the car ground to a halt, and out poured the others. She had known that Cyborg was driving the car even before she had known what car it was, and indeed, he stepped out of the driver's seat. His half-human face was lined with the same premature aging that she remembered from her trip to this future, yet his mechanical parts were polished and gleaming with energy, his circuitry restored to top condition and beyond, and his eyes, both mechanical and organic, showed no signs of slowing, nor of the sadness and despair he had inculcated in his years of exile. Several new devices of indeterminate use were mounted in various places around his body, and he seamlessly shifted one hand into a cannon as he advanced to stand alongside Robin.

Beast Boy, or whatever he called himself now, actually looked better than she remembered. She had found him eight years before in a ramshackle zoo, overweight, balding, and depressed from the destruction of his team, life, and family. Yet barely a sign of that could be seen here. He had dropped the excess weight, or at least much of it, and his hair had even returned, still as green as it was in her time. He did not adopt a new form, but folded his arms, stepping up next to Nightwing and peering into the darkness with his emerald eyes.

Of Raven there was no immediate sign, yet seconds later there was a flash, and she appeared in midair, her cloak, hood, and uniform a dazzling white, as it had been when last Starfire saw her future self, yet the vacant stare of madness was gone. Pale as ever, she nevertheless moved with quiet assurance, wrapped within her cloak, as she touched lightly down on the ground. Beast Boy swiftly moved to her side, yet she neither pushed him away nor scowled at him, nor flew off herself, as Starfire had seen her so-often do.

And behind them all, Starfire saw another flash, a smaller flash, and before her eyes, a young boy appeared, crouched behind the back of the car, peering over it at the Titans and the scene itself from behind. Either none of the other Titans noticed the child appear, for the flash was small and the sound non-existent, or they otherwise did not react. The child wore no uniform or identifying marks, dressed in street clothes and sneakers, with black hair and dark eyes, yet Starfire did not even have to ask who it was. She had seen this child as an adult, as an old man, and as a baby. The identity was obvious.

The plaza was deserted aside from the Titans and the dead, or so it seemed, and the rain that beat down showed no sign of suppressing the raging pyre that was consuming the building ahead. Starfire herself looked around in vain, and she was about to demand that Warp answer her question, when all of a sudden, Nightwing spoke.

"_There,_" he said, pointing with his staff.

To the side of the burning building, in plain sight, stood a lone figure in a long coat. He was half-turned away from them, cloaked in the shadows cast by the raging bonfire. He had not mysteriously appeared without warning, for indeed, upon immediate recollection, Starfire realized that he had been standing there the entire time, so well hidden and unremarkable amidst the scene of chaos and death that her eye had simply skipped over him. The four Titans slowly fanned out, moving carefully towards the semi-invisible figure, as Starfire stared at the man in the coat with a leaden sense of dread building up inside her.

"Nightwing knew," said Warp. "Nightwing always knew. An attack like this, so brazen, so long after the last time anyone had dared attack the city, there was only one person it could have ever been. While the rest of us sought for phantoms in the air, or oversized monsters, he was the only one looking for what was actually there."

Nightwing stood out front, the others in a semicircle behind him, as he extended his staff towards the man in the coat. "_Freeze_," he said, in a voice that meant business.

For a moment, the man did not react. And then slowly, very slowly, as though he had all the time in the world, he turned his head towards the Titans. One hand was at his chin, holding a lit cigarette which he puffed on softly, a small ember serving to illuminate nothing. Slowly he exhaled a halo of smoke, lowering his hand to his side, and only then did he turn fully. With an air of nonchalance, he raised his head and stepped fully into the light.

Starfire's heart froze.

The man was smaller than Nightwing, thin and slight of build, with light brown hair, cropped short and unstyled, which was beginning to gray at the temples. Despite the fact that it was nighttime, he wore dark glasses, mirror-shined, obscuring his eyes. He had an open overcoat, dark brown in color, long-sleeved and knee-length, over clothing so nondescript that it scarcely caught the eye and was in any case near-invisible in the shadowy firelight. In one hand he held his cigarette, and in the other the neck of a wooden cane, varnished and capped by a molded handle of sterling silver. Yet despite the walking stick, the man neither limped nor leaned upon it holding it lightly as he turned to face the four advancing Titans.

But none of this, not the cane or coat or glasses, none of this was what Starfire was staring at, her eyes wide, her breath frozen, the Tamaranean blood in her veins turning to icewater. No one specific thing caught her eye and chilled the very marrow of her bones. It was no discrete flash of recognition. It was instead a shapeless dread, an amalgam, a thousand little things, features, tics of movement, tiny gestures unconscious and unintended, which all added up to a composite picture, one that stirred the deepest recesses of her subconscious, warning her in ever-escalating terms that she _knew_ what she was looking at, moments before the man in the coat opened his mouth to speak, and removed all doubt.

"Hello, Nightwing," said the man, his tone even and calm, betraying no trace of surprise. "How nice to see you again." The voice was gravelly and dark, twisted by years and the ravages of time. Yet Starfire recognized it instantly. It was a voice she had heard a thousand times before.

"By Tamaran," she said, her own voice wavering in shock. "No.... it cannot... this can't possibly... _NO!"_

"You wished to know who killed the Titans?" came Warp's disembodied narration. "You demanded the identity of the one who set this all in motion?" Warp's bitter laughter swam about her head as she felt dizziness coming over her. "Had you only the wit to ask this question earlier, you might have realized that the answer has been staring you in the face the entire time..."

"_Devastator,_" said Nightwing, spitting the name out like a mouthful of venom, as he shifted his staff around into a battle stance. "You're going _down_."

**O-O-O**

"Oh my god..."

The words came to Terra's lips without her even needing to think them. She stared up at the dark canvas in the sky, on which was displayed Nightwing, and Raven, and Cyborg, and Beast Boy, all older, all standing defiant, and all facing...

"_... no._"

David stood in the middle of the street like a manaquin, his eyes wide in horror and disbelief. His mouth formed words that could not be spoken, for his voice had deserted him, as he watched in mounting horror the scene before him. He staggered, swaying like a leaf in the wind, stepped back, stumbled, and fell, his movements uncoordinated and jerky, yet his eyes were nailed to the sky before him, and the terrible scene it showed. He tried to move, perhaps to get up or scramble away or some other gesture, but failed, and managed only to repeat himself in a thin, anguished voice. "No... no... _no..._"

Terra finally stirred, approaching and kneeling down to help him up, unable to even process what she was seeing, but before she could do so, she saw his eyes finally lower, from the sky to the ground, and to the figure still walking towards them. And though an instant before she would not have thought it possible, she saw in that instant his wide, horrified eyes widen even further in horror.

She turned, and she realized why.

The man did not slow his pace, nor did he hurry, walking towards them as if he had not a care in the world. His right hand rested lightly on the silver handle of a wooden walking stick, on which he relied not at all, tapping it lightly on the pavement as though strolling through a park on a bright summer's day. The soft wind that blew from the west kicked dust up about his feet, and shifted the hem of his knee-length overcoat, worn open over his dark and featureless clothing, and he smiled beneath his dark, mirrored sunglasses, the edge of his mouth gently curling upwards towards light brown hair, in which there was flecked just a hint of silver.

"No..." she heard David whisper, and she realized he was speaking for both of them.

Still thirty yards away, the man stopped in the middle of the street, planting the brass tip of his walking stick on the ground lightly with his left hand, while the other fished around in the pocket of his coat before re-appearing with a packet of cigarettes. He drew one out with one hand, replaced the packet, and brought the cigarette to his mouth. No lighter or matchbook did he produce, yet seconds later the tip of the cigarette burst into flame of its own accord and quickly smoldered down to a soft ember. He drew on it carefully, a long, deep pull, before lowering the cigarette to his side, and blowing a soft stream of light-grey smoke off into the ashen air. Only then did he speak.

"Hello there, David," he said with a smile. "I trust I need no introduction?"

* * *

**Author's Note:** Thank you all for reading this far. I shall do everything I can to finish the next chapter as quickly as possible. In the meanwhile, please be so kind as to leave a review for me to read, as they often provide the energy necessary for works of this scale. Thank you all once more, and until next time.


	35. Enemies Foreign and Domestic

**Disclaimer:** I do not, as ever, own the Teen Titans. Neither do I own my sanity at this point.

**Author's Note:** Hello everyone. It has been quite a long time.

As some of you have pointed out, in message and review, it has been a long time since I have published a chapter of this story. For that, I can only apologize. The list of blocks, misfortunes, and other disasters that conspired to keep me from this story is sufficiently long as to warrant a chapter of its own, and of interest to nobody. I will therefore say instead that there has not been a single day since I was last able to upload to this story that has gone by wherein I did not either work on this chapter or try to do so.

The chapter below is a weighty one, in verbiage and content, and given the time it has been since last we met, any who are disposed to try and read further in this enormous story are well-encouraged, I think, to go back to the previous chapter, and read it over once again. We are in the endgame of this tale, and the chapters are no longer as self-contained and episodic as they previously were able to be. I make no demands of those who have paid me the inestimable complement of reading this story. To have anyone willing to read this, even after all this time, is gift enough. But should a notion strike your fancy, a comment come to mind either positive or negative as to what I inevitably did wrong, or perhaps, through chance and great effort, even did right, please do not hesitate to let me know in the form of a review. I have made it my policy to answer every review I receive in person, with whatever thoughts come to mind concerning the subject in question, and it is by these reviews alone that improvement can proceed.

No more words from me, for there are plenty of them below, save that I am, once again, terribly sorry for the time it took to finish this brutal chapter, and that I will move heaven and earth to finish the next one in a much more timely fashion. Thank you all once more, even if you read no further than this sentence. And as always, dear readers, may you find success in every endeavor.

* * *

**Chapter 35: Enemies Foreign and Domestic  
**

_"Helplessness induces hopelessness, and history attests that loss of hope and not loss of lives is what decides the issue of war."_

- B. H. Lidell Hart

**O-O-O**

_I had seen them fight before_. _In training, on video, even in person, from hiding. It never occurred to me that anything was wrong._

"Devastator."

The man in the coat did not react to the name, one hand resting lightly on the handle of his walking stick of varnished hardwood, the other gently holding the cigarette that smoldered in the flame-flecked darkness, a thin trickle of smoke rising past his black, mirrored glasses. His eyes invisible, he breathed slowly, puffs of condensation trailing out into the flame-lit sky. He moved, when he moved, with poise and ease and total disconcern, as though he had all the time in the world, and nothing whatsoever to command his haste.

"Hello, Nightwing," he said at last, his voice an elevated whisper, barely audible above the crackling flames.

Nightwing said nothing. Cyborg and Raven and Beast Boy said nothing. The wide-eyed boy hiding behind the T-car said nothing. Before buildings in ruin and streets in flames and bodies piled in their hundreds, what was there to say?

The man called Devastator did not hurry them, pulling softly on his cigarette and tapping the metal-shod tip of his wooden cane on the ground in time to some beat only he could discern. Only after a lengthy time had passed did he discard the stub of his cigarette, flicking it into the gutter and carefully extinguishing it with the heel of his boot, ignoring the bonfires that raged about him. Having concluded his immediate business to his satisfaction, only then did he raise his head, a disarming smile on his face, and speak.

"So," he said, "here we are."

Still none of the Titans moved, save for Nightwing, who for the first time, took his eyes off Devastator for the split second he needed to sweep his gaze across the fire and death that surrounded him. Devastator did not react, and when the Titans' leader turned back to him, it was with a single, bitter, anguished question.

"_Why?_"

The question seemed to amuse the man in the coat. "Why?" he asked with a wry grin. "Isn't that obvious?"

"You didn't need _this_ to get our attention!" snapped back Nightwing, his staff trembling as he gripped it tighter and tighter. "If it's us you wanted, you _knew_ where to find - "

"And walk into the Lion's den alone to face whatever traps you've set for anyone fool enough to attack your little Tower?" asked Devastator, his voice as calm as a still pond, "I don't think so. I prefer it this way."

_Not, that is, until Raven spoke._

"What do you want from us?" she asked. And there was nothing at all untoward about the question, a perfectly valid one when confronted by a mass-murdering metahuman, yet Starfire's breath caught as she heard them. There was nothing obviously wrong, and yet the tone was clipped and shortened, the words forced through her teeth, so subtle as to be almost imperceptible, yet enough that she noticed, and Beast Boy noticed, his eyes turning to her automatically. They both had heard the same thing.

Raven was afraid.

_I'd never heard fear in Raven's voice before. I never would again._

"I want your blood," said Devastator, as simply and calmly as though discussing the weather. "I want your souls. I want your heads mounted on spikes, displayed for the cameras on the parapet of your little Tower." He leaned against his cane, planting it on the rubble-strewn asphalt. "I want you all dead," he said. "And I'm here, today, to collect the things I want."

It was no different than a thousand speaches Starfire had heard before, justifications, bravado, proclamations of defeat that every would-be criminal mastermind from Slade to Mad Mod to Brother Blood would recite at the drop of a hat. She had learned, through long experience, to simply ignore such lectures of impending doom as the rantings of the mad. The Titans of the future, having had many more years' exposure to such things, should have been even less likely to give them credence.

Yet they did.

And so did she.

"Who's payin' you for this?" asked Cyborg, and his voice was like a ringing bell, snapping Starfire and the others out of their own fears, driving them back into the present. "Luthor? Immortus? Some kind of - "

The man began to laugh.

Somehow the laugh made it worse, for it wasn't the laugh of the mad, some far-fetched cackle of a mind long-past the realms of sanity. It was a polite, calm laugh, that of a sane man amused by the antics of a clown. Though the David she knew had not been given to laughter for its own sake, Starfire had heard enough of it to recognize the cadence, and she felt a pang in her stomach as the man responded.

"I had targets here," he said, sweeping his hand around to gesture at the piles of dead bodies heaped among the nearby ruins and piled before the burning building. "Six of them, to be precise. The rest just got in the way. But you four..." he smiled again, a wistful smile, like a sommelier savoring the taste of a fine wine. "You four are another matter."

"What, you couldn't find any buyers?" asked Cyborg.

"Quite the opposite. You wouldn't _believe_ how many people of want the four of you dead. _I_ could scarcely believe it. Presidents, dictators, CEOs, retired villains, I even had a Sultan make an offer. But that's really all beside the point." He popped his cane up and grabbed it by the neck, letting it swing out behind him lightly as he began to approach the four Titans.

"You really think you can take us all?" asked Nightwing as the Titans spread out, moving to surround the man, an action he took no measures to prevent, content to watch them do so.

"Yes," he said with perfect assurance, "and so do you."

Perhaps he was right, for none of the four responded immediately, Beast Boy looking to Raven who looked to Cyborg who looked to Nightwing, who stared, inscrutable as ever, at the man with the coat and cane. Nightwing did not move a muscle, gave nothing away, and yet...

"It doesn't have to go this way," said Nightwing, and his voice only hinted at the terrible depths represented by that phrase.

The man merely shook his head. "Yes it does," he said. "You know that. I just killed four hundred people. I could give you reasons, or letters of marque, but none of those things matter to you. You're an idealist, Nightwing. And idealism requires a certain myopia. You simply aren't permitted any other option."

The man smiled and fingered the neck of his cane. "And as for me," he said, "don't get me wrong, I'm not turning _down_ the payoff. Money or otherwise, it's astronomical." He took a deep breath, and his voice distorted slightly, a feral edge entering his otherwise calm demeanor. "But to be perfectly honest, Nightwing," he said, planting his cane back on the ground, "the truth is, I'd _gladly _kill you for free."

None of the Titans replied. One by one, their eyes turned to Nightwing, who remained as still as a statue, sizing up his opponent, as his grip on the staff in his hand imperceptibly began to tighten.

The man either did not notice, or did not care, and after a lengthy pause for decency, he smiled one more time, as though recalling an old joke. "So what do you say, Titans," he asked, lifting the cane slowly and sliding his hand down it to the midway point. A bare moment later, malevolently red flames ignited along its entire length, flickering in the fire-lit darkness as they licked at his bare hand. "Shall we?"

"Titans," said Nightwing, his voice clipped and dry. "Go."

Years might have passed, yet time had not slowed the Titans' reactions. In a split second, in the blink of an eye, Nightwing leaped from the ground, and Cyborg raised his cannon. Beast Boy erupted in size and Raven wove her magic. It was like the explosion of a flashbulb, a burst of activity from absolute inaction that was dizzying to behold, and yet it was not fast enough. For before any of them could complete the actions they had begun, the man with the burning cane inclined his instrument downwards just a fraction, touching the tip of it to the ground, and then everything went black.

**O-O-O**

"No..."

It couldn't be. It had to be a mistake. A trick. Some multi-layered plot of Trigon's or Warp's. It was some sort of cruel joke perpetrated by evil men. A twisted mockery of reality designed to cause him to suffer. A hallucination, a construct, a simulacrum. It wasn't real.

"No..."

It couldn't be real.

"It's good to meet you at last," said the man, and it was his _own voice_. Deep and gravelly, scarred by years of abuse and smoke, but still recognizably, obviously, _patently_ his own voice, the same cadence, the same rhythm, belying all denial. He watched mutely as the man smiled, his face weathered by time and God-knew what else, but the gestures were his own, unconscious and unintended, the twitch at the corner of his mouth, the way he brushed his open coat aside with his right hand, and held it behind his back, the posture of his calm stance, there was no question, no minute dissonance to lay hopes upon. He was staring at himself.

"_No_."

"I admit, it's been a while," said the man, with just the vaguest hint of a wry smirk, "but I'm pretty sure that at your age, I knew more words than that."

David gave no evidence that this was so. Indeed he gave no evidence that he could even understand what was being said. He stared in dumbstruck shock, hands trembling at his sides, mouth agape, looking for all the world like he had just been frozen in place, like his mind had just experienced a segmentation fault, and could not determine how to compute the data being fed to it.

The man in the coat said nothing, did nothing to indicate that he was surprised at this reaction. Indeed he smiled, like a trainer amused by the antics of a small dog, and passed it over without so much as a word.

"And you must be Terra," he said, turning his head to the other teenager, his manner calm and collected. He planted the cane's tip on the asphalt with practiced ease, looking for all the world like a schoolteacher or civil servant asking after a student or case file.

Surprised though she might have been, Terra was not staring at herself, and retained sufficient lucidity to speak. Doing her best to at least mitigate her astonishment, she tried to answer with equanimity. "Have we met?"

If anything, this seemed to amuse the man. "No," he said, breaking a disturbingly familiar smile. "Not originally at least. But I've heard a great deal about you."

Right now, what he had heard of her, and from whom, was the last possible thing on her mind. Yet before she could ask another question, David recovered enough of his powers of speech to ask a question.

"What are you?"

That one did not amuse. "_Please_ don't play stupid," said the man, "you know _perfectly _well who I am."

"I didn't ask _who_ you - "

"Yes you did," said the man. "It's the same question, and you know the answer in both cases." He paused, looking David over for a second with a discriminating eye. "You'd still be going by 'David Foster' at this point, wouldn't you?"

David was visibly oscillating between horror, shock, and anger. "What are you _talking _- "

"It's just that it's been quite a while since _I_ went by that name," said the man evenly. "We both know that you just made it up. So did I."

Several seconds passed in silence, Terra not daring to venture a word, the man choosing not to, and David seemingly incapable of doing so. Yet when finally the silence broke, it was David who broke it, his very voice wavering with the implications of the simple sentence he conjured forth.

"You're... me."

But the man simply shook his head. "No," he said, "not the way you mean it."

"I don't understand. You're... you said you - "

"My name is David Foster," said the man, "among many other titles. "The question is, who are _you_?"

If anything, David looked even more confused. "I'm... I'm David - "

"_Really?_"

The question was like a gunshot, barked in a tone entirely different than that of the previous civil conversation. It echoed down the silent street, making Terra jump from the sheer unexpectedness of it. David fell silent, as the man who called himself by the same name stared at him with eyes like jellied fire. All pleasantries were forgotten.

"Just look at yourself," said the man, and it was not a polite suggestion, it was an order. Almost reflexively, both Terra and David obeyed it, their eyes flicking to David's ash-gray skin and hair and uniform, and to the burning red coals that sat where his eyes should have been.

"It's the mark of a Doppleganger," said the man, "or whatever Trigon calls these little metaphorical playthings of his. A conceit to theatricality, he's full of those. It's a symbol of the fact that you're not supposed to exist."

"What are you talking about?"

"I'm saying that you're not supposed to _be _here," said the man, wrinkling his brow. "You're not supposed to be involved."

"I _know_ that!"

"No you _don't_ know that. You say you do, but you haven't thought it through. If you had, you wouldn't be anywhere near here, and you _certainly_ would be wearing that ridiculous getup."

Addled by shock, fear, and a thousand other things, David was plainly having trouble keeping up. "My... my uniform?"

"That's not a uniform," said the man, "it's a costume. Uniforms are meant to _be uniform_ with other things. Costumes are intended to stand out. And it's not about _what_ you're wearing, it's why you're wearing it."

"You _know _why I'm wearing this."

"No, David, I'm afraid I don't," said the man in an exasperated tone, spreading his arms wide as though inviting an answer. "I'm an intelligent man. I'm capable of accepting that there are a wide range of appropriate behaviors among similarly intelligent people. But I cannot, for the life of me, figure out what would _possess_ you to spend the last year in that Tower with those... _lunatics_. I can't figure out why you've been willingly placing yourself in a position to get killed, and ignoring clear signs that doing so would lead to the end of the world."

The man took several steps forward, his expression and voice becoming more and more animated. "You've been engaging in extra-curricular fights with bank robbers and terrorists for no reason, inserting yourself in a situation which should rightly have nothing to do with you, not to mention associating with, of _all_ people, the _Teen Titans_. So please, tell me, David, for the love of God, what in the _fuck _are you_ doing here_?"

David tried to answer, tried to say anything, but his tongue was cloven to the roof of his mouth, his nerves deadened by this final, ultimate shock. He stared at himself, his own face, his own voice, angry and bitter, changed but yet clearly the same, and all words fled before the sight.

"Leave him alone."

He snapped out of his daze to find, of all things, that Terra had stepped forward, hands aglow with yellow light, staring his older self down. Surprised (as indeed seemed the older man), he could only blink and watch as the man who called himself Devastator regarded her with what looked like annoyance.

"Ms. Markov," he said, and David saw Terra flinch at the name, "I'm afraid I don't see how this concerns you at all." He lifted his cane lightly and stepped forward. "I'll be with you in just a moment if you - "

"I said _STOP_!" shouted Terra, punctuating her command with a peal of thunder as the ground split in front of Devastator's feet. And for a second, he did stop, but only for a second. Glancing at the small crack as he would the antics of a small child, he lightly jumped over it, landing with ease on the other side, before lifting his head to Terra once more and smiling.

"I will not," he said. "Kill me."

So nonchalant, so light and yet serious was that command, that Terra hesitated. "What?"

"You told me to stop. Your implication being that if I didn't, you would make use of those kinetic powers of yours. I have not stopped. Now you have to attack."

"I'm _warning - _"

"Warning me," interrupted Devastator, altering neither his pace nor his voice in the slightest, "is a waste of time designed to cover the fact that you don't know what to do. You're here, I'm here, the rocks are here, what exactly are you waiting for?" He strode forward, cane tapping in time with his footsteps, as Terra stepped back a pace, then another. "Maybe you know you haven't got a chance. Maybe you're afraid to try. Maybe you're just slow. Either way, if you can't act, then what's the point of making empty - "

"That's _enough_," shouted someone, and it was a moment or two before David realized that that someone was him. Before he even knew what he was doing, David was suddenly standing in front of Terra, hands balled into fists at his sides.

"Why are you here?" asked David. "For me?"

He stopped. "Yes."

David willed his voice to remain even. "To kill me?"

"I suppose so."

"Then what are _you_ waiting for?"

No answer. Not for a few seconds. And then slowly, a smile grew across the man's face. "Now that's a bit more like it," he said.

"That's not an answer."

"No, it's not." The smile died as the man slowly began to circle the two teenagers, walking carefully, no hurry or rush to his movements, as though he was carefully considering what course of action was best. "I suppose it's morbid curiosity," he said. "I needed to see for myself."

"See what?"

"You. I needed to see what happened to you. What they did to you."

"They didn't _do_ anything to me."

"Well you sure as hell didn't come up with this teenaged hero crap by _yourself_," said the man. "I would know, wouldn't I?"

David didn't answer. He simply watched, turning in step as the man circled around him and Terra. He said nothing, but plainly he had no need to.

"You're surprised." said the man.

"No," responded David.

"Yes you are," said the man. "I can see it on you. You know you _shouldn't_ be surprised, but you are. It's not that you didn't know. It's that you let yourself think you'd been wrong. You let them talk you into thinking you were one of them. And how you could do that, is entirely beyond me."

His throat seemed to seize, his eyes blurring with tears or denial or just directionless rage, and all he could do was stare wordlessly at the man circling him, like a truant child caught red-handed in some offense.

"What was the first thing you told the Titans when you first met?" asked the man.

"I don't... I don't remember," he said.

"_Bullshit_," said the man sharply, and he stopped, and stepped towards David, his eyes like power drills. "Don't lie to me David, I know you better than anyone else in the world. You know exactly what you told them, it's been thundering inside your head ever since you saw me. What _was_ it?"

Conscious of Terra watching him out of the corner of his eye, David could only stammer out his answer. "I... told them I wasn't a hero."

"And did they believe you?"

"Yes," he choked out.

"So I'll ask you again, given that you know you're not one of them, and given that_ they_ know it, _why_ exactly are you surprised to see me?"

His tongue wouldn't work. His brain wouldn't form the necessary words, and yet the man said nothing, waiting for him to answer, until finally he managed to cough it up.

"You're... you're a supervillain."

"Oh good _God_," the man exclaimed, his tone exasperated, and he turned away, agitated, swishing his cane through the air like a riding crop. "A _supervillain_?" he exclaimed, turning back, "Jesus Christ, David, what the hell did they _do _to you?"

"What?"

"Am I wearing a purple cape?" demanded the man, spreading his arms wide. "Am I in pinstripes? A gladiator costume? Do you see me dancing on top of a pyramid made of skulls while singing my own theme music?" He turned his head to Terra. "You've turned in those circles. How many people do you know who _actually _call themselves supervillains and aren't trying to be funny?"

Terra and David spared a glance at one another, but neither said anything.

"No, David," said the man. "The Joker is a supervillain. Brainiac is a supervillain. Maniacs who obsess over some costumed vigilante with an overdeveloped occipital lobe are supervillains. Whatever you think about me, David, try to divorce yourself from this childish stupidity and see things for what they are. I am _not_ a supervillain." He planted the cane down once more and shook his head. "I am a contractor."

"You're a _mass murderer_."

The man rolled his eyes, but this, at least, did not seem to offend him. "Always with the dramatic," he said. "I remind you that if I'm a mass murderer, so are you."

"I've never killed anybody."

"But you will," said the man. "Or rather you would have, had you not succeeded in destroying the universe and getting yourself killed instead. That's rich, by the way, calling _me_ a mass murderer. I certainly never wiped out humanity, nor delivered reality itself into the keeping of the Devil."

"You're _working_ for the Devil!"

"And how _exactly _does that excuse your actions?" demanded the man, and suddenly he sounded angry, raising his cane in one hand and holding it by the neck. "Are you seriously so desperate to prove that you're not responsible for all this that you'll bandy excuses about what _I_ did, ignoring the fact that you just _destroyed the fucking world_?"

Nothing happened, no fireworks or peals of thunder, yet none was necessary. David's breath caught, and he fell back a pace as though he'd just been struck, wilting before the man's anger. His head swam, he felt like he was going to faint, even as the man unleashed a torrent of bilous wrath.

"What are you thinking? That I'm some twisted version of you? Tortured into insanity? Beaten until the breaking point? I can see you _grasping at the straws_. 'No! It can't be true! What could possibly have gone wrong?' Can you imagine, David, that looking at you, I ask myself the _exact_ _same_ question?"

"No..."

"Repeating that word does not transform the nature of the universe, boy. What have they been feeding you in that Tower of theirs?"

"Leave him _alone_," said Terra, pitching her voice at its most menacing, fists clenched once more. "He doesn't need your - "

"Interrupt me again, girl, and you will lose all means of interruption forever," said the man without even a glance in Terra's direction. He stepped forward, walking slowly, yet evenly, like an unstoppable force advancing in spite of all denial or opposition, and before his level gaze, David's mind simply wilted.

"I did not suffer some horrid trauma at the hands of evil men. I was not abused, or beaten, or driven mad. I suffered my fair share of life's unpleasantries, no more, no less. What I am, what _we _are, was the product of rational, calm reflection."

"You... you killed them," said David weakly.

"Yes I did," said the man, approaching still closer, not even needing to ask to whom David was referring. "I killed them all. I've killed a great many people. I've lain waste to entire ideologies. I've broken governments and thrown nations down in fire. I'm the most effective contractor in history. Men who command the worshipful obedience of a billion souls beg for my services at _any_ conceivable price. I have a hundred different aliases, and seven legal names, including David Foster. But by and large, they call me the _Devastator_."

He was right in front of him now, close enough to reach out and touch if need be, yet David did not recoil, did not even move. He stood rooted to the spot, and could only watch, as the man stopped in front of him, and planted his cane calmly at his side.

"So why don't we just stop bullshitting one another, and you can tell me, given that you knew what you were, and what you were not, what in the name of God made you think, for _one instant_, that you were meant to be a superhero."

David said nothing. He could not even remember how.

The man merely smiled. "You asked me before about that little discoloration problem," he said, gesturing at David's ash-gray skin and ember-red eyes. "It's not a side effect or curse. It's a symbol. Trigon likes to conjure up the dark sides of his victims. Dress up their bitter natures in that sort of livery and make them fight themselves. But... simply put, that's not what I am. I'm not some evil alternate version of you, I am you as you were supposed to be." He slowly folded his arms, fixing his gaze like a headmaster staring at a truant pupil. "You look like that, David, because I'm not your evil twin. You're mine_._"

Had his older self produced a weapon then and there to kill him, David would have stared helplessly at it as it descended towards his face. He had lost all sense of action, all capacity to move or speak or even think. His eyes wide, his mouth hung in mute horror, he could do nothing but stand and watch the end.

It was therefore fortunate that there remained someone present for whom the shock of the situation had not resulted in such total paralysis.

There was a loud _BOOM_, like thunder from directly overhead, and suddenly David was jerked off his feet as something grabbed him from behind and hurled him backwards, away from his older self. He landed on the ground on his back, and the impact knocked his head clear, at least enough to see what was happening.

Terra stood between him and the man with the cane, and around her floated volcanic stones the size of medicine balls, orbiting her body like a moon around a planet. Her fists were closed and sheathed in gold, and her posture was the same one David remembered from a time not that long ago, when, as now, she had faced David Foster with powers on-hand and intent to kill.

"That's _enough_!" she spat. "I don't care what version of him you are. Leave us both alone and go back to Trigon, or I'll smear you all over the street."

The man regarded Terra with what looked like a tired gaze. "I told you not to interrupt - "

Terra opened her hand.

Two massive blocks of limestone flew at the man's head like speeding meteors. The first was poorly aimed, and missed by several feet, but the second was on target, and would no doubt have taken the man's head off had he not acted precipitously and ducked out of the way. Both stones flew on another thirty feet, before shattering against the asphalt, even as Terra stepped back and lowered her hands, and the ground shook as she prepared to call up more.

Yet, strangely, the man did not counterattack, nor brandish weapons and powers. Instead he turned his head to watch the blocks land, and then, carefully, reached into his pocket, and produced once more his packet of cigarettes.

It was an oddly innocuous thing to do, and David didn't know what to make of it. Neither, it appeared, did Terra. Rather than continue the attack, she stopped, and backed up a couple paces, and helped David back up, even as the man slowly turned back to face them, fishing a single cigarette out of his packet.

"Leave us alone," she repeated. "Whatever you and Trigon want now, we don't want any part of it. Go back and ask _him_ whose fault this all is. Nobody here cares what you think."

"I don't believe that's entirely accurate," said the man.

"I don't _care_ what you believe!" shouted Terra, "and I don't care who you've killed. I took David out once. I'm happy to do the same to you."

No laughter. No mad cackling. No denials. The man simply stood, watching, before slowly bringing the cigarette up to his mouth. He had no lighter, yet the cigarette burst into flame of its own accord, before smoldering down to an ember. Only once it was lit and emitting a fine trail of smoke did he answer her.

"Really?"

Terra narrowed her eyes. "I once killed all of the Titans," she said. "Just like you." The man said nothing, drawing a long pull on his cigarette, and holding it in, lifting his head as though savoring the taste of a fine wine as wisps of smoke leaked from his nose and the corners of his mouth. He said nothing, and she made bold to continue. "I don't care how important you think you are or how much you don't approve of all this, _get away_ from us or I'll smear you all over the - "

The man lowered his head, fixed his shaded eyes on Terra, and exhaled his lungful of smoke.

And then a skyscraper exploded.

Far in the distance, behind the man, loomed the shadowy ruin of one of Jump City's tallest buildings. The Transpacific Tower, a seventy-four story monolith of glass and black stone, home to the west coast headquarters of several of the largest multi-national corporations in the world. Ruined like the rest of Jump City, it stood nonetheless, vaguely visible through the scorched skies, a landmark in a world turned upside down.

The top story exploded first, blossoming into flames like a match being struck, blowing off the roof and casting flaming debris off of itself like a volcano. Though nearly a mile away, the blast was plainly visible, and rumbled like a living thing, the force of it parting the smoke and ash and giving the two stunned teenagers a full view of the awesome destruction. A bare moment later, and the next floor down erupted into flames, just as the previous one had, and then the next, and the next, the entire structure going up story by story like a Roman candle. The man gave no sign that he knew what was happening, save for a soft twitch of the hand that held his cane as each successive floor detonated. In barely thirty seconds, the entire building was blown apart, flames and pieces of debris as large as tractor trailers raining down indiscriminately on the city below, as a roiling cloud of smoke boiled forth sweeping over the empty city, before overtaking the two teenagers and the man with the cane, and then they could see no more.

Hand over his eyes, coughing, peering through the smoke, David saw a soft red ember glow, like the end of the lit cigarette writ large, which resolved gradually as the smoke began to clear and the dust to settle. And as his vision cleared, David saw the silver-tipped cane, now lit with flames of dull red, held gently in the bespectacled man's hand as he calmly beheld the two teenagers, who stood stunned, at last, into mutual silence.

"I'm sorry," said the man calmly as he took the cigarette from his mouth and dropped it to the ground, turning the red-sheathed cane in his offhand. "You were saying ...?"

**O-O-O**

And just like that, it was over.

In the blink of an eye, the demons were gone, even the broken bodies of the ones that had been destroyed, vanished into nothingness as though they had never existed. In a split second, the world went from a roaring maelstrom of noise and frenetic action to the soft background hiss of the river of lava. In an instant, what had been a nerve-pounding battle, without pause to think or breath, was suddenly concluded, and the greyscale double of Beast Boy that had just tried to murder him was simply gone.

He was in the form of a spider monkey, hanging from one of the carven lava spigots by his tail, and below him, he saw Slade balanced on a slab of stone the size of a sedan in the middle of the lava river, brandishing the boat pole like a quarterstaff, seeking more foes, and not finding them.

A shift to cormorant, a quick beat of wings, then back to his humanoid form, and Beast Boy landed on the other side of the rock island, as Slade turned back to face him.

"What _was_ that?"

Slade took a moment to sweep his gaze across the flame river in search of further enemies before he bothered to reply.

"Demons," said Slade. "Bits of rock and sulfur animated by a minor spirit. Functionally innumerable."

"Not _those_," said Beast Boy. "That... _me_!"

"Ah yes." Slade stepped back and crossed his arms, his single eye betraying the barest hint of a smile. "That one's special."

"Slade..."

"Raven, as it happens, was not the only one who had a dark side," said Slade. "That was a manifestation of yours."

Beast Boy blinked. He was sure he'd seen this in a Star Trek episode somewhere. "You mean it's... like my evil twin?"

"I suppose that fits," said Slade. "It's certainly equally annoying."

Beast Boy let that one pass. "But why would he want an evil copy of me?"

"It's how Trigon operates," said Slade, and he turned away, searching for some means of proceeding forward. "It's not enough for him to kill his enemies. He has to see their wills broken."

"Pft," said Beast Boy, crossing his arms. "He didn't break much."

"He wasn't trying to," replied Slade. "That was just a warning. If you choose to continue, you'll find much worse where that came from."

Small wonder that Slade had to work alone if he was always this cheery. But rather than articulate that particular thought, Beast Boy asked a question.

"So if that's _my_ bad side, where's yours? Trigon can't be too happy with you either."

"You see it standing before you," said Slade casually. "Or were you under the impression I had a _good_ side?"

With a groan, Beast Boy simply gave up. "Whatever, dude, let's just go."

"Indeed," said Slade, and he used the boat pole to vault from rock to rock, even as Beast Boy shifted to a hawk and followed him. It was barely a half dozen bounds before they came to a small path, perhaps a dozen feet wide, carved into the living rock of the crevasse wall thirty feet above the lava river. Slade vaulted up onto it as Beast Boy touched down and resumed humanoid form.

They moved down the road in silence, Beast Boy too preoccupied to question what this new trail was or who had carved it. Slade, as usual, ventured no comment on this or any other topic. If Slade considered Beast Boy's silence to be strange, he gave no sign of it, and indeed, when the silence finally broke, it was Slade who broke it.

"The way ahead forks left and right," said Slade. "Raven can be found along the rightmost path, if you take it to the end."

Beast Boy didn't answer, indeed he stopped where he was, looking down at the ground with a blank expression. Slade continued on for a few paces before he noticed that the changeling was no longer pacing him, and stopped as well, turning back to Beast Boy with his boat pole held like a walking stick.

"Having second thoughts?" asked Slade.

Beast Boy didn't explode or deny the matter in loud rhetoric, but instead answered with a question that seemed completely out of place.

"Why are you even here?"

Slade narrowed his eye. "I thought we covered this."

"No, why are you _here_. With me."

"Certainly not for the company," said Slade. "Now come on, we have to keep - "

"You don't think I can find her, do you?"

Slade took the accusation in stride. "Not in a hundred million years, no," he said. "You're far too weak in every sense."

"So then why would you agree to come down here with me?" he asked. "If all I'm gonna do is fail, what are you getting out of this?"

"Like your friend Cyborg said, I don't exactly have a great deal else to do."

"Sure you do," said Beast Boy. "You could be up there helping Cy fight Trigon off, or helping Starfire find Robin. But you came with me."

"Perhaps you need the most assistance, being the weakest of the three of you."

It was an obvious bait, and Beast Boy ignored it. "You want something else," he said. "Something from down here. Something you need me to help you get, or else you'd have left me behind."

Slade was silent for a few moments, which to Beast Boy served as all the confirmation he needed. "Perhaps so," said the villain finally. "Shall we go?"

"Well what is it?" demanded Beast Boy, ignoring the question.

"What exactly does it matter at this stage?" asked Slade. "I agreed to help you find Raven. I will do so. What else I require along the way is _my_ business."

Beast Boy crossed his arms. "Not if I say it isn't. How do I know you're not just gonna turn on me or something?"

"You don't," was Slade's less-than encouraging answer. "Would you prefer to proceed by yourself?"

Annoyed, Beast Boy fired back. "What's the _deal_, dude? What are you afraid of?"

"The things _I_ am afraid of would melt your brain, changeling," replied Slade. "I told you that my reasons were my own. Leave them there."

"So I'm just supposed to trust that you're not out to betray me with this secret side-mission of yours?"

Slade didn't answer in words.

Without a sound, without a hint of prior intent, Slade whirled around, and in a split second, Beast Boy was up against the wall. Slade was looming over him, towering like a one-eyed colossus, and when he spoke, his voice was clipped and deep and fierce.

"What are _you_ doing here?"

It was not the question he expected, but Beast Boy responded in kind, drawing himself up as much as he could. "You know why I'm here," he said. "I'm here to find Raven."

"_Why_?" demanded Slade.

"What do you mean _why_?"

"I mean exactly what I just said. Why? Why go search for her quixotically? Why not stay with your _living_ friends and die with them, rather than down here in some pit."

"We're _not_ gonna die."

"Then you are as delusional as you are stupid. You are _all_ going to die. Whether or not you find Raven."

Beast Boy refused to be intimidated. "We've heard that from you before," he said. "Didn't work so well for you, remember?"

"I am not Trigon, boy. Trigon holds Devastator. As long as that is the case, even Raven at the height of her powers is no match for him. Finding Raven will not save the world, and it will not save your lives. You know this. I told you before we left. So _what are you doing here_?"

Beast Boy leaned forward, keeping a mental grip on his powers. "I'm here to find Raven."

"So that you can have the privilege of dying together? How many times do you need it repeated to you? _She cannot help you now_."

"That's not why I want to find her."

"Then what is?"

Silence. Slade stared down at him, his eye like a searchlight, until finally Beast Boy looked away, expecting yet another rant about focus and will and all that crap that supervillains loved to go on and on about. Yet instead of all that, Slade let him go, and stepped back.

"Do you not know?" asked Slade, "or do you not know how to put it in words?"

He looked up again, to see Slade standing with his arms crossed, looking, of all things, amused. "I want her back," was all he would say. "Whatever it takes."

"And you can't, or won't, tell me why?"

"I could."

Slade smirked. "Then we have something _else_ in common, don't we, changeling."

He turned away without another word, walking away in the obvious expectation that Beast Boy would follow. Beast Boy watched him go, as arrogant as ever, and then finally sighed and shook his head before, as was inevitable he supposed, following Slade.

But he only got a few steps before something jumped Slade.

There was a gray blur, a flash, faster than the conscious mind could process, and something _smashed_ into Slade from above with the force of an avalanche. Chips of stone flew at Beast Boy like bullets, and he instinctively shifted to the form of a marmot, scurrying to the side to take cover from the flying debris. Moments later, he peaked out from behind the rock, and emitted a startled squeak before he could stop himself.

Slade lay on the ground, facedown, and above him was crouched Beast Boy himself, or rather the evil version of him, one hand on the back of Slade's head, the other on his back, forcing him to stay on the ground as his red eyes leered down at the supervillain.

Beast Boy shifted back to human form, kicking the stone fragments aside, but his double paid him no mind, shoving Slade's face in the dirt effortlessly, as Slade struggled to shake him off.

"You want to know what he's after?" asked the double mockingly without looking up, each word punctuated by another hard shove into the dirt. "He wants his flesh and blood back."

Slade convulsed violently, bucking the Beast Boy double back and leaping to his feet with a loud roar. Yet before he could lay so much as a finger on the duplicate, it shifted into the form of an anaconda, twisting a coil around Slade's fist and slamming him back to the ground on his hands and knees. Before Slade could react, the double was bent over him once again in human form, and had grabbed him around the neck in a headlock.

"What's the matter, Slade, didn't want to talk about it?"

Novel, and admittedly enjoyable, as it was to watch Slade being humiliated by someone who looked just like him, Beast Boy was here for more important reasons than personal fun. He rushed at the double, shifting on the go into a giant condor and lunging at him with his talons, but the double simply turned into a Tyrannosaur, pinning Slade down with one foot while lunging upward with foot-long teeth. Beast Boy evaded the lunge by switching to the form of a hummingbird and diving towards the ground, then taking on that of a rhinoceros and charging the T-rex directly. The double switched to a mosquito, flying up and back as Slade got back to his feet and Beast Boy ground to a halt and shifted back to human, before landing some dozen yards away and doing the same.

"Awww, what's the matter?" asked the double. "I thought you wanted to know what he was here for."

Beast Boy glanced up at Slade before he could catch himself. "What do you mean flesh and blood?" he asked, leaving it open as to who he was talking to.

It was the double that answered. "Slade's _dead_, dude," he said, grinning widely. "Dead as a doornail. Terra cooked him. He's just an empty shell now. Thinks his life is down here somewhere waiting for him."

"What?" Beast Boy turned back to Slade, who was standing very still all of a sudden. "_Dead_?"

"He got tossed into an active volcano," said the double. "You were watching, remember? Or did you forget that night already?" The double raised the back of one hand to his forehead and staggered dramatically. "I know how _hard_ it was."

Beast Boy snarled and might have lunged for the Double had not Slade done so first, lashing out with fist held high. Yet the double barely seemed to break a sweat as he slipped with practiced ease into a kangaroo, bounding into the air before turning into a giant squid. A suckered tentacle snatched at Slade's ankle and upended him, and seconds later, the double landed atop him in human form, posing like a big game hunter with his beaten prey.

"Don't believe me?" asked the double. "See for _yourself_." He bent down and grabbed Slade by the neck once again, and before Slade could so much as resist, he twisted the supervillain's head right, then left, at a sickening angle, moments before there was a loud 'pop'. A second later, the double sprang up, brandishing Slade's one-eyed facemask in his hand.

Beast Boy gasped.

Slade's face was a rictus skull, a burnt, withered ember of black ash and white bone, with two searing red eyes set within the empty sockets like live coals. His ghoulish, toothed grin, with no lips or skin to cover it, bored into Beast Boy like a laser drill. He fell back a pace without thinking of it, horrified, his evil twin temporarily forgotten.

"What the..."

"Aww, you're not afraid of a bunch of old bones are you?" asked the double mockingly from a perch overhead. "I just thought you'd like to know that he's just using you to try and get himself brought back."

Slade spun on the ground and lunged upwards, missing by inches as the double sprang back and tossed his faceplate aside. Rather than attack however, the double stepped back, crossing his arms and smirking, though who he was laughing at was unclear.

"A couple of gutless wimps," said the double. "You really think you're gonna find anything down here?"

Neither Beast Boy nor Slade responded, and the Double laughed, waving his hands around him in a circle as another horde of flame demons emerged silently from the walls, behind and before, above and below, ringing them all in a fence of flame and sulfur.

"I didn't think so," said the Double with an evil grin. "Let's see how you guys handle _this_..."

**O-O-O**

There was light, plenty of light, flashes of crimson, violet and cerullean, fused with the red flames of wrath, so much that it overloaded her senses, and she could not see. There was sound, plenty of sound, deep guttural roars like the throated eruptions of live volcanos, high pitched whines of machinery and protesting steel, and the filled-in punctuations of cries and screams in any comparatively silent moment, so much that her ears were filled with indistinguishable din, and she could not hear. She had been in battles a-plenty before, fights with hundreds of assailants, crossfires between gangs of armed men and companies of police, close-quarters melees of frenetic violence, she was no stranger to the chaos of battle.

But this was something else entirely.

She could see nothing, find no-one, determine nothing of what was happening. Smoke thick enough to be grasped boiled forth from seemingly everywhere simultaneously, while the din and clatter of collapsing buildings and gyrating asphalt roared in her ears and blotted out all else. Flashing lights, source indeterminable, burst before her eyes every second, nearly rendering her senseless. Bad enough as it was for her, Starfire could scarcely imagine how any of the actual _participants_ in this re-enactment could possibly be determining what was going on.

But Warp. Warp she could hear just fine.

'_I watched the world explode._'

Suddenly she saw Warp, child-Warp, the stowaway who had snuck out to watch the Titans fight, and how he could make heads or tails of the frenetic maelstrom was beyond her, but he managed somehow to pick his way through the rubble to what she found herself hoping, despite everything, was safe ground. Behind him the T-car exploded into fragments and ruin, walls collapsed, the ground itself up-heaving like a living, angry God, knocking him off his feet time and time again, as rocks larger than his body flew past or burst into fragments at seemingly random intervals. Desperately he ran, crawled, stumbled and scrambled up again to run some more, finally finding cover of a sort, if cover meant anything in a whirling death-zone such as this, behind a pile of rubble that had, moments before, been a towering edifice of masonry and steel. He vaulted over the crest of the rubble and threw himself down as an entire tractor-trailer, container, wheels, and all, pinwheeled overhead like a child's toy, and crashed to earth some hundred yards away, erupting into flames with a bone-shaking roar moments before the general calamity covered all once more.

'_I hid. I hid like they'd taught me to hide, but I had come all this way to watch them fight, and so I turned back._'

The chaos did not decrease, indeed it seemed to intensify, yet the boy-Warp turned, and crawled gingerly back to the top of the rubble pile. Starfire watched as he peered over the lip, an expression of awe and fear mixed on his face, as he watched the convulsions of air and smoke and fire that cloaked whatever violent disasters were underway beneath the opaque shroud. What sense he could make of all this was beyond Starfire. He peered into the dark storm, as though trying to discern what might be transpiring within it, as enormous objects, cars, vans, chunks of building ripped forth as though by a giant scoop, were hurled about or blown to shreds by side effects of the massive power on display. The very sky seemed writ in red, slashed by lightning and torn by firestorm winds, and he had to duck and cover his head every few seconds as another convulsion cast debris or shock waves about like the playthings of a mad god.

'_All this, and I still thought that what I was watching was normal. They were the Titans. Invulnerable. Indestructable. Conquerors of Devils and Armies and Aliens from outer space. I could not conceive of anything capable of besting them. For all the violence of the battle, I had nothing to compare it to to warn me that anything was amiss._  
_  
But then..._'

Suddenly_,_ there was a _deafening _blast_, _an explosion which, even by the standards of before, was simply enormous. The shockwave it created was visible, boiling up from within the stew of smoke and dust like a living thing, and sweeping them aside. Starfire saw Warp duck reflexively as the shockwave passed over him, shaking the very ground violently enough to bounce the boy a foot in the air. And when he had landed, and recovered his equilibrium, and looked up, suddenly he could see again, and by extension, so could Starfire.

David stood in the midst of ruin, but it was not the David that Starfire knew. It was not even the one that had moments ago stood calmly and quietly, telling the Titans that he was here to murder them and place their heads on pikes. _This _David stood atop the piled debris, his coat open and flapping in the artificial winds, and in his hand, he held a staff made not of wood or metal but _flame_. Fire coursed from it like an oil-soaked torch, and he brandished it aloft like a holy symbol. It spun in his hand as he raised and lowered it and twirled it about himself, hand over hand, grasping it now by the handle, now by the tip, now by the center like the axle of a wheel. And with every gyration, every sweep, every dance of the fiery cane, the world around him exploded, flinging debris and flames and sprays of rock or shrapnel in any direction he chose, again and again and again, as though the battle were all a mad dance, and he the conductor.

Of Cyborg and Nightwing, Starfire saw no sign, yet Beast Boy was present, the focus of David's violent and unrelenting assault. He was shifting from form to form at lightning speed, bird, dinosaur, rodent, octopus, dragonfly, rhinoceros, and back again, ducking in and around the debris hurled his way, trying desperately to avoid the relentless explosions that clove the air from all directions. Beside him was Raven, floating in mid-air, shields of darkness raised against the barrage of missiles, and she returned every shot with one just as great, seizing cars and parking meters and hunks of rock and hurling them at David with waves of her hand. Yet none of her hurled shots came close to the mark, for each was blotted out of existence by a flick of David's hand or cane, shattered or thrown off course or even hurled back in Raven's face by the dozen.

Suddenly David half-turned, sweeping the cane around in a broad arc, up and over his head before bringing it down like a pick-axe, and instantly, the ground beneath Beast Boy and Raven was torn open, vomiting flames and stone up and at them. Beast Boy was caught mid-transformation and hurled up and back, smashing headlong into a brick wall and tumbling down it. Without missing a beat, before Raven could even turn around, David swept the cane back upwards, spun it around his head, and swung it like a tennis racket. An instant later, every brick in the wall exploded at once.

The concussive wave nearly bowled Raven over, even David staggered before it, but in an instant, Raven was back on the ground, kneeling over the pile of shattered bricks. There was no sign of Beast Boy, but Raven raised her hands, cloaking the entire rubble pile in black before hurling the smashed bricks away in every direction. Several dozen flew at David, and he spun his cane like a propeller, blowing them all to dust. But Raven ignored him, concentrating instead on rubble, hurling tons of it aside with a flick of her wrist to finally reveal Beast Boy, laying unconscious and half-buried, unmoving, with rivulets of blood running down the side of his head.

'_That was when I first began to feel fear._'

For once, David did not attack immediately. He stood calmly behind Raven, his fiery cane held contemptuously at ease, watching the scene with evident interest. And in the ensuing quiet, the first for many minutes, Starfire could hear his casual comment.

"Hm," he said, leaning back slightly, planting the tip of his cane on the ground once more, even as Raven half-turned to face him. "It's funny... I always assumed he _bled_ green."

The comment produced the inevitable result.

Raven growled, deep and demonic, her eyes flaring red, and she raised her hand and fired a beam of pure darkness at David, but David threw his hand forward and detonated the ground beneath her feet, hurling both her and Beast Boy back and throwing off her aim. She landed hard and rolled, coming back up on one knee to fire again, yet everything she threw was beaten out of the air by David's relentless explosions, and he blew them both back again, Beast Boy fetching up against a broken wall, Raven sliding to a stop beside him.

Looking pleased with his handiwork, David calmly approached them, not even batting an eye as, to his left, a massive pile of rubble was suddenly shunted off, revealing Cyborg, broken and battered but still very much in the fight. With a cry of wordless anger, Cyborg leveled his sonic cannon at David, but David did not so much as turn his head, contemptuously waving his hand at the half-metal Titan. Moments later, there was a thunderous explosion, and Cyborg let out a howl of surprise, pain, and shock as his entire _arm _was blown apart, the cannon's pent up energies backfeeding and blasting him off his feet. David did not even turn, walking calmly over the piled ruins towards Raven, giving Cyborg no further thought.

Raven lay prone next to Beast Boy, struggling to rise once again. She grabbed onto the side of the ruined wall, pulling herself back to her feet, as she half-turned to David and hissed.

"Back off."

Starfire's breath caught. Nevermind that it was decades in the future, she _knew_ that voice, the quiet, fearsome snarl that seemed conjured out of the depths of Raven's soul. She had heard it before, rarely, but always on occasions that stamped it indelibly into her memory. She knew what it meant.

And plainly, David did not.

He laughed, once again not in madness but mere amusement, and shook his head, obviously taking the words for nothing but another toothless threat. "No," he said simply, and he walked on, stepping over rubble towards Beast Boy and Raven, gripping his cane by its neck and raising it up. Starfire watched as Raven backed up a pace, then another, until she was standing above Beast Boy's broken form, and then David crossed some invisible boundary around them both, and Starfire instantly knew what was going to happen.

It did.

"I said _BACK OFF!_" shouted Raven, and her voice distorted into a full throated roar, instants before she erupted off the ground like a whirlwind. Before Starfire's eyes, before Warp's, before David's, Raven's cloak fused together into a shroud and she exploded into the air, swelling up, up, up, like a living Tower of vengeance and destruction, four cinder-red eyes glaring down at David like a vengeful God. An unearthly roar, a scream of outraged air and matter, howled across the battlefield as hurricane winds whipped at the flames and smoke, spiraling them up and away from the raging demon that had suddenly manifested.

'_This was when the fear became terror._'

David fell back, visibly stunned, his apparent control over the situation shattered, the burning cane in his hand clutched unconsciously like a religious icon. For the first time since this scene had begun, Starfire recognized his expression, even through the sunglasses, one of bewilderment, awe, and thunderstruck astonishment, mixed liberally with what had to be fear. His identity had never been in question, but this was the first time she could actually _see_ something of the David she knew reflected in the casual murderer who stood before her. For the first time since this had all begun, something had happened that was quite plainly _not_ part of the plan.

"Mother of _God_!" he exclaimed, speaking to nobody in particular, and he scrambled back, raising his staff and blasting smashed cars and bits of asphalt and masonry at Raven, yet it was as hurling pebbles at a stone castle. The howling winds sheathing Raven tore his projectiles to bits, even when he blasted an entire delivery van into the air before hurling it at her with a rocket-propelled explosion.

Raven roared, roared like a caged demon unleashed, and lightning crashed overhead and blew divots in the ground even as the living storm tore entire buildings from their foundations, catapulting them into the air before hurling them down at David like flaming meteors. Abandoning his attempts to pound Raven into submission, he brandished his cane like a priest brandishing a cross before hellspawn, falling back, back, ever further back as he sought to beat back the hail of flaming debris, yet his resistance only served, if possible, to enrage the storm further. Like a living spectre of destruction, Raven advanced, scouring the very earth beneath her towering form like a tornado, raining hailstones of fire and bolts of forked lightning down on the previously confident Metahuman. Shot after shot he deflected, tearing buildings to pieces and casting the debris about like a raging animal, yet plainly even his awesome power was not up to the task of containing Raven, and inevitably he faltered, and missed one, and a blast of living flame blew him off his feet and back into a wall.

She pursued him, slowly shrinking back down to normal size even as the storm overhead intensified further and further, raining flames down indiscriminately. "_No more!_" she roared, her voice amplified by all the throats of Hell. "_No more!_ Don't you _dare_ touch them! You think you know _Hell_, Devastator? I'll _show you Hell_!"

"You _first_!" snapped David back, and there was fury in his words too, bitter anger from sources unknown. He scrambled to his feet, but rather than retreat, he reached into his coat with his free hand and pulled out, of all things, a handgun, which he pointed at Raven and fired. The shots rang out one after another, rapid, blooming thunderclaps that lit the night up with flashes, yet the shots had no effect, consumed by the raging storm system that cloaked Raven. Shouting in frustration, David threw the empty gun at her, detonating it when it drew close, yet this too did nothing, and neither did the barrage of stones, bricks, and pieces of pipe that followed as he fired them at her with gyrations of his flaming cane.

'_It was like nothing I'd ever seen before,_' came Warp's voice, '_I couldn't help but watch._'And Starfire saw him then, staring out from behind the rubble pile, fear and awe and every other thing written on his child's features. _'I wanted to turn away, but couldn't make myself, and so I watched..._'

Back and forth the powers flew, Raven and David both hurling everything they had at one another, but it was visibly an unequal contest, for there was nothing that David could detonate, nothing he could destroy or throw, that made even the slightest dent in Raven's berserk powers. He lasted some fifteen seconds, smashing down everything she threw at him, before finally she seized a motorcycle and hurled it at him along with seemingly everything else. He detonated it in mid-air, but was a fraction of a second too late, and the full gasoline tank caught and went off like a bomb. The shock wave slammed into him and hurled him back into a shattered wall, knocking the wind out of him, leaving him open for further strikes. Raven struck, firing a barrage of projectiles, which he batted aside with difficulty, closing the distance to point blank range, before one of the pieces of debris leaked through his defenses and smashed him square in the chest. He staggered, willing himself not to fall, catching himself on his cane as his concentration abandoned him and the flames that sheathed it went out. And then finally, sensing at last the final opening, Raven stepped up to within five feet of the teetering supervillain, threw out both her hands, and unloaded.

Raven was, by most measures, the most powerful of the Titans, demon-child, mystic, practitioner of magic and sorcery, and this was the strongest blow Starfire had ever seen her unleash.

The blast manifested in a wave of pure darkness, parting the air, disintegrating the ground and walls and debris, a blast of pure energy that made Warp duck and cringe, even at the distance he was at. Everything went into the shot, the storm abating, the lightning and fierce winds dispersing at a glance, everything Raven had, all her anger and pain and fear weaponized and conjured forth, and it was all David could do to throw his hands up in a paltry defense before the black wave struck him dead on and then everything vanished.

Far to one side, Warp lay behind a of a pile of rubble, curled into a ball, cringing at the display of awesome power, until finally the sound echoed off, and the debris ceased to rain down. And then, hesitantly, he peeked back over the lip of the rubblepile, and peered into the smoky darkness, at Raven, powers now spent, nearly doubled over with the effort of having struck Devastator with a blast nothing in this world could possibly have survived.

'_And then... right then... I saw the seed from whence this all progressed. The first hint of what I was truly witnessing. I had seen the fantastic._'

The smoke parted, and Starfire gasped.

'_Now I saw the impossible._'

David stood where he had a moment before, and he was _untouched_. Smoke wafted from his skin and clothing and from the cane clutched in his left hand, his arms still crossed, his head turned away, as if in anticipation of what should have been his total destruction. About him there was nothing, not even ruins, for the piles of rubble that ringed him in had simply been vaporized with the force of the energy blast down to the bedrock. Latent electricity crackled on the scorched ground, residue of an enormous static charge, yet to all appearances, David himself, the target of this act of incalculable violence, was utterly unaffected by it.

"... Devastator," whispered Starfire.

'_Yes,_' responded Warp. '_But we didn't know that. Not then. All we knew was that something had gone terribly wrong._'

It was some time, a second or two perhaps, before David slowly lowered his arms. He seemed dazed, stunned to near motionlessness, as he turned his hands over, looking down at himself as though unable to believe that he was still alive. Raven stared at him in equal disbelief, her mouth agape, _shocked _as Starfire had never seen her shocked before. Behind her, Starfire saw Beast Boy, who had apparently come round in the interim, watching silently from the heap of ruins he was laying upon, and he too looked stunned, as stunned perhaps as David himself, who slowly lifted his head to look Raven straight in the eye. Neither of them said a word, staring in silence at one another, enmity temporarily forgotten in the aftermath of this occurance that by all standards, even the warped ones that governed metahumans, should have been impossible.

But only for a moment.

Perhaps it was Warp's recollection that was... well... warped, or perhaps Starfire's own perceptions slowed down, but in what seemed to be slow motion, David reached over with his free hand towards the head of his cane.

'_I knew what was going to happen next before it did. And yet I couldn't do anything except watch it happen._'

He gripped the cane's handle with his right hand, clenched his fingers around it, and twisted. There was a soft click that might well have been imaginary, and then suddenly the handle came loose from the body of the cane, and attached to it, hidden within the cane's body, was a thin ribbon of razor steel thirty inches long. In one, fluid motion, David drew the entire length of the blade free of its wooden sheath, yet there seemed to be plenty of time to watch the firelight glinting off of its polished blade before he turned to his right, and as part of the same stroke, slashed the sword through the air at neck level.

Raven didn't move.

The sword swept down to David's side and stayed there, and for an endless moment, neither of the two of them moved. But then, as if by magic, a thin red line appeared on Raven's throat. Blood slowly ran down from it, staining the fabric of her leotard red. Only then did she begin to move, trembling, rocking her head slowly back and forth, her hands clenching and unclenching at invisible objects at her throat. Her eyes unfocused, staring up into the dark skies, and David watched her, carefully shifting his shaded gaze from Raven to Beast Boy, who was still laying broken on the ground, eyes wide with dumbstruck horror.

And then, as David met Beast Boy's thunderstruck gaze, he stepped forward, brought his right hand around, and without so much as a word, drove all three feet of the sword into Raven's chest.

There were screams, incoherant screams, from Beast Boy perhaps, or the others, Starfire couldn't tell. She was watching David and Raven, as David drove the sword into Raven up to the hilt, until the last foot or so was sticking out of her back. And as he did so, the sword burst into red flames, even as Raven emitted a soft gasp, hung for a moment, and then went limp. David held her up for a fraction of a second more, and then he stepped back, pulling the sword back out of her, and let Raven crumple to the ground in a pool of her own blood.

He stepped back anew, sweeping the sword around, casting droplets of dark blood about him, and leveled it once again, aiming his sight down the length of the blade at Beast Boy. And as the changeling's broken form shifted once more, this time into something wholly bestial, Starfire saw David smile.

'_I thought it was the end of the world,_' said Warp. '_But it was only the beginning...'_

**O-O-O**

"Some say that we are what we choose to be. Others think that we are what we're made to be. But if you ask me, then I'd say it's obvious..."

The man stood in the street, his cane held in the middle, dripping flames and ruin on the street. Carefully he lifted it to waist height, crouching slightly, his offhand held behind his back, as he looked over the lip of his glasses at the two frightened children who were even now slowly backing away.

"We are," he said, "only what we _will_ to be."

The storefronts on either side of David and Terra exploded simultaneously, sending a hail of shattered glass spinning towards them like an ocean wave. David yelped and dove to the ground, but Terra merely raised both her hands, and two walls of packed earth erupted from the ground on either side of them, absorbing the rain of glass with a series of wet thumps.

David looked up in time to see the man smile.

Terra threw her arms forward, and both walls compressed themselves into massive boulders studded with glass and were hurled at the man as though fired from a cannon. Yet the man simply spun his cane like a baton, lifting it into the air, and both boulders were blown to pieces dozens of yards away, raining bits of stone, dirt, and glass down all over the street.

"Will is everything," he said, slowly walking towards the two teenagers. "Will moves mountains and alters rivers. Will starts wars and ends them. The will to be. The will to decide. And the will to act."

He raised his hand behind him, and four parked cars were summarily blown into the air, spinning and pirouetting hundreds of feet into the air above. The man waited until they were at their apexes before bringing his hand down towards the two teenagers as though throwing something at them. Instantly, four more explosions sent the cars hurtling towards them like flaming meteors.

This time Terra dove too.

They leaped to either side as quickly as they could as the first two cars smashed into the center of the street and exploded like bombs, the shock waves hitting them in mid-dive and throwing them to the sidewalks on either side of the street. Yet plainly, the man had anticipated that they might do something like this, for the other two cars were aimed at the sides of the street, and blew up barely a dozen feet in front of them, tossing them into the air like rag dolls and hurling them back down the street. Terra managed to keep her head long enough to catch herself with an uprooted pile of fine dirt. David was not so lucky, and was smashed into the windshield of a minivan, before rolling limply off of it and down onto the street.

The man advanced nonchalantly towards David as he moaned softly and tried to scramble back to his feet, expecting any second for the van or the ground to explode around him. Yet the man seemed content to let him struggle, dismissively shattering Terra's barrage of thrown rocks with nothing more than a wave of his hand.

"Devastator is commanded by will alone," said the man as David rose to his hands and knees. "That's what he told Raven, isn't it? Will is the key. Will is all he's missing. Will is what lets mortals like us command the powers of Gods. Will, David, is why Trigon has Devastator now, and why you're lying there in front of me without the slightest hope of defending yourself."

David gave a shout in reply, and from beneath a pile of crushed masonry, he pulled a foot-long section of iron rebar, springing up at the man with all the force he could muster. It was not fast enough. The man raised his cane, knocking the clumsy stroke aside, seconds before the rebar exploded.

Had the parry not knocked the rebar out of his grip first, the explosion would have simply blown his hand off. As it was, it whipped him back and to the side, spinning him around and dumping him unceremoniously on the ground. Desperately, he tried to rise again, but before he could so much as move, the section of the street he was laying on was blown into the air, spun lazily end over end, and then exploded, hurling him like down and into the side of the pile of dirt that Terra was disentagling herself from. He hit it hard enough to overturn it, sending both of them collapsing onto the sidewalk in a heap of dry soil.

"Will, it happens, is the most powerful force in the universe," said the man. "And it's precisely what you have none of."

Clawing her way back to her feet, Terra raised a shower of volcanic stones from the fire channels coursing deep beneath the city, sending them bursting through the ground in a hundred different locations. The man stepped back, brandishing his cane, blotting the dozen nearest stones out of existance, but the others flew to Terra and began to orbit her like electrons around a nucleus. David, lying half crumpled on the ground, lifted his head to watch as Terra clenched both fists, sheathing all of the stones in a golden light. Faster and faster they spun, as Terra gritted her teeth and concentrated, before finally throwing both of her hands forward and sending the entire barrage hurtling at the older version of David.

Or rather... she would have, save that the instant she tried to do so, the man raised his hand, and every single rock exploded at once.

The blasts were small, relatively speaking, but there were dozens of them, and instantly, David lost sight of Terra behind a cloud of dust. The accumulated blasts flipped him over and bounced him unceremoniously down the street, where he slid to a halt. He barely had time to register where he had landed when something landed on the asphalt next to him. He knew who it was before he even rolled over to look.

Terra lay stunned on her back, eyes wide and unblinking, staring up at the scorched sky with dirt smeared across her face and a cross between disbelief and awe written on her face. For a second, he thought she might actually be dead, before she coughed and her eyes slowly, grudgingly, focused once more.

"C'mon," he said, scrambling up as best he could and grabbing her by the wrist. "We've gotta - "

"Got to what?"

David turned around to see his older self standing nonchalantly in the middle of the street some two dozen yards away, arms crossed, a smirk on his face. He froze, expecting the ground beneath him to detonate, yet the man only laughed.

"Let me ask you something, David," said the man, sounding like nothing more than a patient schoolteacher. "Do you know what the core principle of Devastator is?" David didn't reply, watching like a deer in headlights as the man smiled and continued. "It's not explosions. Explosions are just a side effect. Destruction, as embodied by Devastator, comes down to the transfer of energy. Energy is everywhere. Devastator merely gives us the capacity to manipulate it."

David neither knew nor was interested in finding out where his older self was going with this. He turned back to Terra and knelt down, grabbing her arm and trying to help her up, but she was barely conscious, unable to assist in her own locomotion, and given his own condition, the best he could do was get her sitting up before a nearby explosion served to focus his attention back on his other self.

"I know you think you know all this," said the man. "You've played around with Devastator before, and you're not a complete idiot. The colored dots, the vibrations? You know what that is, don't you?" The man waited for David to answer, and when he did not, blew up another section of street, closer this time. David gulped, and answered.

"Cyborg..." his throat seized and he coughed, trying to force words out. "He called it thermo-kinetic energy,"

"Did he?" asked the man. "Well I suppose that will do as a definition. It's the thermal energy of molecules in any object. It causes them to vibrate, shake their bonds. Enough of it, and they break them completely. They come loose from their rigid structures, liquify, even vaporize. But even as solid objects, the energy is still there, waiting to be harnessed. Devastator simply permits us to do so, shift the thermal energy into kinetic, store it up deep within, and then unleash it all at once."

"I _know_ how it works!"

"No, you don't. You make up definitions that suffice for your purposes and then live on in ignorance. You've played with solid objects. Maybe even a simple liquid or two? Water? Gasoline?"

David didn't answer.

The man smiled. "Solid molecules are locked into rigid lattices," he said, "barely mobile at all. Liquids can't even overcome their own surface tension. No wonder you couldn't stop this. You never learned how to deal in _really _potent substances."

"Gasoline and water worked just fine for me," spat David.

"If you've no ambitions beyond throwing a motorcycle at someone, I'm sure it does," said the man with the tone of one speaking to a tiresome child. "But I'm talking about the fundamental principles of matter, David. The stuff of reality. To unlock real power, you can't merely content yourself with the vestigial heat from solids or liquids. You need something richer.

The man drew himself up and slowly extended one hand, palm open and upwards, fingers splayed out as though holding an invisible object. He smiled as he spread his fingers wide. "You need _gasses_."

David's heart stopped.

The man's shaded gaze turned from David slowly to his open hand, as he slowly turned it over, letting the smoky wind ply through his fingers. "Do you have _any idea_ how difficult it is to manipulate a gas?" he asked. "How much energy courses through it? Molecules _four hundred_ degrees above their condensation point, flying in every direction like meteors?" He was no longer looking at David, speaking half to himself, as David watched in mounting horror. "Did you ever stop to just watch them go? Watch them dance around you like fireflies? Did you ever imagine..." he turned his palm back upwards and locked it rigid, "what it would take to harness them?"

"Oh god..."

David turned and grabbed Terra's wrist, hoisting her to her feet by main force. She responded weakly, head hanging to one side limply, and he threw one of her arms over his shoulders and struggled to walk, even as he glanced back at the man.

"A hundred _trillion_ molecules," said the man, wistfully, "just to fill the volume of a marble. And each one requiring its own effort. Fewer by volume of course than any solid, but they're _so_ eager to mix... diffuse, transfer energy from one to another. You wind up playing a billion games of table tennis mentally just to get them started."

Slowly, David noticed the air around the man's hand was beginning to darken, as though a cloud were starting to condense in his hand. A soft whistling sound began to emit from all directions as the wind began to pick up.

"Terra, come on, we've gotta go!"

"Wha... what's going..."

"He's gonna - "

The wind suddenly increased from a whistle to a scream, as streams of smoke and air lashed at them, galvanizing Terra back to her senses and nearly knocking David off his feet. Bits of ash and debris stung their faces, forcing them to turn sideways to the wind, as David looked back at his older self, who seemed entirely unconcerned.

Around the man's hand swirled a whirlwind of air, violent, _dark _air that seemed to spiral inwards towards an tiny, central point. Though the air seemed leaden and filled with smoke, the center was white, gleaming white, floating an inch above the man's outstretched hand. And very slowly, it began to grow.

"Nitrogen freezes," said the man, staring intently at the small speck, "at sixty-three degrees Kelvin. Oxygen at fifty-four. That's _four hundred_ degrees below room temperature. Can you even conceive of that? You need to bleed off 80% of the thermal energy in _every single_ molecule, at once. And then, you need to contain it, deep inside, because all that energy just wants to do one thing..."

The small speck became a pebble, then a rock, then a round sphere the size of a tennis ball, white ice dusted with grey ash and sprinkled with black soot. David redoubled his efforts, clawing his way through what was now a wind of nearly hurricane force, hurling debris at him, trying to drag him off his feet. Something hit his leg and he stumbled, falling to his hands and knees, desperately trying to drag himself and Terra forward, step by agonizing step.

And then suddenly the wind stopped.

It stopped _instantly_, sending David and Terra crashing forward headfirst onto the ground as the wind resistance died away. David rolled over onto his back, lifting his head, and saw the man turn sideways to him, the now fist-sized ball of glinting ice still floating several inches above his outstretched hand. Slowly, the man lifted the cane in his other hand, before turning his head to David.

"The universe is full of energy, David," said the man. "And if we only can find the will to bend it to our own ends... " He brought his cane-hand back as he lightly tossed the frozen ball into the air, before turning his head just enough to look straight into David's eyes.

"Then we are free."

The man swung his cane like a tennis racket, and struck the frozen ball with the handle, sending it flying directly towards the two teenagers. David opened his mouth to shout a warning, but before he could make a sound, a blinding flash burst before his eyes like the radiance of the sun. He had just enough time to see Terra throw up her hands sheathed in gold, and then the very earth convulsed, and the air caught fire, and he saw and heard no more.

**O-O-O**

Not even the demons were expecting it.

There were too many. Far too many. Hundreds at the lowest, he couldn't take the time to calculate. And while his evil twin was busy fighting Slade, Beast Boy had found himself battling a horde of demons without limit, for more and more streamed out of the very walls with each successive moment.

He had taken to the air in the form of everything from a giant condor to a mosquito, dodging swarms of demon tendrils hurled his way every fraction of a second, striking back whenever he could find a free moment. Two demons seized his talons in swallow form with flame tendrils, but he simply turned into a pleisiosaur in midair and tore them from the walls, grinding them to paste against the rocks below before taking on a flying form once again. Another seized him around the neck, only to find itself grasping an enraged gorilla, which seized it in both hands and dashed its sulfuric ichor out against the far wall. Yet no sooner had he done so than several _hundred_ more demons lunged at him from nowhere, burying him beneath an avalanche of living flame. He shifted once more, this time to an armored dinosaur, and flung a dozen of them off to be smashed to bits against the opposite wall, but five more took the place of every one he shed, and before long he was forced to the ground. They beat at his armored back and clawed at his flanks, and he ran his mind trying to think of what to do before the demons simply tore him to bits.

And then something wholly unexpected occurred.

The ground gave a heave, a sharp jolt, like an earthquake of enormous magnitude, bouncing all eight tons of his and the demons' weight into the air like a rubber ball and sending them tumbling off of him like the pieces of a board game with the table overturned. He bounced twice, landing on his back, and shifted semi-consciously into his human form, only to open his eyes and gape.

Far, far above, towering over the yawning heights of the deep chasm he was in, there loomed a cloud, but no ordinary cloud, not even the perpetual smoldering thunderhead of Trigon's damned realm. This was a living cloud of flame and smoke, boiling up from some unseen source into the all-too familiar shape of a giant mushroom, towering a thousand feet above ground level. A deep, rumbling roar built and built and finally brimmed over, echoing down the chasm in crashing and rolling thunder, as though mountains were being bowled. Behind the sound came a pressure wave so violent as to be visible, tearing rocks from the walls and ripping the lava spigots to pieces, amplified by the confines of the narrow chasm. Beast Boy rolled back onto his stomach, and, in pure instinct, shifted into the form of a cockroach, crawling underneath a pile of debris and ducking down moments before the shockwave hit.

The debris pile simply exploded, ripped apart like an anthill in a tornado, as Beast Boy's ears, or rather his tactile antennae, were flooded with a boundless roar like the howling of a mad God. A blast front like the fist of some enraged giant smashed him against the ground over and over and over again. He heard demons howling against the wind, and a sound like bugs hitting a windshield, or crockery thrown against a wall, as it sent them flying off to be smashed to paste against the walls or the fire river below.

Had he been in any other form, likely he would have been blown to pieces as well, the pressure wave popping him like a ripe balloon. But one of Mento's first lessons long back in the day had been how to survive something like this, which form was properly equipped with the gelatin structure and compartmentalized pockets that enabled it to survive, just for a moment, gyrating atmospheric pressures of a dozen atmospheres striking against his body like tidal waves.

He had no idea where this tremendous outpouring of destructive power had originated from, and for a second, he worried about whichever of his friends it might have been intended for. But the second it passed, he was on his feet as a human once again, brushing the smoke from his face as he surveyed what opposition remained. Most of the demons had been blown away, or simply torn to pieces where they stood, but a good thirty remained, saved by one trick or another from the violence of the mighty explosion. Scattered and distracted, the demons hesitated, turning to one another as though to seek instruction. Whatever had just happened had rendered even these monsters capable of astonishment.

But not Beast Boy.

Before they could recollect themselves, before they could even determine what was going on, Beast Boy set upon the nearest two demons in the form of a bighorn sheep, tossing both of them over the edge of the cliff they stood near, before half-turning, shifting to a horse, and kicking with his back hooves, caving a third demon in like a glass sculpture. A fourth lashed at his neck and caught nothing but air as Beast Boy collapsed into a coiled anaconda, before lashing out with his tail, encircling the demon with his coils and flinging it towards his head. By the time the demon arrived however, Beast Boy was a rhinoceros, and he impaled the demon on his keratin horn. He dropped his head, letting its lifeless body slide to the ground, and then suddenly he was a field mouse, and the flurry of fiery whiplashes struck nothing but air in his wake.

The demons crowded around from every direction, and he let them do so before suddenly assuming the form of a Tyrannosaur, bursting upwards with a sudden change in volume, casting demons off of himself left and right. Two wound up before his snout, and he tasted the bitter and burning sulfur on his tongue as he crushed both of them to steaming jelly in his powerful jaws. Another demon looped its burning tendril around his neck and squeezed, hoping to choke him to death or lop off his head, but he lost his volume as quickly as he had gained it, shrinking down, not to some mincing field creature, but a Velociraptor, eight feet tall and hissing, and the burning lasso closed around empty space. Before the demon could recover, he leaped onto it, striking downwards with his four-inch razorclaws, splitting it from head to abdomen like a battle axe through a straw effigy. And even as he landed, he twisted his neck to the left to avoid the blow of yet another demon and turned his head around to sever the offending tendril with his teeth, and when they proved inadequate, shifted on the fly into a tiger shark.

He had scarcely hit the ground before he was a grasshopper, bounding into the air to evade the attacks he knew were already coming. With a quick shift to swordfish, he bucked in mid-air and dove, driving all eleven hundred pounds of his body headfirst into the largest demon he could find. The sword at the end of his nose ripped through the demon like a projectile, moments before Beast Boy's weight drove both him and the demon over the edge of the cliff. Shifting to turkey vulture, he withdrew his head from the dying demon and pushed off of its body, selecting the form of a gyrfalcon to accelerate upwards and prepare his next move.

He was not afforded the opportunity. Three demons leaped from the cliff towards him, howling like the damned, their fiery limbs beating the air as they slashed towards him. Without missing a beat, Beast Boy turned a clumsy somersault, the purpose of which was unclear until, a moment later, he became a massive stegosaurus, his tail whiplashing down and bludgeoning all three demons out of the air as though they had been struck by a wrecking ball. And then he was a dragonfly, re-orienting himself and flying back up to the level of the rocky ledge. The remaining demons hung back, trying to discern how best to attack the gyrating shape shifter, but before they could come to a decision, Beast Boy turned into a golden eagle, and dove.

The demon he had selected was unready, and he staved its head in with his claws, already switching to a pterodactyl, lashing the air with his enormous wings and hurling himself backwards. With a sickening rip, the demon was torn in half, the bottom half collapsing as the top was hurled into the air. Beast Boy turned a complete flip, changing to kangaroo and smashing into another demon feet-first, splattering it against the wall before springing away, turning over in mid-air and torpedoing another demon in the torso, this time in the form of a bison. The demon exploded as two thousand pounds of angry ungulate collided with it at twenty miles an hour, and Beast Boy managed to catch yet another demon with his rear hooves in a bucking kick, seconds before he turned back into a human at last, his uniform and hair creased with burn marks and splattered with liquid sulfur, staring down the handful of demons that remained, surrounded by the broken and crushed bodies of their fellows.

For just a moment, the demons stared at the agent of this massacre, the skinny green changeling whom their master had commanded them to slay, the weakest by far of all of the Titans by every reckoning known, the prankster and weak-willed joker who hid behind his fellows. They stared at Beast Boy, the feeble organs that served as minds for their fiery bodies spinning in circles, and all of them, as one, froze.

It was the last thing they did.

Beast Boy became an elephant, nine tons and eleven feet tall, and he let loose a roar, not a trumpet but a deep, angry _roar_, and charged. The demons leaped and scattered to avoid him, but he seized one with his trunk and beat it against the ground, gouging another with his tusks. One enterprising demon vaulted up onto his back and brought its fiery arms around to plunge them into the back of his neck. But before the demon could do so, Beast Boy was a giant tortoise, and his thick shell repelled the blow without so much as a divot. A second later, he was a raging mountain gorilla, and he reached back with his long arms, seizing the demon and slamming him against the wall before using him as a bludgeon to smash two more demons. He became a flea as another demon tried to decapitate him with a whipping strike, and from there a wolf, leaping into the demon's chest and bowling it over. By the time they struck the earth, Beast Boy was a Gray Whale, and he barely felt the demon's splattered corpse as he crushed it beneath his blubbery hide.

And then silence.

Beast Boy held his breath, laying prone on the ground as the bubbling sulfur oozed out from under his enormous bulk, before finally shifting back into a human and getting up. Stepping around the quivering pieces of the slaughtered demons, he raced back down the path towards where Slade and his evil twin had been fighting.

Too late.

The slate gray version of Beast Boy stood leering over Slade, grinning from ear to pointed ear, with one foot planted atop Slade's back, like a triumphant hunter posing with his slain prey. Slade lay on his stomach like a puppet whose strings had been severed, prone and unmoving, and there were jagged rents torn in his side like knife slashes through paper mache.

Slade's armored hide had stood up to literally everything that the Titans had thrown at it for the last three weeks, from railguns to rhino horn, sonic projectors to starbolts, dark energy to demolitions. Even the sub-nuclear detonation that David had used in desperation, powerful enough to blow Slade's entire army to steam and tear twenty thousand tons of bedrock to rubble and dust, even _that_ had done nothing to Slade. Yet here he lay, and the evil twin bent down over him, sneering as he hissed in Slade's ear.

"_Now_ who doesn't have any friends?"

What Slade might have said to this went unheard, for a second later, a three hundred pound ostrich slammed into the evil twin at forty five miles an hour.

For the first time, Beast Boy's clone let out a cry of pain as he was hurled against the far wall. He sprang back from it, spinning back around, but Beast Boy was already back in human form, sulfuric sludge smeared all over his uniform, standing warily between the broken form of Slade and his own twin. Beast Boy didn't move, anticipating that his clone would attack, yet rather than doing so, the clone seemed to hesitate, before smiling evilly, and folding up his arms once again.

"You think he's leading you to Raven?" asked the smirking changeling.

Beast Boy closed his hands into fists, glaring at his evil twin with an unblinking stare. "I think you wouldn't be trying to stop us if he wasn't."

There was a fractional hesitation, a split second of indecision that leaked through the evil twin's mask of disdain and indifference, so quick as to be imperceptible to anyone but Beast Boy himself. And then it was gone, and the gray changeling sneered once more.

"You're gonna wish Trigon _had _killed you," he spat, and then he was gone, transformed into something too small to be seen, and all that remained was Beast Boy, Slade, and the turgid fire.

**O-O-O**

_I don't know how long it was before I could see anything._

The fires were calmer now, starved down to embers from lack of fuel. The thunder of the explosions had receded into distant echoes. Even the smoke was beginning to thin at long last. But it scarcely mattered anymore. There was nothing left to see.

The destruction was total. The very rubble had been reduced to rubble, with no distinction given any longer between buildings and open space. All was covered in indistinct heaps of ruin, studded periodically with larger pieces, a broken car, a crushed sculpture, or a vent of flame that might well have been channeled direct from Hell for all anyone could tell. The extent of the destruction was hard to discern, enough smoke continued to vent into the air to preclude seeing anything beyond a hundred yards. All that Starfire could make out at this stage besides the undifferentiated ruin, were two men who stood amidst the devastation. One standing. One on hands and knees.

The flaming sword that had once been a cane, in the hand of the man standing, indicated which was which.

The wind blew cape and coat off to one side, yet neither man moved, the standing figure holding the sword down at an angle, letting a soft red liquid, whether blood or some other fluid dyed by the flickering firelight, she could not tell, drip from its tip to the ground below. He watched his counterpart with shaded eyes, as though waiting for some inevitable action.

Nightwing seemed to be in no hurry to accommodate his expectations. His head was lowered to the ground, one hand resting on his metal staff, broken at one end. He seemed to sway back and forth in the wind, as though barely able to keep upright, yet David did not approach him or make any move to press the attack, waiting for Nightwing to strike, as strike he inevitably must.

"You're not fooling anyone," said David, eyes invisible behind the mirrored glasses. "I can _literally_ see right through you. Get up and try it."

"Raven..." said Nightwing, and his voice was pained. "You..."

"She's dead," said David, with a chilling calmness that reminded Starfire, for an instant, of Slade. "So are Cyborg and the changeling. All dead. The universe's only constant."

Nightwing raised his head, and his mask was missing, torn off by some unfathomable force. He set his teeth and spat defiance back at the man in the long coat. "You _sick, twisted_ - "

"Don't patronize me," said David. "I'm no crazier than you, and you know it."

"You're a _murderer_."

"We're all murderers. All of us would-be gods, you included. By act or omission, we kill every day. We're the Valkyries, Nightwing. We choose who lives and dies. The only difference between us is that I don't lie to myself about it."

"The difference between us is that you're a sadist," spat Robin.

David seemed to freeze, as though this, at last, had surprised him. "A _sadist_?" he asked, incredulously, and his voice was bubbling with anger. "That's rich, coming from you. But even if I _am_ a sadist, what are you? A legalistic anachronism who thinks that he has the right to impose his will on all the world. Nevermind what people need or want, you know best, don't you?"

"Shut _up_!"

"Or _what_?" roared David, brandishing his flaming sword in the air, fire dancing from it like a living thing. "_What will you do_?" He swung the sword down, cleaving the ground apart between him and Nightwing with a series of massive explosions. "What do you have left to threaten me with that I haven't already seen? Will you break my arm? Smash me through a wall? Beat my head against the pavement until the blood flows? What have you got planned for today? Another arrest warrant?"

"Not this time."

Starfire choked back a gasp, so _cold_ was Nightwing's voice, a chilly hiss like an arctic wind, one that presaged nothing but ruthless violence.

David too seemed to notice, but he was not impressed. "Is that _anger_ I detect?" he asked, voice dripping with sarcasm. "My God, he _can_ react. I'm stunned. Please, Nightwing, elaborate. Are you actually preparing to _kill _me? And here I thought we'd have tea and discuss old times."

Nightwing sprang to his feet, faster than the blink of an eye. And like a blur, a barrage of explosive birdarangs shot at David like bullets. But David was ready and equally fast, and every one exploded ten feet from his body, moments before another explosion sent Nightwing tumbling backwards to the ground.

"You think yourself put upon?" demanded David, striding forward, sword in hand. "Am I being _unfair_ to the stalwart defender of Jump City? What a terrible notion! How will I _live_ with myself?"

From the place where he had landed, Nightwing groaned weakly, rolling over and clawing back to his feet before turning around to face David. David did not hinder him, watching Nightwing carefully, as though waiting for some inevitable attack.

"Still laconic as ever?" asked David. "And here I thought your tongue might be loosened at last."

"I don't have anything to say to you," said Robin, voice clipped. "You're a mass murderer, you're insane, and it's time someone stopped you for good."

"Well lord knows you've tried," said David darkly. "And with such effect. Tell me, do you remember Ceylon? Do you remember Minsk? Or how about Uganda?"

"I remember them."

"You're lying," said David. "Oh you remember what happened, I'm sure. But not the way I do. Not the way you made _certain_ that I would, now do you?"

"You tried to murder innocent people. We stopped you. That's all there is to remember."

"Well that's funny, because I managed to remember something else. I remember the Great Nightwing, who never kills his enemies. Because that would be uncivilized. He just cripples them, leaves them broken and helpless in his wake, and then makes them thank him for the mercy of having spared their lives."

To Starfire's astonishment, David's voice began to shake, through anger or sheer emotion, she could not tell. "I remember lying in a pool of my own blood as your little brute squad made _jokes_. I remember being beaten so badly that I couldn't walk for six months_. _I remember what it feels like when a martial artist breaks your arm in four places, and then kicks you into the mud." David's sword flared like a torch. "I remember that _very well_."

From the looks of it, Nightwing was having none of it. "You know what I remember?" he asked. "I remember you blowing up a loaded passenger bus. I remember you trying to assassinate the President of Ethiopia. I remember you derailing a train off a cliff and then murdering the survivors with a landslide."

"But you don't remember _why_ I did those things, now do you?"

"I don't need to know why."

David smiled. "No. You don't. Because it doesn't matter to you that the President of Ethiopia was a bloody murderer who deserved to die painfully every day that he drew breath."

"You killed eighty people along with him. People who never did anything. Peasants, bystanders, women and children. And even if you hadn't, you don't get to decide who lives and dies."

"No," said David. "That's your job, isn't it? You made that decision, and then you came after me because I had the temerity to challenge it, didn't you? There's people out there with body counts eight times mine. Most are in politics. But I usurped your authority. And we just couldn't allow that, now could we?"

"You played God with the lives of thousands of people. You murdered most of them. You murdered my friends. I don't _care _how you justify doing that."

Slowly, David lowered his sword, until the point was resting on the ground. He seemed to smile almost wistfully as he inclined his head at Nightwing.

"If you ask me, Nightwing," said David. "You couldn't ask for a better epitaph."

From within Nightwing's cape, he drew a metal cylinder, extending it with the flick of his wrist into a new staff four feet long. He leaped into the air, avoiding the treacherous ground, flying towards David with all the speed he could muster, and Starfire could tell that neither time nor injury had slowed his reactions by as much as a milisecond. He gave no indication that he was going to move, no shout, no expression, not so much as a twitch.

But for all that speed and subtlety, he had to leap, and charge, and swing, whereas all David had to do was flick his wrist.

The staff exploded like a firecracker, and Nightwing was blown out of the air like a bird hit with a shotgun. Starfire heard the splinter of bone and the painful cry that stabbed right through her heart over the echoing explosion, as Nightwing fell, crumpling to the ground like a broken toy. David simply watched, his expression confident and calm, as Nightwing struggled to rise again, but failed. And then, slowly, David reached back into his coat, and produced a gun. He regarded it for a few moments, and then, without another word, draw back on the slide, released it, and aimed the business end straight at Robin's forehead.

"Goodbye, Nightwing."

"_FREEZE!_"

The shouted command could not have been more surprising if it had been delivered from by a winged angel descending from on high amidst halos and light. As it was, Starfire jumped in surprise, and both Nightwing and David started visibly. Both of them turned their heads to see who had just intruded on the situation, as did Starfire. And when they did, the eyes of all three onlookers widened in surprise.

Warp stood a dozen yards away, a gun several sizes too large for a child his age held shakily in both hands, but aimed squarely and clearly at David.

_I don't know what possessed me to move. I don't even remember where I found the gun. I didn't know how to use one beyond what I'd seen on television. But I remember staring into those black lenses like it was yesterday._

David stared at the eight year old child who had just materialized from nowhere, armed with a weapon and threatening him, his expression approaching disbelief. For a moment, he seemed lost for words, his entire equilibrium thrown off by this most unexpected of interruptions. And then, finally, he asked what was, perhaps, the obvious question.

"What the hell is _this_?"

"Don't _move_!" shouted Warp, plainly terrified, but equally plainly not backing down. He drew back the hammer on his gun, aiming it straight at David's chest. "Put it down!"

David did no such thing. He didn't even seem overly concerned at the prospect of the weapon presently pointed at him. Instead he looked rather like he was trying to puzzle out a particularly difficult riddle. Shaking his head, he half-turned to the frightened child, keeping his gun trained on Nightwing. "Who are you?" he asked, his voice calm but confused.

Warp hesitated before answering. "I'm Warp," he said. "I'm a Titan."

Instantly, David's expression changed. He froze in place, features turning from puzzlement to something approaching horror, and he slowly turned back to Nightwing. "I don't _believe it_," he said, and his tone was that of shock, subdued and legitimately stunned. "You _didn't_!"

"Warp, get out of here, _now_!" shouted Nightwing in his most stentorian tone, but Warp did not move.

If anything, this seemed to shock David yet further. "You brought a _child_ into this? Are you out of your _mind_?"

"He followed us here," said Nightwing rapidly. "He's not part of this, let him go!"

"Not _this, _you idiot!" shouted David, brandishing gun and sword at the surrounding desolation. "Warp's not a given name. That's a superhero handle! You inducted a _child _into the superhero business? What is _wrong_ with you?"

David had been angry before, but now he was visibly furious. He seemed to have forgotten Warp completely, consumed with shouting at Nightwing.

"What, were you trying to follow in Batman's footsteps? Do what was done to you? I knew you were capable of any sort of rationalization, Nightwing, but this - ."

"Warp, _LEAVE_!" roared Nightwing, cutting David off. "Blink out of here, now!"

"Leave him _alone_!" shouted Warp

"Go back to your Tower, boy," said David without turning his head. "This is not your business." He shook his head, looking down at Nightwing with contempt written all over his face. "How you can call _me_ insane, after what you've done in the name of your obsessions, is entirely beyond me."

"_STOP IT!_" shouted Warp, and it might have been desperation, or it might have been mere accident, but in that instant, his finger clenched the trigger of his gun.

Click.

The sound was soft, but it shut David up instantly. He turned his head to the boy with the gun, as though unsure of what he had just heard, and Starfire saw Warp staring wide-eyed at the browncoated man he had just tried, and failed, to shoot.

Slowly, David shook his head. "Such a waste," he said.

The words seemed to galvanize Warp back to life, and he stepped back, pulling the trigger once more, this time clearly with deliberation, yet once more it refused to fire. Again and again he pulled it, but each pull was rewarded with the same soft click, and no result.

"Don't bother," said David. "It won't work."

Warp blinked, lowering the gun slowly as his mouth tried to force out words. "Wha -"

David smiled. "I don't know what Nightwing and the others told you about me, boy," he said. "But I'm not _that_ stupid. I broke your firing pin the moment I saw the gun."

Warp said nothing, but his eyes darted to the gun, his face going pale as it fell from his hands. David's grin broadened as he shook his head. "Next time," he said, "don't give warning by shouting demands. Just shoot."

And then Nightwing tackled him.

Both David and Starfire's attention had been directed away from Nightwing, and in that split-second, Nightwing had acted, lunging at David like a noiseless phantom, and the first warning David had was when Nightwing collided with him at full speed. Sword and gun went flying, as David let out a shout of surprise, and Nightwing one of pure rage. They struggled for a moment, no fancy maneuvers or martial arts, for one was plainly untrained in close quarters combat, and the other badly wounded. Grappling with one another, they twisted and turned, and then lurched to one side, and went spilling down the heap of debris that David had been standing atop, rolling over one another down into a small depression in the rubble.

As one, they scrambled back to their feet, David racing up the side of the shallow depression towards where his weapons had landed, Nightwing pursuing him. Despite his injuries, Nightwing was still faster, and he leaped onto David's back with a razor-sharp birdarang in his hand. David screamed like a stuck pig as the birdarang plunged into his leg, moments before Robin tore him off of the slope and threw him back down into the depression. He pursued, slashing at David once more, but David seized a broken rock from the ground where he had fallen, and clubbed Nightwing across the temple with it hard enough to shatter it in his hand. As Robin staggered back, David moved to follow up, but Nightwing knocked his arm aside, and elbowed him in the chest before hitting him in the chin with a two-handed axe-blow that threw David off his feet and onto his back onto the ground.

Above, Warp crept up tentatively to the lip of the depression as David and Nightwing struggled within it, no powers, no explosions, no martial arts or fancy gadgets. There was no room or time for any of these. Nightwing was plainly the superior fighter, but he was sapped by injury and fatigue, his lightning skills degraded to the point where it was simply a matter of bloody slogging. And for David to use his matchless powers of destruction at this close of a range without blowing himself apart required time and concentration that Nightwing was plainly intent on not affording him. All weapons material or supernatural denied them, David and Nightwing were reduced to rocks, broken bits of metal, and the birdarangs still hanging from Nightwing's belt. The only sounds were shouts, cries, and the sound of fist striking bone, or body flung against broken rock.

Back and forth the two men struggled, grappling and beating one another bloody by every means on hand, before David seized a broken lead pipe from within the rubble and swung it at Nightwing's head. Nightwing simply ducked the awkward slash, hit David in the stomach with his open palm, and then clubbed him in the back of the head as hard as he could with his fist, sending him crashing to the ground like an inanimate object.

Bleeding, bloody, and badly injured, Robin took a few moments to catch his breath, a bloody birdarang still clutched in one hand. Carefully, he removed three more from his belt, adjusting and then sliding them together with a series of soft clicks, until he was holding a makeshift sword fashioned from the razor-sharp blades of each handheld throwing star. Only then did he approach David's crumpled form once more, kneel down, and roll him over onto his back before placing the tip of his sword against the demolitionist's throat.

"Don't. Move."

For once, David seemed inclined to obey. His glasses had been lost or broken in the tumult, and his eyes were unfocused, staring up at Nightwing, teeth clenched against pain or anger or both. For several seconds, neither he nor Nightwing said a word, until finally David spoke.

"Well, Mr. Grayson?" he hissed, voice shaky but firm. "What exactly are you waiting for?"

"This is what you wanted, isn't it?" asked Nightwing, the tip of his sword resting against David's throat. "Everything destroyed, everyone dead. You wanted it to end like this."

"What do you take me for, a nihilist?" spat back David. "I wanted to kill you and everyone around you. All this," he gestured weakly up and around at the ruins of the city, "is just window dressing. And you give me half a chance, that's exactly what I'll do."

"I feel any ice on this sword or see any red, and I'll cut your throat."

"Then what the hell are you waiting for?" demanded David. "Are you _still _trying to take me prisoner? There's no jails left in this city, and there's none on the planet that could hold me anyway. I just killed four hundred people including your so-called friends and you've got me at swordpoint, so shut up and _do the job_."

Still Nightwing didn't move.

"You think you're being noble? You'll kill eight million people by omission, but you won't kill me in a standup fight? You think that makes you honorable?"

"So now you _want_ to die?"

"What I want doesn't matter. You've got the sword. If you can't use it to get what _you_ want, then you might as well hand it to me."

Nightwing said nothing for a moment, but then slowly stood up, the point of his sword still aimed straight at David's throat, but withdrawn several inches.

"I'm not killing you," he said with finality. "You're going away."

Of all things, David seemed to regard this as funny. He shook his head slowly. "Away?" he asked, like a teacher terminally disappointed with a truant student.

"I'm going to find somewhere to stick you where you can't hurt anyone anymore. I don't care what it takes or where I have to go. I won't be you."

"You're out of your mind," said David. "There is no facility in _existence_ that can restrain me perpetually, and you know it."

"Then I'll find one outside existence," said Nightwing. "Another dimension, another universe, it doesn't matter. Whatever it takes to make it happen, you're gonna rot in a prison for the rest of your - "

Nightwing froze in mid-word.

Starfire wasn't sure what had just happened. Nightwing simply stopped, like television program paused in mid-frame. David did not move either, and for several seconds, they simply stared at one another, before slowly, a smile spread across David's face.

"I don't think so..."

Nightwing shook in place, twitching, convulsing, his shakes becoming stronger and stronger, as though he were being shook by the hand of an invisible giant. The sword fell from his hand and clattered to the ground, as David slowly, painfully, climbed back to his feet.

"The human body is 60% water," he said, carefully picking himself up off the ground, nursing his broken arm and bleeding temple. "And water is one of the easiest elements of all." He dusted himself off slowly with his remaining good arm, wincing with pain as he did so, one hand clutched over his stomach, as Nightwing stood and watched. "You didn't have a chance anyway," he said. "The brain itself has no sensory nerves. By the time you felt anything, it was too late."

Starfire could see Nightwing trying desperately to move, to speak, to act, but he was unable to do so much as breathe in or out. David steadied himself, walking over to Nightwing, and looking him straight in the eye.

"You asked me before if this here was what I always wanted? Well the answer is no. I didn't always want this. I wasn't raised by a madman in a bat costume. I didn't grow up in the same metahuman madhouse you did. In fact, there was a time when all I wanted was to have nothing whatsoever to do with you and all your kind."

He reached up and laid one hand gently on Nightwing's forehead.

"I came to want all this, Nightwing, because _you_ convinced me to."

He pushed lightly against Nightwing's head, and as though his very touch were toxic, Nightwing instantly collapsed. David stood in the bottom of the rubble depression, and watched as Nightwing landed on the ground like a lifeless doll, twitched several times, and then moved no more.

"Goodnight, sweet prince," said David. And then he turned and walked away.

But he didn't get far.

All of a sudden, there was a flash of light from behind David, and suddenly, standing where there had been nobody a moment ago, there now stood a child holding a thin sword, retrieved from where David had dropped it bare minutes ago. The flash alerted David, and reflexively, he turned around to see what had just happened, yet he was too late. Before he could complete his turn, before his eyes could identify what it was that had appeared behind him, the child lunged forward, and without a second's hesitation, drove all three feet of the razor sharp sword directly into David's chest.

There was a shout, not of pain but of shock and surprise, and a loud crack as the blade broke off at the hilt, knocking Warp back and onto the ground, but David scarcely seemed to see him. He staggered back, tripping and falling back against the shallow slope of the depression wall. The sword sticking through him prevented him from landing flat, and he rolled, crumpling down onto the scorched ruin, landing on his stomach like a boned fish, his head raised and mouth working, but no sound emerging. Eyes wide and breath coming in scared gasps, Warp scrambled back, away from the stricken murderer, but he needn't have bothered. David groped blindly for the end of the sword, failing to find it, and with his other hand he reached towards Warp, staring in wordless shock at the architect of this sudden reversal of fortune. But before he could say a word, or do whatever it was he had purposed to do, his hand stiffened and fell limp. He coughed, took one last gasping breath, and then slowly, lowered his head to the ground, blood leaking from the side of his mouth and from the rent in his stomach to feed a growing pile on the floor. There was one final shudder, and then silence.

Starfire watched, barely daring to breathe. And only once silence had fallen once more over the tapestry of violence and death, did she contribute a word.

"You... you killed him," she said.

_"No,"_ came the adult Warp's voice in reply. _"I only thought that I had. The true agent responsible for this was beyond my capacity to kill."_

Starfire looked around, as though expecting yet another surprise attack by some unseen figure. "I don't understand," she said.

_"Neither did I, at first._"

And suddenly, there was light.

Not a flash, but a gradual glow that began to emit from the fallen form of David, a cherry-red halo so intense that Starfire thought for a moment that his body had caught fire. But this glow was not of flames, nor of any other visible source. It seemed to emit by its own accord, framing David's body in crimson light. And then, before Starfire and the child Warp's astonished eyes, it began to rise.

It lifted from David's body like a wisp of cloud, twisting and turning as though alive, to a rhythm all its own. A second later, and it had detached itself from David entirely, leaving him behind as it slowly rose into the air. Starfire saw Warp get up, staring wide-eyed at the red cloud as it danced into the air, now rising faster and faster, and so stunned was Starfire by all that she had seen that it took some time before she suddenly realized what she was looking at.

"Devastator," she said.

_"I didn't know it's name at the time,"_ came the Adult-Warp's voice, as the Child-Warp watched the red mist flying off into the air, eyes blazing with a mixture of tears and impotent rage. _"I was just a child. I didn't know anything of demons or energy parasites. All I knew was that I was watching some part of the person who had just murdered everyone I ever knew, escaping. And with God as my witness, I swore then and there that one day I would find that part, and destroy it once and for all._

**O-O-O**

Darkness.

Pitch darkness, darkness so profound as to negate the possibility of light. He could feel nothing, as though his nerves had shut themselves down. No sound. No sensations. No scents to the air. He wasn't even sure if he was breathing.

Was he dead?

Did death exist in this place?

The last thing he could remember was a flash of light so intense that he saw it through his clenched eyes, that he saw it even now, dancing before him. A flash that hurt to even think about, and then, instantly, a profound darkness, the transition so stark that it had stunned his brain to silence. And then there was nothing, and maybe there never would be again.

"David?"

A whisper, so quiet, yet it shocked his entire system back to life, and he felt his heart beating, and the breath flowing in and out of his mouth and nose, and realized all of a sudden that he was laying on his back, and that all around him was weight. Not pressing against him, just a sense of weight, of enormous pressure, held at bay by means unknown, enveloping him like a cocoon. He did not dare to guess where he was.

"David?" came the whisper again, the same quiet urgency, but this time he knew who it was. Where Terra was, he couldn't even guess at, but he heard her as though she was right next to him. Maybe she was.

He didn't answer her, too afraid to even whisper back, but somehow she seemed to sense that he was awake.

"On your right," she said. "By your hand." And for the first time, he became aware that his hand was there, and intact. He reached out, millimeters at most, and his fingers closed around something cold and rough and metallic.

"I'm gonna draw him in," she whispered to him. "Distract him. You have to take him by surprise. You'll only have one chance."

And then suddenly, the world seemed to convulse.

He felt himself moving, though how or by what means, he couldn't tell. His ears were full of sound, a roaring, crushing sound like a raging landslide, but one that refused to stop. He felt himself buffeted about, by what he could not tell, and he clenched his hand reflexively about whatever metal object he had found there, until some time later, seconds, minutes, it was impossible to tell, it stopped.

And then, suddenly, he felt hot air on his face, and opened his eyes, and to his astonishment, he saw light, red light, blurry still, but slowly moving into focus. And as his addled brain began to process the images that it was being shown, he realized what he was looking at, and accordingly, where he was.

He was laying on his side, nearly entirely buried by a pile of dirt and rock, save for an opening around his face. Before him stretched an expanse of empty terrain so barren and cracked that, for a time, he did not even recognize that he was still in Jump City. And in the middle of it all stood the man with the cane, his back to David, facing down the street with one hand on the handle, and the other tucked into a pocket and held behind his back. He seemed to take no notice of David, if even he knew that David was there. And after a few moments, he began to walk.

The man walked through a city street scourged, first by fire, and then by the wrath of some angry god. There was no rubble or heaped debris, for everything mobile or semi-mobile had simply been blown away, cast aside in a wave of rock and ash and vanished into the gloom. The streets and sidewalks had been swept bare, streetlights, mailboxes, and parked vehicles hurled off into the distance, and the buildings that lined either side of the road had suffered varying fates. The sturdier ones, built of concrete and iron, manacled together by the strongest bonds men could devise, these still stood, huddled together like refugees on a cold night crowding around a fire. All had lost their facings, some their interiors and roofs, and others stood reduced to skeletons of twisted steel. Between them yawned empty gaps studded with plumbing fixtures and foundations, or sometimes with nothing at all, scorched spots on bare ground marking where other, weaker buildings of wood, masonry, or brick had once stood. There was no sound, save the soft rustling of the wind, no smoke save that of the ambient fires scattered far away, for all flames nearby had been summarily extinguished, along with anything that might have produced noise.

Across the magnificent desolation walked David's older self, pace unhurried, demeanor unconcerned. He might have whistled for all he acknowledged the lifelessness of his surroundings, as he slowly approached the one distinguishing feature that remained within this blasted heath.

In the middle of the street loomed a hemisphere of stone, caked with what had once been loose dirt, now reduced to blackened cinder painted across its pitted surface. The entire front section had been crushed, as though beaten into the ground with a giant hammer, and the remainder of the rock and packed-earth structure was twisted and riven with cracks. Considering the magnitude of what it had just withstood, it was a wonder that it was still existent at all.

The man considered the broken edifice for a moment, and then slowly walked towards it. But he hadn't taken more than a dozen steps before it erupted.

There was no explosion, no venting of white-hot gases and kinetic pressure waves. The pile of stone did not fly to pieces but _erupted_, like a volcano stirred once more to life. A column of earth and rock flew into the air and whiplashed back and forth like a loose fire hose, writhing in the hazy air, before the column collapsed, parting in two as it did so and landing in two smaller heaps on either side of the street.

And between them, Terra.

She was covered in loose dirt, which ran from her arms and face like water, painting her in a uniform shade of brown. Her hair was matted with blood, to which the dirt stuck in dark clumps on her forehead and down the sides of her face. Yet her eyes were washed out in golden light, and her closed fists sheathed in it, as the wind whipped about her, kicking dust up around her feet and billowing it back behind her like an unfolding cloak.

Standing some dozen yards away, his back turned to David, the man regarded Terra and folded his arms. "Very impressive," he said, unconvincingly. "Where is he?"

"He's safe," she said. "Safe from you."

The man seemed to find this funny. He sighed, chuckling, shaking his head and rubbing his eyes behind his glasses. "Is that right?" he asked, patronizingly. "And while he's off being safe, what exactly do you propose to do?"

Terra narrowed her eyes, pulling her arms in closer to her body, as the rocks around her stirred at her unspoken command, clashing together like castanets, sending peals of thunder rolling about the empty ruins. Faster and faster the rocks spun, the tumult rising to a deafening crescendo, yet what purpose she could have for them was unclear, for the man with the cane was plainly neither impressed nor intimidated. Yet finally, at the climax of the display, David felt the weight of the debris and dirt that buried him shift violently and drain away, as the dirt above him slid back into the ground, leaving him laying alone on the bare ground, save for a heavy, lead pipe, clutched in his right hand.

"I'm gonna break you."

Terra's voice was distorted, perhaps by the whirlwind of stones or some other trick of the air, but the man she addressed simply sighed and shook his head in disappointment.

"It's like I'm speaking to a wall sometimes," he said, and then he blew the rocks up.

They all went off at once, bursting like firecrackers in the smoky sky, but this, at least, Terra had anticipated, and she threw them away in every direction at best possible speed. Still, the blasts lifted her off her feet and dumped her on the ground on her back, knocking the wind out of her lungs as the man carefully stepped towards her.

"You know what the problem is with kineticists?" he asked her as he advanced. "You, all of them?" He paused, as if to give her a chance to answer. "There's no discipline."

Terra rocketed back to her feet, pulling stones from the ground as she did so and hurling them at the man with the cane, who batted them aside almost offhandedly, as he reached behind himself with his free hand without looking. "Kinetics are all emotion-based," he said, "all about how much you _feel_. No study, no training, just random chance. And you know what that does?"

Three dozen yards from where David still lay, a block of bedrock the size of an ambulance was blasted out of the ground fifty feet into the air, where it began to slow to a stop.

"It makes you _lazy_," said the man, and then he threw his hand forward, and another titanic explosion sent the block of stone hurtling towards Terra like a jet engine.

Terra shouted, throwing her hands out, encasing the rock in a sheath of golden light, planting her feet against the ground and gritting her teeth as she leaned forward, as though into a tremendous headwind. The flying stone block shook and corkscrewed, plowing into the ground and sliding towards her as she fought to bring it under control. She squeezed her eyes shut, her entire body glowing with light, as the rock bucked, and groaned, and heaved, and finally slid to a stop bare inches from Terra's hands.

And then the man with the cane opened his hand, and the rock exploded.

The blast was deafening, sending a visible shockwave wafting out that nearly bowled the man over and temporarily blinded David. The smoke took a few moments to clear, and when it did, David saw Terra laying crumpled on her side some thirty yards back, moving only weakly, surrounded by the fragments of the enormous stone bomb.

"You don't have to work for Kinetics," said the man. "You don't have to train for them, earn them through years of effort. At best, you might make the concession of learning how to keep them under control, but they come to you as naturally as breathing." He stepped forward, using his cane to pick his way through the shrapnel as he continued to lecture. "All I have to work with are explosions. Omnidirectional, thermokinetic explosions, triggered by parasynaptic rote. You want to move a rock, you simply will it to move. I have to will Devastator to perform an unspeakably complex series of properly calibrated micro-detonations in an exact sequence, with perfect timing, to accomplish the same goal." He shook his head. "Can you even _conceive_ of the difficulty of such a task, of the _years_ of practice and refinement that need to go into it?"

Terra did not appear to be listening to him, raising herself up weakly on her forearms as she rolled over onto her back, her eyes once more their normal color. She looked back up the street, past the man with the cane, straight into David's eyes, as he lay still on the pavement, fifty yards behind. She said nothing, gave no sign, save for what could be read into her frightened, pained expression.

"Of course not," said the man, who either did not notice that she was looking right through him, or did not think anything of it. "You don't know anything about control, do you? All you know how to do is _rage_."

It might have been David's imagination, or simply his eyes playing tricks on him, but he could have sworn that at the man's last comment, he saw Terra's mouth curl ever so slightly into a soft smile. And then her eyes went gold again, and she scrambled back to her feet to face him down once more.

In that instant, he understood.

He picked himself up unsteadily, for his balance was still recovering from the subterranean trip, his heart still pounding in his throat like a battering ram, and he held the pipe, heavy as it was, like his own baton, low and to his side, as he began to creep towards the two combatants.

Terra pulled a wedge of stone into the air, sheered it to a razor edge, and hurled it like a whip at the man, who blew it aside almost contemptuously, advancing towards her with an even gait as she conjured and hurled ever-larger, ever-deadlier stones and hurled them at him at breakneck pace. Not one came closer than twenty feet, blasted off course, blown to fragments and steam, even aborted before they could be carved from the ground.

"Spoiled children, throwing tantrums because they can't get their way," said the man, as he clubbed down a dozen more hurled projectiles. "No finesse, no responsibility, no understanding of what you're doing. Just raging anger, crudely beaten into a weapon and hurled out into the world."

Terra fell back again, and sent a tremor through the earth, ripping spikes of stone out of the ground in rhythm with what David belatedly realized were his own footsteps, her washed-out, gold-glowing eyes rendering it impossible to determine what she was actually looking at. He moved as quickly as he dared, fearful that his alter-ego would somehow sense him approaching even through the cover of the explosions and the fire. Yet as he moved, he found to his amazement that with every step, the ground seemed to warp beneath his feet like rubber, the earth itself muffling any sound of his approach, as Terra slowed her retreat and increased her attacks, bringing her adversary to a stop, temporary though it might be.

He didn't question how it was possible that she was simultaneously flinging so much material at the man with the cane, and taking care to conceal, by every artifice in her repertoire, the sound of David's approach from behind. He could only trust to her capacities, and break into a run.

The man took no notice of anything amiss, mechanically blasting each spike into dust as it was raised, his voice growing more and more contemptuous. "Go on," he spat at her. "_Rage _at me, Terra. Throw your worst tantrum. _Cut loose_. Watch where it gets you."

She certainly seemed to try. A geyser of loose stone and rock exploded from between her and the man, rocketing a hundred feet into the air, before snaking around and spraying like a firehose towards him. But the geyser was slightly off-center, and the man stepped briskly to the side of it, not realizing that in doing so, he was lining himself up perfectly with David, now approaching at a dead run. He planted his feet and counterattacked, hurling a series of explosions down the street and blowing Terra off her feet, but no sooner had she struck the ground than she rose again and threw rocks anew.

David could feel Terra's influence slipping as she fought to maintain control of a hundred different objects at once. He felt the ground firming up beneath him as she lost her grip on it, and plainly she did too, cutting everything loose in a violent maelstrom of stone and rock, trying desperately to bury any sound of David's approach under a barrage of raw sound. Only a few more seconds...

Suddenly, the man shot his cane forward, and a tremendous blast turned one of Terra's rocks into flames and flying debris, all of which were blown back into her chest like a shotgun blast. She gave a stunned cry, and was lifted off her feet and hurled back a dozen yards to the ground, where she lay like a boned fish, gasping for air, curled automatically into a ball on the floor.

"You can only get by on rage for so long," said the man, as the echo of the explosion was fading out across the ruined city, "before you encounter something impervious to your anger." He raised his cane, but before he could bring it down to do whatever it was he had planned, he froze.

And by the time he had spun around, half a second later, it was too late.

David had given no sign, and Terra was past the point of being able to, but as the last echos of the most recent explosion faded out, the sound of David's footsteps had at long last become discernable. Had the man reacted the instant he heard them, he might have managed to pre-empt David, but the split-second's hesitation was unavoidable, and he could not turn in time to prevent David from bringing the pipe down at his head.

It was not, however, too late for him to try to block, and with an action borne from reflex as much as any thought, he brought his silver-handled cane up to parry the blow. The ringing sound of metal on metal morphed into a savage "crunch" as David's overhand swing collided with the cane and forced it back down into the bridge of the man's nose, smashing into his sunglasses and crushing them before knocking the man back with a stifled cry of surprise and pain.

Thrown off-balance by his clumsy swing, David struggled to recover, and slashed at the man's head again, but this time the man managed to grab David's arm, wrenching him around before slamming the head of his cane into David's stomach like a pool queue, doubling him over. But when he withdrew to repeat the blow, David grabbed the cane with his free hand, locking them both together as they struggled and twisted for the upper hand. Smaller than his older counterpart, driven by adrenaline and pure fear, David could only hang on for dear life, aware in some reptillian sense that he was only safe for so long as he remained too close to his adult self for him to safely employ his explosions.

Back and forth they wrestled, each trying to wrench the weapons from the hands of the other, scrambling and stumbling on the uneven ground. No matter how much he shoved or pulled, the adult David's mass was not so much greater than his younger self that he could simply manhandle his way out of the teenager's grip. Then suddenly he lurched backwards, slipping perhaps, or overcompensating for some shove of David's, and lost his footing, and fell to the ground. His brain operating on autopilot, David lunged after him, desperately trying to keep close, but apparently his older self's tolerance for risk was tighter than he thought, for no sooner had the man landed on the ground, than the pipe in David's hand exploded.

He felt the frost forming on it, and reflexively let go, and that alone was what saved him from having his hand blown off. The shock wave aborted his lunge and blew him off his feet, sending him bouncing and sliding down the street to a stop up against the curb. It did damn near the same to his older self however, cracking the asphalt he lay upon and sending him rolling away several feet, for he had been given no time to mitigate the explosion or channel it away from himself.

Fighting back tears from his wounded hand, not even daring to look at it, for fear of finding it a mangled stump. He scrambled uneasily back up, and turned to find the man doing the same...

... and gasped in horror.

The man's glasses were shattered, and lay in fragments on the ground, permitting David, for the first time, to see his face. His _own_ face.

But...

"You... you're _blind_."

He couldn't stop himself from staring, nor from speaking, and indeed, blind was just the beginning. The man's eyes were wholly opaque, like marbles, indeed they might well have _been_ marbles, given everything else. A horrid, flaming scar was carved across his face at eyelevel, crossing from temple to temple through both eye sockets and the bridge of the nose. Yet no sooner had David spoken up, than the man lifted his head towards him, and with perfect assurance of sight, raised his cane and blew the ground out from under him.

It was a short blast, scarcely enough to knock him over, but the man used the opportunity to rise once again. Yet despite everything, he seemed almost amused.

"I can see as well as you can," he said, brushing the dust off of himself. "Better in fact, given your present circumstances."

"But how - "

The man merely smiled and tapped one finger to the side of his head. "The same way you used to," he said. "Devastator provides, after all."

"What... what _happened_?"

"Your little friends happened. Along with a lesson on the fundamentals of life." He popped his cane up with one hand, and the red flames cloaked it once more as he rolled it up and down his fingers.

"In the end," said the man, "nothing matters except who's left standing."

"Couldn't agree more," came a voice from the side.

The ground shook violently and tore apart, throwing both David and his counterpart off their feet, as a chasm opened between them venting a massive wave of loose earth and stone into the air. Before either of them could react, the wave split, sweeping both of them off their feet. David was washed down the street, fetching up on the sidewalk like a beached fish, while the man with the cane was spun head over heels back, as the wave carried him into and through the front of a small building.

Before David could even figure out what just happened, Terra grabbed him by the wrist, jerking him back to his feet. He was half-pulled, half-ran a dozen steps down the street, before Terra pulled a slab of rock from the ground as cover, and shoved him behind it.

He slid to the ground, next to Terra, and it took a moment or two before he recognized just how spent she looked. Blood, matting the dirt that liberally covered her, framed her entire face and ran down one arm. One hand was clutched over her stomach, where her shirt was stained black with mud kept wet by what had to be yet more blood. She collapsed next to him, breathing heavily, leaning against the stone she had just conjured up.

David waited for her to speak, and when she did not, ventured a comment of his own. "Are you all right?" he asked, trusting that she knew what he meant.

"I'll be fine," she said, hissing the words through her teeth. But before he could ask another question, she raised her head, staring him straight in the eye. "You have to get out of here."

Had she asked him to jump into a pool of magma, he would scarcely have been more surprised. "What?" he asked. "What do you - "

"There's no time to argue," she said quickly. "That wave won't hold him for long. Just get up and run! I'll cover you."

"If you want to run, let's both go, come on!"

"He'll just follow us, somebody has to stop him, and I'm the one who still has powers. You can make it if you leave _right now_."

Fire flared upwards from somewhere deep inside his stomach. "I'm not just leaving you to - "

A _tremendous_ explosion from down the street interrupted both of them, and they peered over the edge of the rock shelter in time to watch the entire building that the man with the cane had been hurled into exploding. Flaming pieces of debris flew a hundred yards into the air to rain down in every direction, as a shadow began to form within the flames that raged inside it.

Terra was the first one to act.

She grabbed David by the collar, pulling him back down behind the rock and forcing him to look her in the eye.

"You _have_ to go," she said. "You're the only one left."

He blinked. "What are you talking about."

"You're the only Titan left," she said. "Trigon killed the others, and now he's trying to kill you. That's why he sent that double of yours. He needs you all dead."

"He's trying to kill both of us," said David.

"He wants me because I betrayed him, just like Slade. He wants you because he knows that the Titans beat him the first time, and as long as there's still one of you alive, he's vulnerable. That's why you have to get out of here."

"But," stammered David, still barely able to even credit what she was suggesting, "but I don't... I don't have _Devastator_! How am I supposed to - "

"I don't _know_!" shouted Terra. "I don't know how this is supposed to end. None of this was even supposed to happen. But it _did_ happen. And the only people who can still set it right are the Titans."

David didn't know what to say, but Terra didn't wait for him to figure it out. "Go," she said, standing back up. "I'll hold him here."

"T... Terra..."

"_Run!_"

She whipped her hand out, and David was hurled back by a convulsion of the earth, moments before another wave of living earth picked him up and brushed him down the street like an insect caught in a gust of wind. Over and over he rolled, until finally he reached the end of the street, and saw Terra turning back towards the scene of the action, her body cloaked in a golden halo, before the smoke closed between them, and he saw no more.

Back up the street, Terra turned back towards where the man in the cane had last been, and gasped, as she saw the man in question standing not a dozen yards in front of her, leaning on his flaming cane, watching her with equanimity, staring into her soul with his lifeless, blank eyes. She took a step back, clenching her fists and raising fresh stones with which to do battle, but the man did not advance to the attack.

"So tell me," he asked her, his tone calm and curious, "why did you _really_ want him to run?"

She hesitated. "To get away from you," she said.

"And why should you care whether he gets away from me?" asked the man. "Surely you don't actually believe that he's going to run off and single-handedly kill Trigon?"

She took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. What use now in lying?

"Because I wiped the Titans out once," she said, "or I thought I had. I thought it was what I wanted to do. And after I'd done it, I just wanted to die." She paused, letting the stones spin around her like heavenly bodies. "I won't let Trigon, or you, or anyone else wipe them all out again."

"That may not be up to you."

"I say it _is_ up to me," she said, and she dropped back into a ready position. "You wanna say otherwise?"

The man simply nodded, picking his cane up idly and looking it over, as though expecting it to bloom in his hand. Then with a single, fluid motion, he grasped the top of his cane and turned the handle. There was a soft click, and suddenly the handle came off entirely, and from within the cane came a ribbon of bright steel, razor sharp and glistening in the unearthly twilight. In one motion, he raised the handle and sword into the air, letting it ring as it vibrated in the breeze. And then at once, the entire sword burst into heatless flame.

Terra took a deep breath, trying to still her heart rate, as the man slowly lowered his flaming sword, looked her in the eye once more, and smiled.

"I knew a man once who had a saying for occasions like this," he said. "Tell me, Terra, would you like to know how I got these scars?"

**O-O-O**

If there was a God, he had a sick sense of humor.

Beast Boy wanted nothing more than to race off, take to the air, to the ground, whatever he had to do. He had the unavoidable sense that time was slipping through his fingers while he loitered here. But rather than do what he wished to, and run after where he thought Raven was at full speed, he was stuck here, moving at a pace a snail would have described as a dawdle, practically carrying someone he would ordinarily have spared no effort to reduce to a state such as this.

Slade was barely mobile, unable to maintain his own weight. He would not even have been able to move had Beast Boy not been supporting him. Sickly yellow ichor leaked from the slashes in his side, oozing like mucus down his side and dripping onto the ground, where it bubbled and hissed, etching the very stone. Beast Boy didn't ask what it was, nor how his duplicate had managed to rip through Slade as he had. Even if Slade had been willing to tell him, he was pretty sure he wouldn't understand the answers.

He was almost equally sure he didn't want to know.

Slade said nothing, save for a persistent groan that seemed to emanate from some indistinct point within himself. It sounded like dying machinery, like the groan of a gnarled tree as it shifted in the wind. Every time he made his mind up to ask if Slade was all right, he managed to think better of it. All he could do was help him along, and trust that he was doing the right thing here. For all he might have hated him, Slade was the only one who seemed to know what this place was.

At long last, they rounded a corner. Ahead, the boiling river turned sharply to the right, and bore away into further fathomless depths. The path that they were following, running along it some twenty yards above the surface of the lava, split here, one branch wrapping right along the cliff wall, bearing gently upwards before being lost to sight. The other fork turned away, towards a tunnel carved into the living stone, vanishing almost instantly into darkness, but not before plunging down a further set of carven stairs.

Step by shambling step, they made their way onwards, Beast Boy not even asking which way they were to go, assuming that Slade would make his intentions clear in good time. Yet when finally they came to the fork in the road, the last step seemed too much, and Slade's body suddenly went rigid, and then limp, moments before he collapsed to the ground on his hands and knees. He remained there for a moment, teetering on the brink of total collapse, until finally his limbs seemed to give out beneath him, and he fell, utterly spent, on his front, and moved no more.

Beast Boy thought for a moment Slade might be dead, until he reminded himself that Slade _was_ dead, and that death didn't seem to mean what it previously had.

Kneeling down carefully, Beast Boy tried to roll Slade over, but to no avail. Whatever Slade was now made of, his weight was such that he might as well have been carved from solid lead. It wasn't until Beast Boy resorted to using himself as a makeshift auto-jack, shifting to a tiny form, sliding underneath Slade, and then progressively adopting larger and larger forms, that he managed to budge Slade at all.

Once he had gotten Slade onto his back, he resumed normal form, and bent down over him. Slade's rictus-skull looked, somehow, even worse than it had before, the flame-red lights where his eyes should have been, staring unfocused upwards at the towering heights above. He raised his hand weakly, and seemed to grasp at things that were not there, even as the ichor continued to leach from his injuries, if they could be called that. He gave no sign that he could even tell that Beast Boy was there.

"Slade?"

Slade's eyes brightened, then dulled once more. He stirred slightly, looking as though he was seeking for something. It was several seconds before he managed to find Beast Boy, kneeling directly overhead.

"Slade, are you... "

Beast Boy stopped himself from asking the question he had meant to. Slade was _dead_. Whatever lies his evil twin had or would tell, that much he believed. He tried again.

"What... what are you?"

The question seemed to galvanize what life remained in Slade. His eyes brightened, he focused on Beast Boy, and emitted a sound that might have been a laugh.

"A son of Perdition," he said, his voice fading in and out.. "Adversary's adversary." He coughed, or seemed to. "Petulance or stubbornness. Too much hate to die forever."

None of it made sense. Beast Boy left it off. "Which way do we go now?"

"Nowhere."

Beast Boy fought off the urge to drive his fist into that grinning skull. "You said you'd bring me to Raven," he said, not bothering to conceal his anger. "Where _is_ she?"

Slade fixed his eyes, or what passed for them, on Beast Boy. "You'll find her in Tartarus," he said, "rolling boulders up a hill. Frozen in Cocytus. The darkest Hell is reserved for traitors."

Instantly, Beast Boy forgot where he was or who he was talking to. His vision clouded over in red, and before he even knew what he was doing, he had lifted Slade, lead weight or not, half-off the ground, and was staring down into his face in a form he would not have been able to describe, had he been asked.

"Raven is _not_ a traitor!" he practically roared into Slade's ashen face. Slade simply seemed to laugh.

"She came here of free will. Joined a team meant to save the world. Wound up destroying - "

"_This wasn't her fault!_" By now, Beast Boy wasn't even sure if he was still speaking English, or howling in some guttural animal-tongue. Slade seemed to understand him, either way.

"Fault?" asked Slade. "Never anyone's fault. That's the problem these days... a culture of buck-passing. Nobody takes _pride_ in their work."

Beast Boy leaned down over Slade, pressing him back against the ground. "Tell me where Raven is," he said through clenched teeth, "or I'll make you wish Trigon left you dead."

Something galvanized deep inside Slade, and he slowly raised his head and shoulders, propping himself up carefully. He forced words out, his tone clearing slightly, his entire body shaking with the effort required to maintain even this level.

"Nothing..." he said. "Nothing... you can do... to threaten me now... boy. Your worst nightmares... rages... nothing close. Not a _fraction_ of what Trigon could... in your place."

"Don't bet on that," said Beast Boy, but he didn't even believe himself, and slowly, he felt his rage drain away. Slade wasn't important now. He had to move on.

"If you won't tell me where she is," he said finally, "then I'll find her myself. I don't care what I have to do. I'll find her, and I'll bring her - "

From nowhere, Slade's hand shot out like a piston, and grabbed Beast Boy by the throat in a grip of iron, and suddenly Slade was right in his face, sitting upright, his soulless red eyes boring into Beast Boy's from bare inches away.

"_Convince me,_" hissed Slade, with a voice like grated glass.

The sudden reversal cost Beast Boy both his train of thought and his equilibrium. He shifted to a tiny insect, slipping through Slade's fingers before he could tighten his fist and re-appearing a foot away. Bereft of support, Slade collapsed back once more, a sick wheezing sound emitting from his skeletal face, as Beast Boy approached warily.

"Convince you of what?" asked Beast Boy.

Slade didn't answer, not when Beast Boy repeated his question, not even when he shouted it. Cautiously, the shapeshifter knelt down over Slade once again. Slade might well do anything, grab him again or even attack, but he simply had to know what Slade knew if it was possible to know.

"Slade?" he asked, letting some of his desperation creep into his voice, and tentatively he reached out and took the armored cyclops' shoulder, half expecting Slade to bolt upright again, but Slade barely reacted, and to his surprise, Slade's armored skin was hot to the touch, even through Beast Boy's thick gloves.

"Slade?" asked Beast Boy again, louder this time, even as the heat under his fingers increased to the point where the surface of his gloves started to scorch. He withdrew his hand, sliding back as the air above Slade began to shimmer with the radiating heat. "_Slade_?"

A soft hiss of what might have been breath, and Slade twitched, though he did not rise or seek for something to grasp. Gurgled sounds from deep within his form resolved slowly into indistinct words.

"Boil forever in the river. Till Phlegethon runs dry."

Beast Boy blinked. It wasn't that he had the first idea what Slade was talking about, not specifically, but...

"You _are_ dead, aren't you?"

"Dead..." said Slade, and he didn't seem to be talking to Beast Boy so much as himself. "Dead and burnt."

"Then how are you here?" asked Beast Boy. "What happened to you?"

Slade's eyes seemed to clear, not that Beast Boy could easily tell, and his voice became slightly stronger. "Promised... promised to serve. For power. Liberation." His armored skin began to glow a faint, cherry red, as the heat wafting off his body became more and more palpable. He snarled, spitting the words out by force of will. "Lied. Betrayed the Devil... all for... guesswork."

"Guesswork?"

"Can't... stop Trigon," said Slade, his words clipped, boiling with barely suppressed agony. "Nothing... nothing can stop... not Raven. Not you."

"Then why did you come all this way? Did you think I was going to find your body for you or something?"

Slade laughed, a horrible, hollow, pained laugh. "Never much hope... for that..." he said. "Came to see... if Raven... would let you find her..."

"All you care about is yourself," said Beast Boy, but he found that he couldn't infuse the words with his usual scorn. They were simple statements. "What do you care if I found Raven?"

Slade's head lolled over to one side, as flames began to flicker around his skeletal face. And yet despite that, his withered features slowly twisted into a smile.

"You should have died... in the fire..." he stammered. "In the ambush... in Yosemite. Should have killed David with Cinderblock. Should have been turned to Trigon-stone. You all... should have been killed... so many times before... Brother Blood. Terra. Me..."

Beast Boy hesitated, staring down into Slade's face. "What... what are you saying?"

Slade's head drooped, as he visibly fought to stay awake. "Trigon... indestructable. Raven... dead. Devastator... gone. Situation... utterly... totally... hopless." He gathered his breath, forcing the flames to subside slightly, looked back up at Beast Boy, and seemed to smirk. "You people... make a habit... of those sorts of situations."

Despite everything, Beast Boy felt a soft smile coming to his face, the first since this whole nightmare had started. "You _do_ think we can stop him, don't you?"

"No," croaked Slade, "I know you can't. But... I think you Titans..." he strained to force out the last few words, "you _enjoy_ making me look... stupid."

Deep inside himself, Beast Boy felt something wake up, something he couldn't describe nor identify, but recognized nonetheless. He smiled once again, this time in earnest, and crossed his arms.

"Well guess what, Slade," he said, "you're about to look stupider than ever."

Maybe it was the light playing tricks, but he thought he saw Slade's rictus-face twist into a smile.

Suddenly there was a roar of flame, and Slade's armor began glowing bright, cherry red. Fire wreathed his head, and shot several feet into the air from every crack and opening in his boiling armor, and Slade emitted a sound like a raging gorilla, writhing on the ground, even as Beast Boy scrambled back from the withering heat. He raised his arm to his face, peering through his fingers at the burning supervillain, trying to think of something to do to beat the flames out, when Slade's voice roared out, above the flames, a loud, keening wail, like that of an evil spirit conjured up from the dark pits of the earth.

"_Prove it!_" he roared, the words repeating over and over like a neverending echo.

"Where... where _is_ she?" shouted Beast Boy, not even sure what to look at anymore. He stood back up, backing away from the roaring pyre that now encased Slade. "Tell me where she is!"

"Ascend," came the reply, barely discernable through the howling flames. "Keep going, no matter what. Find her."

"_Where_?"

"The halls of lamentation. The depths of your own guilt. Find her in your own fears. Whereever you go, there she will be..."

"I don't - "

The flames exploded a hundredfold, driving Beast Boy back against the wall, his hands thrown up to protect his face, as gouts of fire shot in every direction, and Slade's voice became a horrid scream. For a moment, he thought he saw a looming shadow burst out of Slade's body, boiling up like a wraith of darkness to cloak the world in ruin. And then it dissipated, along with the scream, trailing away into the far distance, and all that was left was a glowing husk of iron, crackling and burning with orange flame.

Slowly, Beast Boy lowered his hands, staring at the burning pyre, looking for any signs of movement, but there was nothing there. He hesitated only a few moments, watching as the flames continued to dance over Slade's surface. And then, finally, Beast Boy turned back to the fork in the path, selected the rightmost path, the one that climbed out of the crevasse, took one, long, deep breath, and slowly walked away.

**O-O-O**

And then there was nothing at all.

Starfire took a breath, held it, exhaled, and still there was nothing. The world had shut off completely, all light, all sound removed, save for the sound of her own heartbeat and breathing. But just as she was beginning to wonder if Warp had somehow contrived to banish her to some nether dimension, suddenly the darkness disapated with a soundless flash, and she was standing in the ruined castle once more, staring up at Warp, who stood before the small fountain, the glow from which was beginning to subside.

Warp stared at her expectantly, but said nothing, waiting patiently, as Starfire slowly re-acclimatized herself to her surroundings, and faced him once more, before finally, she offered a comment.

"You... you did all this," she said, "all this death and destruction. You betrayed an entire world, _your_ world, killed Robin, and delivered the Earth to Trigon, all to take revenge on _David_?"

"No," said Warp. "Not on David."

Lightly, Warp stepped off the dais, walking slowly around Starfire, towards a small wooden chest propped against the back wall, speaking as he walked.

"I killed David, but I had seen something else escape. I thought it was some part of David, an astral projection, a consciousness transfer... a ghost perhaps. I didn't know anything. But I knew that some element of the person who had slaughtered the only family I had ever known had escaped. And I knew that I had to find it."

Starfire followed Warp with her eyes, turning to keep him in sight as he moved around her. "How did you discover what it was?"

Warp reached the chest and crouched over it. Starfire briefly considered shooting him where he stood, but before she could do so, he popped the latch on the chest, and reached into it, even as he turned his head back to her and smiled.

"Time," he said. "Persistance. And my inheritance."

He pulled something out of the chest, a large bundle wrapped in sackcloth, which he held to his chest as he turned around.

"I knew that once the word escaped that the Titans were dead, that their enemies would congregate in Jump City and ransack the Tower. I had only bare moments to escape with what I would. But fortunately, I knew exactly what item I required to find what I needed."

Warp undid the sackcloth wrapped around the bundle and removed it, and in his hands, he held a large book, bound in black and violet and clasped shut by golden fixtures and hinges. Sigils of an unknown language were inscribed on its cover in threads of woven silver, and the entire codex seemed to glow with a soft purple light, and trembled in Warp's hands like a living thing.

Starfire's eyes popped. She let out a gasp, and took a step back. "Raven's book!" she exclaimed.

"The Book of Azar," corrected Warp. "The collected wisdom of the monks of Azarath. A very useful tool for one who wished to kill something he did not understand."

Starfire bit her lip and clenched her teeth. "You had _no right_ to take that!" she snarled at Warp. "That belongs to Raven."

"Raven was _dead_," snapped Warp back. "So were all the other Titans. I was the only one left. If I hadn't taken it, then one of her enemies would have. It was mine by _right_. And if you disagree with that, then I'll remind you, princess, _you_ put me in that Tower with them."

"She would not have wished for you to use that book to destroy the Earth!"

"Then perhaps she should not have died," said Warp coldly.

Starfire shook her head, lowering it, before another thought came to her, and she raised it once more.

"But... Raven attempted to determine what David's powers were with that book as well. She was unable to discover anything about them."

Warp frowned. "Raven didn't have the time I had," he said, "and she didn't know what I knew."

Starfire fell silent, and Warp continued.

"I had nothing to go on," he said. "Nothing but what I had seen. But I remembered that David had somehow contrived to resist Raven's powers at their most extreme. He didn't even appear to know how he had done it, meaning somehow he had managed to nullify the most powerful weapons Raven had at her command, by accident."

Warp opened the book with a touch, the clasps undoing themselves before the book flipped open, and the pages began to turn of their own seeming accord.

"You see," said Warp, "I didn't have the advantage of a regiment of learned monks at my beck and call, nor anyone to teach me how to even read Azarathian. And with the Titans dead... well... I had to make my own way. Something none of you ever understood the necessity of."

Something in Warp's voice stuck out. "What... happened to you?"

Warp didn't answer immediately, looking down at the pages of the book as they flashed by. "I survived," he said finally. "And moreover I learned. It took me years to decrypt what was in that book. Years of drudgery and degradation and scraping by in a dystopian nightmare world." He raised his head again, looking into Starfire's eyes with fire dancing behind his own. "Every day, I was taught once more the full price that you extracted from me for my crimes. Every day, I was made to suffer indignities the likes of which you never even imagined. All because _you _condemned me to a life sentence in Hell."

Starfire did not answer, and finally Warp looked back down at the book. "But I survived," he said. "And I learned. I travelled all around the world, looking for scraps of arcane lore, ancient temples, anything that might shed light on what I'd seen. I became an expert in Metahuman physiology and paraphysics. And eventually... I was able to gather enough to finally break the code. And when I finally was able to translate the book into English... then I found the key."

"You discovered what David was?"

Warp smiled. "No," he said. "Far better. I learned of _Trigon_."

He began to pace back and forth, the book's pages flipping as though in a windstorm, as his voice became more excited. "Trigon was an _obsession_ of Azar's. She knew he would return, and she poured all her lore and all her knowledge into this book, hoping to find a solution. I learned everything, what Trigon was, why he had come, how he had been defeated in the past, and best of all... theories as to how he might be beaten, once he returned."

"Devastator."

"Of course," said Warp. "Raven had never heard of Devastator, but Azar had, and she hid the information deep within the book, mired in riddles and rumors. A complete description of the entity called Devastator, one that matched what I'd seen that night in Jump perfectly."

"If you discovered all this from the Book of Azar," asked Starfire. "Why did Raven not find the answer when _she _sought for the identity of Devastator?"

"Raven searched for mere weeks," said Warp. "I had _decades_ to unravel the mysteries of this lovely tome. The secrets of Azarath do not reveal themselves lightly. I found more in here than she learned in her entire lifetime."

The implication of that statement was frightening enough that Starfire felt a shiver run up her spine. Somehow, Warp seemed to notice, and he smiled darkly before slamming the book shut with a loud clap like a peal of thunder.

"Once I learned of Devastator," said Warp, "then I realized what I had to do. For my own sake, for the sufferings I was put through, and for all those murdered by Devastator I would take my revenge in two parts. One against you. The other... against Devastator itself."

Starfire felt another chill. "You did all this to revenge yourself against _Devastator_?"

Warp smiled a half-smile. "Devastator destroyed my life. Destroyed what little support I had left after _you_ cast me into the midst of Hell itself. Devastator removed everything from me that I had come to care for. What passed for my family, for my _entire world_, was ripped from me in an instant because Devastator empowered a madman to slaughter them all."

"So to avenge your family, you went back in time to kill them all _again_?" exclaimed Starfire in horror.

The smile faded from Warp's face. "The Titans of this planet were not my family," he said. "These were adolescent children from another dimension who happened to share their names. I returned the punishment done to me onto the world that inflicted it," he said. "It was the only way to ensure that Devastator paid for its crimes... and that you did."

Her eyes wide with horror, Starfire could only stammer a reply. "If it was your wish to kill me, why did you not simply _do so_? Why did you need to destroy our _world_?"

"Because that was _not_ my wish," said Warp. "If I wanted you dead, Starfire, you would already be as dead as Robin. I wanted you to know what you had wrought, to understand what your actions set in motion. And above that, I wanted to take my revenge, not just on you, but on Devastator itself."

"Then why not do so? Why arange to bring back Trigon?"

"Because in my world, David was dead. Devastator had already chosen a new host, and I had no means of finding it, let alone of taking action against Devastator itself even if I had. Devastator exists outside time and space. It's an energy parasite. Strike down a host, and it simply finds another. I needed something permanent. I needed something capable of destroying a cosmic entity, something capable of killing a being that was not even fully alive by our definitions of the term. In short, I needed Trigon."

"So you returned to our time."

"Of course I did," said Warp. "Trigon was already dead in mine. I came back, and contrived to contact Trigon directly. I offered him everything he wanted, the world, the universe, Devastator, his daughter. I told him of how the Titans had slain him, how Robin had found Raven's spirit, rescued it, and gave her the opportunity to strike him down. And then I told him that I knew how to give him victory." Warp smiled, lowering the book in one hand, and stepping forward. "And all I asked in return, was that he grant me this opportunity."

"And what opportunity _is _this?"

"The opportunity, princess, to stand in front of you, and see your face when you learned that through your actions, you caused the death of Robin, the incineration of this world, and the sentencing of your friends to damnation and death. I wanted to watch as you realized that for months now, you have lived in the company of the _very same_ madman who slaughtered all your friends simply because they were in his way. I even permitted you to think him _your_ friend. And I wanted you to know that I did _all_ of these things, and was only in a position to do them, because _you _placed me there_._"

Quivering now, with anger and perhaps even fear, Starfire spoke slowly, as to as to emphesize each word.

"I am _not_ responsible for your crimes."

Warp only smiled. "You are _wholly_ responsible for everything I am, and everything I did. As much as Devastator was, if not more. Devastator was created to fight Trigon. For its sins, I enabled Trigon to devour Devastator whole. You swore, on your arrival here, to protect the people of this world, and those who accepted you. For your sins, I have sentenced you know what your actions have wrought, before you join all those whose deaths are on your hands."

Starfire shot him.

Anger boiled within her like a seething cauldron, and she raised her hands and fired a starbolt comprised of white-hot rage. It split the air at nine times the speed of sound, exploding with a flash of green light that temporarily cloaked all else, moments before another starbolt followed in its wake, and another, and another, a barrage of energy blasts that sundered stone and shattered the wall and blew the wooden chest at Warp's feet to splinters and vapor. Into them, Starfire poured her fury, righteous or otherwise, deluging him in the searing fire that was the mark of a Tamaranean scorned.

And it was all in vain. Warp lifted his hand, and a shield of animate blackness materialized around him, warding off the onslaught effortlessly, the shield barely quivering as Starfire flung her rage against it. Only when she had spent her fury against it did he lower his hand once more, smiling broadly.

"Like I said," said Warp, grinning at the wide-eyed Tamaranean. "I had more time to study this book than Raven ever did..."

Fear began to replace anger, as Starfire slowly stepped back from Warp, who made no move to follow. Instead he lowered the book in one hand, and with the other, began to trace designs in the air with his fingers, which hung in soft purple light and floated around him like planetary bodies around a star.

"You came here," he said, "seeking for Robin. You came in the hope that he might somehow be restored to life, and brought back to you." He raised his free hand, and the symbols congregated around it, spinning around his wrists, their glow increasing in radiance to that of sparkling jewels. "Never let it be said that I did not give those who call on me precisely what they want."

The symbols flashed as one and vanished, and then all of a sudden, there was Robin.

But it wasn't Robin.

The distinction wasn't subtle in the least, for the figure standing before Starfire resembled Robin's corpse more than it did Robin himself. His skin was gray, like volcanic ash or powdered concrete, a leached, colorless monochrome that extended even to his uniform, which should have been red and yellow and green. He stood with his head lowered, like a somber statue, not moving a hair, not even to breathe.

"I'm going to give you a gift, Princess," said Warp, as he slowly lowered his free hand. "One that very few people ever receive. I'm going to let you die with a perfect understanding as to why this has happened to you.

Robin, or whatever this corpse-pallor simulacrum was, raised his head, revealing two glowing red eyes, which seared like burning coals. His expression blank, his motions robotic and precise, Robin slid one hand to his belt, removed a small metal cylinder, and extended it into a steel battle staff.

"Kill her," said Warp, his arms folded atop the Book of Azar, "and bring me her head."

**O-O-O**

The path curved upwards, ever upwards, snaking back and forth along the towering heights above, blocked periodically by fallen rocks or cascades of magma, yet always moving on and on and on some more. Beast Boy ran, shifting forms as the terrain required it, not knowing where he was going or if it was the right way, but running regardless. He refused to let himself think of the possibility that there was anything else to do, and no matter what pace he set, it seemed to him not fast enough.

Only once did anything try to get in his way. A quartet of fire demons lunged out of the wall by surprise, snatching at him with their tendrils, hissing like steam vents as they came. He shifted imperturbably into the form of a grizzly bear, reared up on his hind legs, and smashed two of them to paste with swipes of his heavy claws before the demons even had a chance to determine what was happening. The other two had ducked his slashes and seized him by the throat, trying to manhandle him off the cliff. He'd become a mosquito then, slipping through their grasp, then a bighorn sheep, whereupon he butted one of the demons off the cliff, and dashed the other's innards out beneath his hooves. A second later, he was a tiger, sprinting and bounding up the trail once more, the encounter already forgotten, save for his nagging worry that he had lost still more time, and that now every second was precious.

Beyond that one interruption, there had been nothing, and while he didn't resent the lack of intrusions, it worried him that the demons seemed to have given up trying to stop him beyond a purely incidental skirmish. He wasn't so much afraid that this meant they were preparing something special for him, as he was that it meant he was going the wrong way.

But then again, what other way was there to go?

He ran on, faster and faster, heedless of fatigue or what forms he had to take, as he climbed up higher and higher and higher still, until the flame river was a distant ribbon of red below, half-hidden by the smoke and haze. The cliff towered above as enormously as ever, and so he refused to look at it, racing against a clock he couldn't see, couldn't read, and yet could feel like the pounding of drums deep inside his chest.

He was practically ready to try leaping off the cliff in the hopes of finding _something_, when the smoke began to thin, and the air to clear, and he turned another corner and saw the path running up and on and into an enormous building.

A monastery perhaps, or a cathedral, it towered over the stony landscape around it. Ruined, it still stood out, angular of architecture, built of black stone that gleamed in the firelight, festooned with buttresses, crenelations, and towering spires. The roof was gone, the walls worn down as though with the passing of centuries, yet the path that ran towards it was as clear as daylight.

He raced ahead, turning to a swallow on the run and flying at top speed towards the cathedral's entrance, heedless of anything that might seek to prevent his passing. Enormous stone statues, human and bestial, lined the route, but they stood mute and cold, watching silently as Beast Boy passed them by. He soared through the tangle of conflicting air currents, driven up by the boiling lava miles below, and landed before the stone double-doors of the ruined cathedral. He was about to shift into a rhinoceros to batter them open, save that the instant he landed, the doors opened of their own accord, inviting him in, as it were. He switched to human form, and stepped through.

And then something _truly_ strange happened.

In the blink of an eye, his entire surroundings, the cathedral, the fire-scorched sky, the statues, the cliff, everything was gone, and in its place was an open plain of ice, across which whirled a raging blizzard. The ice was perfectly level and utterly featureless, sparkling blue beneath clouds of white snow, driven this way and that by gusts of howling, bone-chilling wind. He stopped, stunned, looked behind himself for the door he had just stepped through, but it was gone. He stood alone.

Was this some new trick? Had Trigon laid a trap for him or something? The Cathedral had... it had _felt_ right, familiar in some way that couldn't be put in words. And this place... well this place did too somehow, though he was absolutely stone-certain he had never seen it before. Either way, there was nothing for it now. He shifted forms into a Polar Bear as defense against the biting cold, and slowly lumbered ahead.

He hadn't gone more than a dozen paces before he began to notice shadows under the ice.

The light here seemed to come from nowhere in particular, but dimly, underneath the ice, there were shapes visible, twisted shapes bent into strange configurations. Some were barely discernible, buried deep within the frozen ground. Others were nearer to the surface, and could be recognized for what they were.

Bodies.

Human, alien, even some that defied description. The bodies of creatures lay scattered beneath the ice like frozen action figures, motionless, indeterminate as to whether they were living or dead. They made no move to rise up and attack him, nor to otherwise bar his passage, their frozen eyes watching him as he padded slowly over the ice. Searching.

"Looking for Raven?"

His own voice, borne on the winds from some indeterminate location, biting and sarcastic. He knew who it was.

"Where is she?" he called out to the winds, shifting back to human form in order to speak, clutching his arms around himself as his body lost the protection of his warm fur.

"She's here," came the reply, the voice mockingly dancing around him. "She's waiting for you."

He turned in circles, peering into the storm, trying to find the speaker, but he could see nothing but indistinct shadows darting this way and that. There might have been a thousand of them, or one, or none at all.

"Come and see," came the voice, and suddenly the storm ahead of him parted like a hallway, revealing a path that led up to the foot of a stone altar. The altar was carved from obsidian, covered in drifting snow and carven sigils of pentagrams and goat-heads. And laying atop it was...

"Raven!" Beast Boy instantly forgot everything else, racing down the path towards the altar, bounding up the steps that ringed it four at a time, before skidding to a halt at the top.

"Raven? What..."

Raven lay upon the altar, eyes open, skin like white porcelain and cold to the touch. She was dressed in her leotard and cloak, as always, but both were pure white, dazzlingly so. Her cloak lay unfastened, draping over the altar, providing no protection whatsoever, and Beast Boy couldn't initially tell if she was alive or frozen solid.

But those weren't the most surprising things. The most surprising thing was that she was nine.

Though Beast Boy had found Raven's birthdate out for her party all those endless weeks ago, Beast Boy actually wasn't sure how old Raven had been, fifteen or sixteen, he'd guessed. She was clearly no longer so. Whether she was nine or eight or ten, she was a little girl, dressed in the same uniform sized downwards, staring blindly up at the swirling clouds. She did not react when he touched her forehead (ice-cold), not even when he shook her, calling her name as loudly as he could. Pushing the question of what had happened aside, he pulled one of his gloves and held it in front of her mouth and nose, and felt, to his infinite relief, a very very weak breath, even as he found an almost imperceptible pulse at her neck.

"Raven, it's me! Can you hear me?" he asked, shaking her shoulder, totally unsure as to what to do now. The storm still swirled around in unbroken strength, and she looked to be suffering from advanced hypothermia, to say nothing of whatever had de-aged her. He tried to remember what first aid lessons Robin had forced him to learn, what he should do, but couldn't recall anything about what to do when you found a child-version of a half-demon girl laying unresponsive and frozen in the middle of a supernatural version of Antarctica. That one must have been in the advanced session.

He fell back on instinct.

"Raven, c'mon, wake up," he said, and gently lifted her off the altar. Her normal form was taller than he was, but like this, she weighed next to nothing. He crouched down behind the altar, forming a sort of ersatz shelter between the altar and his own huddled body, which managed, at least, to block much of the wind, even as he shook the snow out of her cloak and wrapped it tightly around her. The cloak wasn't much, frankly neither was the shelter, but it seemed to work. Very slowly, her breathing became more distinct, her eyes blinked and slowly came into focus, and she began to shiver, first almost imperceptibly, then violently, teeth chattering and hands trembling like a palsy victim.

She still gave no indication that she knew where she was, or who Beast Boy was, or that he was even there, but he chose to take it as an encouraging sign, and grinned despite himself. "There you go," he said as she coughed and shook and then moved, curling up into a tight ball inside her cloak. "Come on, we'll find a way out of - "

"Now why would you want to do that?"

The storm stopped _instantly_, like light being switched off, and in the eerie silence, Beast Boy heard his own voice addressing him from behind. Raven heard it too, and it seemed to wake her up. She opened her eyes, blinking as she looked around, up at Beast Boy, and past him, behind him, at something else.

Beast Boy knew who it was before he turned around.

His double stood with arms crossed, smirking at him from twenty yards' distance. "We made this place specially for you, after all," said the double. "It'd be a shame if you didn't at least try it out."

Beast Boy frowned. "We're leaving here," he said, trying to sound intimidating. "Both of us. We're going home."

"You _are_ home," said the double. "Both of you." He spread his arms wide to encompass the frozen wasteland. "Can't you tell where you are?" he asked mockingly. "This is where the traitors live..."

"_She's not a traitor!_" shouted Beast Boy, blood boiling. It was everything he could do not to leap at the double's throat for even suggesting it, but the double seemed unimpressed, laughing as he responded.

"Of course she is," he said, "and so are you."

He'd had it with this. Beast Boy turned around and picked Raven up, holding her with both arms as she continued to blink and look around in confusion and fear. Turning back once again to his double, who still stood staring, a smarmy grin plastered to his face, he growled at him.

"You can't hurt her anymore," he said. "Get out of our way."

"But can _you_?" asked the double? "Or is that why you're taking her?"

Beast Boy felt Raven tense up in his arms, which tore the answer from him faster than his brain could have.

"I'd _never_ hurt Raven!" he shouted.

The answer came, but not from the double.

"Oh _really_?"

Beast Boy froze.

It had nothing to do with the chill in the air or the ice underfoot. His blood turned instantly to icewater, his limbs froze solid, and his lungs seized, as though he'd just been switched off, the only part of his body still capable of movement, his heart, which began thundering somewhere in his ears as he recognized the voice who had spoken in the double's stead.

Footsteps, approaching softly, unhurriedly, from behind. Beast Boy very slowly turned around to face the person whose footsteps they were, but he already knew who it was going to be before he did so.

She stopped a dozen feet from the altar, her hiking boots crunching the snow beneath them, arms folded in front of her, the wind teasing the hair beneath the blue goggles mounted on her forehead. Her skin was slate gray, like that of Beast Boy's double, and she had the same burning red eyes, without pupils or irises. Yet none of these things in any way prevented him from recognizing her instantly. Beast Boy would have recognized her blindfolded, from the sound of her heartbeat alone.

"Terra..." he whispered.

Behind him, his evil twin laughed, as he walked slowly into view, circling around the altar until he was standing next to Terra. Terra herself said nothing, simply watched him in silence, but then she didn't need to.

"She's been waiting for you a long time," said his twin, as he grinned at Beast Boy. "We've all been."

Beast Boy could say nothing, could do nothing, and in his arms, Raven looked at him, and at Terra, and back again, and he could feel her fear like a cold finger running up his spine. His twin simply turned to Terra, and nodded.

"Kill him," said the twin, folding his arms, "and bring me his head."

**O-O-O**

David ran.

He ran for a countless interval. He ran forever. He ran without direction or purpose or hope of ever being allowed to stop. Down streets filled with the silent dead and lined by unchanging ruin, over heaps of wrecked vehicles and overturned newspaper kiosks he ran, tripping and stumbling and falling over himself and scrambling back to his feet to run some more. He ran with the sound of explosions and violent upheavals in his ears, emanating always from some indistinct point behind him. He did not look back.

He just ran.

He might have run for hours, for days even. He ran so far that he knew intrinsically he should have run into some geographic obstacle, a mountain or ridgeline or flaming, lava-filled bay, one of the landmarks that ringed Jump City and that he would inevitably _have_ to encounter, yet he did not. He ran for as long as his legs would carry him and his lungs draw breath, and when finally they would no longer do either, he collapsed.

He landed on the ground like a boned fish, his burning lungs gasping for air. Breathing painfully, he managed only to crawl to the side of the street before his muscles gave out entirely. For another interminable time, he simply lay in the gutter, forcing air into and out of his lungs, his hands trembling, his guts on fire.

He wasn't sure when it was that he started crying.

No sobs, no sound, nothing but the tears, that simply began to flow like a dammed stream finally loosed. He didn't even realize that he _was_ crying until the tears began to drip from his face, splashing ground so parched that the very asphalt absorbed them instantly, leaving no trace that they had ever been.

Somehow, that seemed appropriate.

Every attempt to move just resulted in more violent tremors, as though the various parts of his body were no longer able to face the task of working in concert. It took only a few moments before he simply stopped trying to move at all. There was, after all, nowhere to go. The entire world was nothing but an extension of the flame-scorched gutter in which he lay, stalked by the twisted phantoms of his own mind, one of which was assuredly in the process of killing Terra, if hadn't managed to finish doing so by now.

Perhaps he had run far enough for the sounds of the battle to be lost, or perhaps the leaden air dampened them more effectively than they otherwise would have, but try as he might, he could hear nothing of the fight that had to be transpiring. The air was still and quiet, save for the omnipresent low roar of the accumulated fires, volcanic vents, and other manifested miseries with which Trigon had cloaked the doomed planet.

He lay in misery and motionlessness, curled in a ball in the gutter, his ash-grey skin coated with ash-grey dust, his red eyes leeching tears onto the thirsty ground, the last bits of moisture remaining within the scope of the planet. There was no one discrete source for the tears, nothing specific that leapt to his mind. It was leaden fatigue, crushing despair, paralysing fear, and soul-wilting shame all rolled into one. The senses of loss, culpability, and utter hopelessness were so overwhelming that they got in one another's way, leaving it impossible to focus on any one element. He saw the faces of the other Titans flashing by incomprehensibly quickly, saw Trigon looming up from the ruins of the library, saw himself standing in a field of rubble with a burning cane in his hand, casting fire down on his enemies. His friends. His...

He convulsed, clutched his hands to his head, and screamed.

There was nobody to hear him scream, but scream he did regardless. Painfully, his throat burning from the effort, yet the screams tore themselves out of him like living things, and after each one he collapsed once more, to lay useless and motionless in the dust once again. He gritted his teeth against them, knotting his fingers into his hair, and yet he could not stop the screams any more than he could the tears. Again and again, for a minute, perhaps two, perhaps an hour, perhaps a year, he screamed and cried and cursed himself, willing death and ruin upon himself, on Trigon, on his unknown parents, on Terra, on even the other Titans by turns, yet always it came back to his own wretched self. Terra had told him to run so that he could somehow fight Trigon or preserve the Titans in form and memory. He knew himself capable of neither, indeed of nothing. Everything had gone wrong. Every decision, every choice, every possible shift of events had failed utterly. All there was left to do was to lay here, alone, broken, and wait for someone, Trigon or Warp or Cinderblock or perhaps himself, to come along, and finish the job.

"David?"

David's eyes opened.

For a moment, he wasn't sure if he had imagined hearing something. He raised his head slightly, fear already beginning to cloud out the rest of his emotions, and slowly he turned his head back and forth and back again, but could find nothing waiting for him. Likely enough his broken mind was playing yet further tricks on him, but he continued to peer off forlornly into the darkness, though for what he could not say. If anything yet lived in this horrid place, it could not be sympathetic to one that Trigon had named his enemy.

"David."

He started this time, his breath catching, yet the voice was not hostile or mocking. It was soft, barely a whisper, and both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. It came from no particular source, no direction, no location around him that he could identify. And yet despite that, he knew, immediately, where the speaker was located.

Slowly, David turned around, wiping the tears from his blood-red eyes, not rising to his feet, but remaining seated in the gutter, half-turned behind him to see who it was that had addressed him. And there, standing five or six paces away, stood a small, slight figure, a boy of perhaps fourteen, with light brown hair and matching eyes, wearing a costume of fire-red laminated mylar that tapered to yellow-orange at the sleeves and pant legs. About his waist was a belt of brass, to which was clipped a retractable police baton of stainless steel, and a small, palm-sized communicator, a black T emblazoned on its golden cover.

David said nothing, did not react, not even in surprise, for those circuits were no longer functioning within his brain. He sat in the gutter, and looked at himself as he had once been, watching as the boy stood and watched him back, arms at his sides, face expressionless save for a slight melancholy that might well have been his own imagination.

"Hello, David," said the boy at last, his voice a whisper, but easily understood, as though the sound were being transmitted directly into David's head.

David said nothing immediately, watching his counterpart as though he could somehow distill understanding from simple observation.

"Who are you?" asked David at last.

The boy's eyes flickered downwards for a moment before he answered.

"My name's Devastator," he said. "And... I was hoping we could talk."

* * *

**Author's Note:** Chapter 36 is already underway, and I hope to have it for you all as soon as possible. In the meanwhile, I can offer only my thanks for those who have read this far, and my plea, once more, that any notions you have as to what you liked and disliked, be encapsulated in the form of a review. Until next time, my inestimable readers, farewell.


	36. Judgment Day

**Disclaimer:** As always, I am afraid that I do not own anything related to the Teen Titans.

**Author's Note:** You ever have one of _those_ chapters?

Hello again everyone. I've missed these chats of ours deeply, and I'm very sorry that so much time has elapsed between our last one and this one. I have, as always, a new chapter here for you all to read (or not) at your own pace and discretion. Without a doubt, it is the most difficult chapter, indeed the most difficult single _thing_ that I have ever written for any purpose ever. How many hours it took me to produce this chapter is something I am probably better off not knowing. At long last, however, it is done, and I present it to you all in the hopes that you might find it diverting.

A word of caution. Given the time elapsed between chapters (for which I cannot apologize sufficiently), I suggest that it might be beneficial to re-read the previous chapter so as to more easily make sense of this one. I appreciate of course that this is not something one can simply _do_ at the drop of a hat, as the two of them together come to more than a hundred and fifty pages, but should you have the inclination, it is my sense that it might help.

It has also come to my attention that some infernal gyration of the mechanics that underlie this website has rendered many of my older chapters totally illegible by deleting the scene breaks which I had inserted into them. Once I have recovered from the trauma of this chapter, I plan to go back and re-add those scene breaks in a more conducive form. My apologies to any of my readers who came later to this story and had to puzzle their way through such confusion.

I know that I have promised this before, but I am terribly sorry for the time required to post this chapter, and I shall indeed exert every effort I can to make certain the remaining chapters take barely a fraction as long to write. Something that never fails to speed the process along however, is feedback, be it good or bad, from those who have undertaken the not inconsequential task of reading this enormous work. Should you do so, and should the mood strike you, I beg of you to leave me a review, be it ever so brief, that I may try and make the remaining chapters more to your liking.

Thank you all once again, and as always, dear readers, may you find success in every endeavor.

* * *

**Chapter 36: Judgment Day**

_"I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free."_

- Niklos Kazantzakis, Epitaph_  
_

**O-O-O**

There is no such thing as perfect silence. Sound is a medium of vibrations in the air, and air is constantly moving, even without the demons of Hell to agitate and flay it to motion. Silence, as with all things, is relative, a facet of the absence of the more obvious distractions that assail the ear. So long as we exist within a medium wherein sound waves may be transmitted, it is never, ever, absolute.

But there are occasionally moments when one might mistake it for being so.

"My name's Devastator," said the other boy, the one dressed in red, the one with flesh-toned skin, the one who was not presently afflicted with some twisted symbolism of counter-factual judgement. He stood in the middle of the street, his baton clipped quietly to his belt, his hands held at his sides, looking calm and almost mournful, and the wind that gently stirred the dust around his feet did not affect him, not even rustling his hair, as though all that had transpired was nothing to him, and did not affect him in any way.

David did not react, could not react, did not even remember how to react. His capacity for surprise was gone, overshot by such a degree that he no longer even recalled what it felt like to be surprised by some new and startling event. Following demons, devils, Hell, the end of the world, and the appearance of his own older self, servant of Trigon and slayer of the Titans... following all that, this here was nothing at all.

"And... I was hoping we could talk."

Everything seemed to slow down. The perennial roar of the eternal pyres seemed to quiet. His reactions were muted, stilled, like the aftereffects of a concussive stun. In movies and television, such things as the world slowing down around you happened in moments of extreme danger, and perhaps to some people they did. But having had the opportunity to test such theories, it had become David's silent opinion that the movies had it all wrong. The world didn't slow down around you when there were bullets flying overhead. The world slowed down when you lost all sense of what to do about it.

"You can't be Devastator," he heard himself saying, though where he was conjuring up the words from he could not have explained if given half an eternity to do so. "Devastator's dead."

The hallucination, the image of David as he had once been, only shook his head. "No," he said. "Not yet at least."

"_I watched Trigon eat you!_" shouted David with a surge of blind anger. He had not come through all of this just to be lectured on more mistakes by a figment of his own imagination.

"David, I can't die," said the hallucination patiently, "or be eaten. I'm an incarnation of Destruction itself. Even Trigon can't kill something that was never alive. And he wouldn't want to kill me even if he could. He needs me."

David blinked at his counterpart, hallucination, manifestation, whatever it was, his brain moving like molasses, unable to process anything except the most basic of thoughts. "What... what are you doing here?" he asked, his brief burst of anger having given way to more fear. "Did Trigon send you after me?" he asked, backing up a step as he did so.

"No!" The figment's voice sounded surprised, even horrified at the prospect, and David saw his own features blanche with fear, but only for a second. "No, I... I came myself. I have a little time... I think. A little time before we finish..."

The double trailed off, and showed no inclination to continue the thought. "Finish what?" asked David.

"Integrating," said Devastator, and he pronounced the word like it was some vile liquid to be spat from his mouth. The figure shuddered almost imperceptibly. "It takes a little time."

David remained poised for further retreat, though he didn't move yet. "With Trigon?"

"With everyone," replied the other, averting its eyes. "Trigon especially... if I can manage it at all."

"What do you mean if?"

"I was created to be Trigon's enemy," said Devastator. "I don't know if I'm even capable of integrating with him properly. I've never tried to bond with an immortal, let alone the Devil."

David was not exactly in a position to sympathise. "If you're 'bonding' with Trigon right now," he said, "how are you even _here_?"

Devastator, or whatever he was, didn't reply immediately. "It's... hard to explain."

Of all the answers in all the world that he could have received, this was the last one David wanted to hear, and his frustration, to say nothing of everything else, boiled over like a pressure cooker letting off. "What do you mean _hard to explain_?" he shouted back at Devastator, forgetting entirely that a moment ago he had been about to run away. "What's going _on_ here? Why aren't you with Trigon?"

"David, please - "

"_No_!" spat David, cutting Devastator off with a wave of his hand. "You told Raven that you can't exist without a host. You're some kind of energy parasite, right?"

"I _have _a host, David."

"Yeah, _Trigon_!Who's _not_ here right now! And you weren't even able to appear like this when I _was_ your host, so what the hell are you even - "

"_I don't know_!"

Devastator was using David's own voice, and the anguished cry was one that drove home in a way that no words could have. It was the same tone of barely-controlled frustration, fear, uncertainty, and knife-edge stress that he recognized from within himself. And in the fraction of a second's hesitation that it engendered, Devastator said his piece.

"I don't know _how_ this is supposed to work," said Devastator, his voice distorting as his image rippled through a thousand other forms, beings humanoid and otherwise. "I wasn't party to my own creation, and I've never been in a position like this, any more than you have." Slowly, the image of Devastator settled back on the image of David once again, flickering like a candle flame before stabilizing. "All I know is through experience and experimentation. I've never been devoured by Trigon before, or taken from a host by force. And I've never had multiple hosts alive at the same time."

"Multiple hosts?" asked David, refusing to let his mind get distracted by the impossible sight. Nothing was impossible anymore.

"I pick hosts," said Devastator. "I inhabit them for their entire lives. Most don't even know I'm there. And when they die, I choose another. That's how it's always worked. But..."

"But now Trigon's got you?"

Devastator lifted his eyes. "Yes," he said. "And not only that, you're still alive."

David didn't say a word, not for what seemed like a long time, watching his own image in silence. When he finally managed to speak, his words sounded muffled even to himself, as though he were listening to a playback from a degraded audio source.

"Let me guess," he said. "You're here to fix that."

Devastator's image flickered for a few seconds, as though a power surge had run through the projector of whatever he was now. When it stabilized, Devastator looked like someone had just fed him something vile and disgusting. To see the expression written across his own face was quite a thing.

"No," he said, more quickly than before. "David, I'm not here to hurt you. I'm - "

"You're what?" asked David, no more anger, just the calm of a barren desert. Despite it, Devastator seemed to hesitate.

"I just... I found that I was able to come. And so I did. I don't..." he trailed off, lowering his eyes again. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm _so _sorry, David. I never meant for any of this. I didn't know that Raven was on this planet. I didn't even know she existed, that Trigon had a daughter. I never thought, for one minute, that this might happen. If I had..." He shuddered, visibly, steeling himself against the awful truth of what _had _happened. "I'm sorry," he finally repeated, and then he said no more.

In a strange way, David knew exactly what he would have wanted to say, had things been any different. All the questions, all the mysteries, everything he had lain awake wondering about, in the Tower, in the centers, ever since he had first realized what he was capable of. Whatever he had felt for his powers, fear, excitement, frustration, even perhaps the modicum of resentment which he knew now was common to all would-be heroes, this here was the agent of all of them. What he had once thought was a product of himself, now known to be an outside agent, a hijacker who had affixed itself to his life, for better or worse, this was him, standing here in the street. And David knew that there had been a time when he would have given anything, anything in the universe, just to have the chance to stand before Devastator and speak to him.

But the world was changed, and broken. And all David saw standing before him was the gaping hole he still felt somewhere inside him, in a place he could not localize, but that he could feel nonetheless. The shadow of something missing, something that stood for all that he had lost, and everything that was gone forever.

"It doesn't matter anymore," said David, and Devastator lifted his head. There was no anger in his words. It was pointless to rage at Devastator, or at himself, or at Trigon. He might have anyway of course, but he couldn't muster the will. "You're too late."

He saw the words hit home. He _saw_ them take effect, saw the unconscious flinch, and from somewhere deep within him, there was a moment of almost perverse pleasure, but only a moment.

"I know," said Devastator. He seemed to struggle for words. "I wish it could have been different. I never thought I was putting you in danger. Not like this - "

"It doesn't matter what you thought, or what I thought," said David, his voice drained of all emphasis. "It's all over, now, isn't it?"

He didn't respond. David could see his own features flickering as Devastator tried to think of something to say, and found nothing adequate to the situation. It was answer enough. Slowly, David closed his eyes, shook his head slowly, and turned away.

"David..." said Devastator, as David began to walk away, not in a huff, but slowly, his head lowered. "David, I - "

"Leave me alone," said David, not turning back. He might have infused the words with anger or fear, but he was no longer up to the task of either. He could feel the tears coming to his eyes, and he clenched his fist and squeezed his eyes shut to force them back. "Just... leave me alone," he said once more, wearily. And leaving the weaponized incarnation of Destruction behind to do as he would, David Foster slowly walked away.

**O-O-O**

Beast Boy ran.

Everything was a blur, in motion at once, as he ran as fast as his legs (four, currently) would carry him. There was no room for subtlety and tact here, and he had chosen the form of a bull elephant, twelve feet tall and eleven tons of dead weight, propelled over the ice at twenty five miles per hour. Yet it was not the height or weight or speed that commended the form to him, but the carrying capacity.

Raven was held in Beast Boy's trunk, a trivial matter in this form, even had she been her normal size, which she was not. He had wrapped her up in it and held her now as tightly as he dared, trying to strike a balance between letting her breathe and making sure he neither dropped her nor let any of the chaos swirling about him reach her.

And chaos it was. What was happening behind, Beast Boy neither knew nor dared turn to face, but the sound was enough to turn a man to stone on the spot. Slavering, howling roars that echoed over the wastes, even as the surface of the frozen ground cracked and shattered. Great sheets of ice vaulted into the air around and before and even beneath him, upthrust by some gyration of the rock below, or perhaps by some malignant will of its own. A hailstorm of stones, sized from baseballs up to fire hydrants, flew at him from behind, pinwheeling through the air like projectiles fired from some infernal catapult. Other forms there were that he could have taken, some faster or more agile than this one, some even retaining the ability to carry Raven. But of all of them, this one was the one wherein he judged the risk to her to be the least, and thus there were no other options at all.

Where speed did not suffice, mass and momentum did, and he lowered his head and charged, ignoring anything that might impede his progress. Ice shards rained down from explosions in the fractured surface. Rocks burst like meteors overhead and underfoot, hurtling down from above in parabolic arcs. Entire sheets of ice burst from the ground, as though to trip him up, but Beast Boy knew well how agile elephants were, despite their size, and he negotiated them successfully, lowering his head and crashing through the sheets where necessary. Though his form was hardly suited for it, he tried to swerve back and forth, the better to throw off the assaults that were coming from behind.

He had gotten perhaps a hundred yards when something zipped past his head to the right, something that was most definitely neither a rock nor a block of ice. He turned his head in time to see it morph spontaneously into a Tyrannosaur, which began running alongside him, keeping an even pace as it slowly edged closer. The ice continued to explode in every direction, forcing his concentration ahead, and he could do nothing to stop his counterpart from angling towards him until suddenly the dinosaur lunged to the side, jaws capable of tearing out even an elephant's throat primed to do just that.

Beast Boy did the only thing he could think of to do.

Throwing his head back as hard as he could, he flung his trunk into the air, uncoiling it like a whip, hurling Raven up into the sky. No sooner had she left his grasp than his entire body shifted, shrinking down into that of a python. The Tyrannosaur's jaws clashed together over empty air, moments before Beast Boy snapped his body sideways and grabbed the dinosaur around the ankle with a grip of iron. The broken and slippery ice did the rest, as the Tyrannosaur tripped and fell forward with a tremendous crash. An instant later, and Beast Boy burst into the sky in the form of a giant eagle, deftly avoiding a shower of stones as he pumped his wings and flew up beneath Raven just as she reached the arc of her flight, permitting her to land softly on his back before jetting away with all the power he could muster.

There was no rush of victory or success, just further mortal terror, less for himself than for the fact that Raven was on his back, nearly senseless, unable to hold on, forcing him to fly a straight and level course that left him open to all manner of assault from behind. The flung stones came closer and closer to the mark, even as they grew ever more tremendous in proportion, until boulders the size of office buildings were flying past in stately majesty, colliding with the ice sheet below like comets striking the surface of some alien, frozen world.

Behind he could hear the thunder of footfalls, his counterpart approaching fast, though whether he was in the form of a Tyrannosaur or Mastodon or Godzilla or some other monster he could not tell, for he dared not turn his head back to see, half his concentration on the course ahead of him, the other half on the painfully light pressure of two small hands weakly gripping the feathers on his back.

A shadow falling over him was all the warning he got as a rock capable of levelling a city block loomed overhead, and he reacted on instinct, winging over sharply and diving as it plunged towards him. Ice shards whistled past on every side, as he saw the edge of the shadow ahead and pumped his wings to try and reach it before he was crushed like a hydraulic press. Yet moments before he reached it, he felt the grip on his back vanish entirely, followed by a shrill shriek, different than anything he'd ever heard from Raven, and yet all too familiar.

Suddenly, he forgot all about the rock.

In a split second, Beast Boy took on the form of a hummingbird, turning around in mid-air as though he had bounced off an invisible wall. Shooting back the way he had come, he waited a second and a half before switching back to his giant eagle form. Twisting his wings around and throwing his weight to one side, he managed, just for an instant, to scoop Raven up with one of his wings and throw her like a baseball player back towards the edge of the looming shadow. She hit the ground at a shallow angle well inside the shadow's bounds, but the ground was yet-unblemished ice, and she slid effortlessly beyond it, an instant before the enormous rock smashed headlong into the ground.

A shower of snow and white ice blotted everything out of view, cascading over Raven in a great wave, dissipating only after some time had past, leaving her laying near senseless, half-buried in ice shards and snow. The jarring impacts, the flights through the air, the successive shocks had all served, if nothing else, to shake her back to some degree of consciousness, and slowly, she managed to sit up, letting the snow pour off of her head and shoulders, and looked back at the skyscraper-sized block of granite, now half-embedded in the ice.

Of Beast Boy, who had flown back to get her out, there was no sign at all.

From Raven's right, a growl, deep and threatening, boiled up from the winter storm, as slowly a shadow emerged from within the walls of swirling snow, which finally parted to reveal a hulking dinosaur, sickly-white with eyes of burning red. Towering overhead like a living thundercloud, the dinosaur's jaws dripped with saliva as its claws dug into the ice for purchase. Raven, still barely able to move, could only stare in wide-eyed horror up at the looming monster, as it barked savage roars into the air, before ducking down to devour her whole.

It did not get there.

The roars of the Tyrannosaur were buried all of a sudden by an atonal howl of pure rage so loud that Raven clasped her hands to her ears and screamed, and the ice beneath her buckled and shattered like a pane of glass struck by a sledgehammer. The Tyrannosaur wobbled and staggered, seeking to recover its balance, snapping its jaws as it sought for its unseen assailant, moments before a tentacle twelve feet thick and fifty feet long burst through the ice like a geyser and seized the dinosaur's leg.

A _green_ tentacle.

The tyrannosaur roared, this time in surprise and perhaps even fear, and jumped back, evading the swipe, but seconds later, five more tentacles exploded through the ice and seized the dinosaur with suckers the size of dinner plates. No sooner had they done so than the ice shook and cracked and burst into the air, and from the ice between all five of the writhing tentacles emerged a hideous green monster, beaked and jellied, with a head vaguely conical and emerald and eyes the size of small cars, fixed now on his albino opponent with an alien glare. Rearing up, beak snapping in the frozen air, the monster bodily lifted the dinosaur and slammed it back down onto the ice like a lump of wet dough. Lurching upwards, he lifted it again, but this time the Tyrannosaur shrank in a matter of seconds to a small sparrow, which flitted up and away, slipping easily between the gigantic tendrils and flying several hundred feet back before switching to a hummingbird and hovering in place.

Carefully, Beast Boy lost volume as well, reverting this time to his human form, a default position from whence to adopt anything necessary, but his counterpart overhead did not attack, lowering himself to the ground instead as Beast Boy climbed out of the enormous hole in the ice and onto the lip of the pit he had gouged. The alternate landed on the far side, perhaps a hundred feet away, and took the same form as Beast Boy, his features twisted into an evil grin as he crossed his arms and leered at the changeling.

"Where do you think you're going?" he called across the gap, his voice mocking as ever. "Running off to escape with her?"

Beast Boy tried to think of some witty retort to make, something like what Robin would no doubt have said were he here, but he came up empty. His counterpart seemed to take his silence for an answer, and simply laughed. "There's nowhere to go," he said. "This is where you both belong."

"We're leaving anyway," said Beast Boy, more for Raven's sake, should she be listening, than for his own. "You can't stop us."

"Sure we can," said the alternate, and from behind him, Beast Boy saw someone else approaching, someone silhouetted against the ambient light, standing tall atop an uprooted boulder, a yellow glow advertising her identity to all the world, as if Beast Boy stood a chance of not recognizing her instantly.

"You really need to make your mind up," said Terra as the boulder lowered to the ground, permitting her to step lightly off next to Beast Boy's counterpart. "You spend nine months chasing after me, and now that I'm here, you can't wait to get away?"

Something very unpleasant began to stir deep inside Beast Boy, and he clamped down on it with all his might. "I went looking for Terra," he said. "Not you."

"Well you're not looking for Terra anymore, are you?" asked Terra's twin. "And it's not like you looked very hard in the first place. Just enough to make yourself feel like you'd done enough before you - "

"_Stop it_," snapped Beast Boy, louder than he had intended, and the sadistic grin that crossed both his counterpart's and Terra's faces told him that he had somehow just lost a point. He swept his hand in front of his chest, as though sweeping an invisible desktop clean, brushing the issue aside as it were. "We're both leaving, and neither of you can stop us."

"You're not going anywhere," said Beast Boy's clone. "Both of you belong down here, with us."

"Especially Raven," chimed in Terra. "She gets the place of honor."

"Raven didn't do anything!" shouted Beast Boy. "Nothing except get stuck with some stupid destiny!"

"Then why didn't she tell you all about this beforehand?" asked Terra, the same sickly smile still stuck to her face. "She came here to save this planet, right? She knew this was gonna happen. Don't you think she might have mentioned something about it? Wouldn't that have helped?"

"She was afraid!" insisted Beast Boy. "She didn't know what to do! She tried to stop it!"

"Well I'm sure all those billions of people up there understand _real well_ that they had to die because Raven was afraid," said Beast Boy's twin sarcastically. "That would make _me_ forgive and forget."

"She betrayed and murdered the whole planet," said Terra. "Makes what I did look pretty tame, don't you think?"

"_Stop it!"_

"Oh, should we talk about you instead?" asked the other Beast Boy. "After all, this place is yours too."

"I didn't do anything and neither did Raven!"

"You stabbed me right in the back," said Terra. "Or do I not count since you found your new girlfriend?"

That one stopped Beast Boy short. "Raven's not my girlfriend!"

"That never stopped you from pretending," said his counterpart bitterly. "The instant Terra was gone, you turned to Raven, even though she didn't want anything to do with you!"

"That's not true!"

"It's the only reason you're here right now!" shouted back Terra. "Robin's dead, so you get to play knight in shining armor and run off after the damsel in distress! You've been waiting for _this_ chance your whole life! And when I wouldn't play damsel for you, you threw me under a bus!"

"I did _not_!"

"Oh _really_?" asked Terra.

"Slade was right," said the alternate Beast Boy, "you don't _have_ any friends." The albino changeling crossed his arms. "Sound familiar?"

"I was looking to you for help," said Terra, "help when I needed it most, after you _told_ me you would help me no matter what I had done, and you threw it back in my face."

"I..." stammered Beast Boy, "I... tried to help you!"

Terra merely snorted. "Great job," she said.

"You belong here," said the other Beast Boy. "With us. With Raven. Forever. That's why we let you come here, and that's why you're going to stay."

"I don't belong here," said Beast Boy, trying desperately to keep his voice even, "and neither does Raven, no matter what you think. We both tried to stop this. We both tried to help you. And now we're both leaving."

"You wanted to help me?" asked Terra, sounding almost whimsical.

"Of course I did! I... I tried to - "

"Well... why didn't you say so?" asked Terra. "No time like the present, Beast Boy."

Terra lifted her hand, and above the chasm that separated them, a circle of blue light appeared, shimmering momentarily in the ethereal twilight. For a moment or two it remained as it was, an opaque disk shining silently above a gaping pit. Then suddenly, the colors swirled and resolved to a picture of...

Beast Boy gasped. "T... Terra?"

Terra. The real Terra, alive, in proper color, dressed in the same vest and shorts and gloves and rock-crystal goggles that she had been wearing when they had first met, standing alone on a street surrounded by burnt buildings and shattered vehicles. Her fists were sheathed in gold, and she stood her ground, staring ahead at someone not visible yet.

"Where is she?"

"Someplace with its own problems," said the other Beast Boy. "Take a look."

The image zoomed out, revealing another figure standing some twenty or thirty paces in front of Terra. A man in a dark, knee-length coat, worn open, holding a silver-handled cane which was glowing with orange - "

A light clicked in Beast Boy's head.

"David?"

"No," said the other Beast Boy. "_Devastator_."

There was no sound from the portal, no sign of what the two of them were saying to one another, but the tenor of the scene could not be any clearer despite the lack. The man with the coat and cane was advancing towards Terra, his gait unhurried and even, and Terra fell back before him, rocks sliding out of her way as she retreated, so as not to trip her up. And then all at once, between one step and the next, she half-turned towards the man in the coat, and from the ground before her, uprooted a rock the size of a refrigerator, and hurled it at him.

He didn't even raise his hand.

The rock exploded so thoroughly that not even pebbles flew away from it, morphing spontaneously into fine dust with the force of a bomb, blowing the street clear of debris and knocking Terra back several paces. His pace unbroken, the man spread his arms wide, and cars launched themselves into the air and towards Terra as though of their own volition. Several were impaled on spikes of rock, upthrust from the ground at Terra's command, but two penetrated the defenses, detonating over Terra's head like missiles, and blocking all view of the proceedings under a pall of black smoke.

"You wanted to help her?" came Terra's own voice, light and airy, drifting across the frozen terrain. "Well there she is. And I don't know about you, but I'd say she could use the help right now."

Beast Boy could not think of how to answer, and so did not, staring instead off into the window as the smoke stubbornly refused to clear, leaving his imagination to speculate on what was happening.

"So what'll it be?" asked the double.

With difficulty, Beast Boy forced his eyes to close. "Why are you even showing me this? I can't help her now even if I - "

"Sure you can," came the reply, smooth and easy. "Just shift into a bird and fly through. It'll take you right to her."

His eyes snapped back open, staring at the two figures on the opposite side of the chasm. "You expect me to believe you?"

"We never lie, Beast Boy," said Terra. "If you want to help her, if you want to help _me_, then all you have to do is choose to."

Frozen in place momentarily, Beast Boy was on the cusp of grabbing Raven's hand, shifting to a condor or eagle, and flying at the portal, when his doppelganger pre-empted him.

"Offer's only good for one," he said with a cruel smile. "Raven's a proven traitor. She stays here."

"No!" shouted Beast Boy. "We're both going!"

"Then make a portal yourself, and do what you want with it," said the other. "My portal, my rules. You can leave any time you want. But not with her."

The smoke within the portal's field of view began to clear, albeit slowly, revealing Terra laying prostrate on the broken asphalt, the man in the brown coat advancing towards her with his cane held by one end like a shepherd's crook, strolling, rather than walking towards her, the fiery aura from his cane wafting up through the air as he advanced.

"Better get going, Beast Boy," said Terra with an edge to her voice. "I don't think I can last much longer..."

"_Stop_ it," hissed Beast Boy between his teeth.

"I can't stop it," said Terra. "Not even if I wanted to. But you can."

"I _can't_!" insisted Beast Boy.

"Just like you couldn't before? Just like you couldn't stop me from dying the first time?"

"_STOP IT!" _shouted Beast Boy in a voice that was more roar than cry. "Stop it! I can't... you _know _I can't - "

"No," said Terra. "You _won't_."

The portal vanished like a burst soap bubble, blinking out of existence like it had never been there at all."

"You said you'd be my friend no matter what I did. You said you'd make sure nothing happened to me. You said you'd find a way to bring me back. And you said you'd never forget me." Terra glowered at Beast Boy from across the way, her red stare so direct that he dared not meet it. "Everything you said to me was a lie."

"_Terra..._"

"You had every chance to save me," she said. "But you never had the will. Too busy chasing after someone who wanted nothing to do with you." She shook her head dismissively. "The Great Beast Boy," she said. "Who runs away as soon as it comes time to deliver on his promises."

Blinking back the tears in his eyes, Beast Boy succeeded, with difficulty, in preventing something bloody and violent from surfacing. "Why are you doing this?" he choked out.

"Because you're a liar and a traitor," said Terra, "and this is where you belong. "And if you think that's not true, then say the word, and we'll send you back to Terra. If you hurry, you might even be able to save her."

"Or you can walk away," said Beast Boy's counterpart, "like you always have. And try and convince yourself that you and Raven don't really belong down here. Because if you turn away from Terra now, Beast Boy, you won't have any excuses left."

Deep inside himself, Beast Boy could feel something, the Beast perhaps, or just his better nature, clawing and screaming and beating against the inside of his eyes, trying desperately to get out, gathering up all the pain and the heartache of the last two years like a weapon and bludgeoning the inside of his psyche with it, howling in terms unspoken and unhesitating to leap for the middle of the ice chasm and go to Terra, to tear her enemy apart, save her, rectify everything that had failed to do over and over again. It was the part of her that still, even here, every day, still tore at his insides at having once lost her, and having failed to ever find her again.

But by the time that feeling inside knew what was going on, Beast Boy had already turned away.

Only Raven wasn't there.

She had been right behind him, he _knew_ that. Someone with his senses simply couldn't fail to know where everyone else was in relation to him, yet she was gone, vanished like she had simply melted into the ice. And he stared dumbstruck at the empty place where she had been standing for several moments before he turned around, half-expecting Terra and his alter ego to be holding her and mocking him. But when he turned back, they were gone as well, disappeared as if by magic, leaving Beast Boy alone with his thoughts and recriminations on the broken, featureless ice.

**O-O-O**

Step by patient step, David walked through death and tried not to look.

All around him lay more ruins, but these ruins, at least, were quiet, their fires quenched, emitting no flames and little smoke. The statues that lined the streets were more sparse here, hidden within the small buildings that had once been homes. He wasn't sure where he was, everything seemed to have been twisted around, but it looked like this place had been one of Jump City's suburbs. It was quieter than the rest of the city, at least.

He had no idea where he was going. He had no idea whether there was anything to go to, save for endless roads filled with burning cars and broken houses. Worse yet, here and there, dotting the streets, stood the statues, standing, crouching, laying prone on the ground, individually, in clumps, an endless parade of people frozen into their last reflexive gestures, their features betraying some kind of terminal fear. Men, women, kids, all of them locked in place, staring out at nothing.

As best he could, he avoided looking at them at all.

The communicator on his belt would have told him the time had he bothered to consult it, but the time it told was relative, vestigial on a planet that, for all he knew, was no longer even orbiting the sun. As such, he did not know how long he had been walking for, nor did he care. He spared as little glance as he could for those things he was walking past, preferring not to know if he was passing a burning elementary school or a ruined hospital. His head bowed, his eyes on the charred ground in front of him, he walked on, like an automation, one hand in his pocket, the other held tightly over his stomach as though he were trying to staunch a gaping wound. There was no such injury, but it was the closest place to where he could feel the gaping void inside of him, neither physical nor non-physical, where something he had never missed before was no longer there.

His mind wandered, for he refused to let it land on any one thing for too long, be it the faces of his dead friends, or his own, hideously scarred, yet smirking, confident in his total superiority. He shied away from the image whenever it appeared, stumbling and scrambling over the debris-choked streets, trying to force it all out of his head. It was useless, and he knew it, but he tried to do it anyway, for what else was there to do?

How long he might have walked was impossible to tell. Maybe forever. Maybe until he finally collapsed from thirst or fatigue. But before either of those two things could happen, he slipped while trying to climb over a pair of burnt-out cars that had crashed into one another and blocked the road entirely, and fell, and tumbled down them onto the ashen asphalt, landing on his stomach.

He lay there for a second, stunned, and mentally checking himself over to see if he had broken anything. Only after he had confirmed that all his limbs were still responding, did he open his eyes again. Yet when he did so, he stopped short, for the shock of the fall had knocked loose his communicator from the clasp on his belt, and sent it scurrying forward, sliding to a stop several inches before his eyes. He had paid it no mind before, indeed he had practically forgotten about it, but now, with it sitting right in front of him, he noticed something he had not seen before.

A red light, silently blinking on the side of the golden communicator.

He blinked, several times in fact, clearing his eyes from the omnipresent dust, yet when he opened them again, the light was still there, clicking on and off softly, unhurriedly, colored red like everything else here, but presenting no other obvious signs of urgency.

Slowly, he sat up in the middle of the street, and picked up the communicator, turning it over in his hands and clicking it open. The tiny screen showed only static, the symbol at the top indicating that there was no signal found, not from the Tower itself or the repeaters around the city. That much was to be expected, yet the light at the side of the communicator kept right on blinking, on and off, on and off.

Cyborg had been the one to explain to him what the various symbols, gizmos, and indicators on the communicator meant, and he remembered the lessons well, for Robin had been absolutely clear on the necessity of knowing, at a glance, what the communicator was telling him. Lives quite literally depended on him knowing this, his own as well as others. Yet this symbol, a red blinking light with no sound, was not one of the ones he remembered from the lessons, try as he might to recollect them. He opened and closed the communicator several times, tentatively pressing the small buttons that ringed it, trying to coax the palm-sized device into telling him what it was trying to say. Yet no matter what he tried, nor how he racked his exhausted, shell-shocked brain, he could neither discover nor recall anything at all about a blinking red light.

"Don't bother."

David froze, but not from fear, letting the words sink in before he lifted his head. Before him, standing some ten feet away, stood his own perfect duplicate, his red uniform pressed and clean, his skin and hair of normal tone, his eyes calm and voice even, as he clasped his hands behind his back in the way that David knew he always did when he was trying to make it look like he wasn't as worried as he really was. Whatever else he might be, Devastator was a capable mimic.

"You've never seen that before."

"How do you know?" asked David, not stirring from where he was sitting. In the back of his mind, he already knew the answer, or at least could guess, but he asked regardless.

Devastator shrugged, the mannerisms unquestionably David's own. "Because _I've _never seen it before," he said. "And I saw everything you did. At least until recently."

David looked down at the communicator again, which sat blinking quietly in his hand as though nothing at all were the matter. Gently, he ran the tips of his fingers over its gold electroplated exterior, feeling its metallic surface in the only way still available to him.

"It has to mean something," he said, as much to himself as Devastator. He held the communicator up to his ear and shook it experimentally, before lowering it again, the blinking unchanged in either color or rhythm.

"Maybe it's the battery?" suggested Devastator.

"It's a radium-decay battery," said David sharply, raising his eyes. "Cyborg said it would last fifty years. I thought you heard everything I did?"

"I did," said Devastator, calmly, "but Cyborg didn't count on this sort of thing happening."

"_Cyborg - " _snapped David angrily before he could stop himself. He caught himself after barely a word, and shut his eyes and clenched his teeth together, holding his breath until he could recover his equilibrium. "Cyborg," he restarted, "counted on everything."

Devastator only nodded slowly. "All right," he said, in the tone of one who is unconvinced but unwilling to argue, "then what is it?"

David didn't answer, slowly standing up, holding the communicator in front of him. He looked up, first at Devastator, still standing calmly in the street, then at the surrounding area. There was nothing of note here, just more charred ruins and smoking ground, but he did not shy away from it, looking past it, putting it out of his mind as he peered into the smoke, looking for something, a half-formed idea in his mind.

"Maybe..." he said aloud, and tentatively walked across the street, ignoring Devastator for the moment. Mounting the sidewalk, he crossed to the shoulder of the road, which had once been a lightly wooded hill that ran up into one of the semi-rural parks that ringed this part of the city's suburbs. The grass was gone now, replaced with bare, blackened stone, the trees reduced to cindered sticks that still smoldered in the hazy twilight, but he ignored all of the decor, instead stopping at the base of the hill, and looking back down at the blinking communicator.

It could perhaps have been his imagination, but it seemed to him that the light was blinking incrementally faster.

"Anything?" asked Devastator, and suddenly he was right next to David, practically looking over his shoulder. David barely even blinked, indeed he didn't turn his head, staring at and through the communicator as the wheels turned inside his head.

"I think I know what this is," he said, to Devastator perhaps, or himself, or nobody, and then suddenly he took off, scrambling up the incinerated hill, the communicator clutched in one hand, the using the other to help himself up the steeper bits, leaving dislodged stones and showers of earth in his wake as he clambered towards the summit of the hill.

The hill turned out to be more of an elevated plateau, formerly covered in woods and undergrowth, a place for hiking, picnickers, and bicyclists. Nothing remained but the burnt stumps of trees and the occasional half-melted slag of what might have once a bike path. He paid none of it any mind at all, zigzagging through the uneven terrain, dodging dead trees and uplifted boulders, glancing every few seconds back down at the communicator in his hand, as the blinking light, slowly but unquestionably, began to accelerate in frequency. The confirmation gave him speed, and he switched from a jog to a dead run, ducking under grasping branches and circling around rocks too large to climb over. He had no idea what direction he was running in, no proof that he wasn't simply running in circles, save that every time he looked back down, the communicator was blinking faster.

The blinking light was racing now, and David redoubled his pace yet again, even as the terrain became rougher, cut by deep gashes in the surface rock and channeled into canyons and broken cliffs. He entered one of these, hemmed in now by rock walls to either side. Around bends and through narrow squeezes he crawled and scrambled, until finally he emerged around one final corner, and found himself at a dead end.

He stopped short, surprised, so sure had he been of the half-formed theory as to what the communicator was trying to tell him. The canyon he had selected had led him to a cul-de-sac of solid rock, a round open space perhaps twenty feet across hemmed in from every direction except the one he had come by walls of unbroken stone at least fifty feet tall. The burnt remains of vines and creepers adorned the scorched walls, but otherwise there was no sign of anything else present. Turning slowly in circles, he considered backtracking for a moment, looking for another canyon or a wrong turn, but when he looked back down at his communicator, the red light was now solid, no longer blinking at all.

"Where are we?" asked Devastator, and when David looked up, Devastator was standing opposite him, arms clasped behind his back in a way that was very familiar.

"I don't know," said David, and he turned the communicator over in his hands, holding it up to show Devastator the now-unbroken light. He half-expected Devastator to take the communicator, but he did not, and David lowered it once more.

"It's a transponder," said David. "Something's sending it a signal, and I think - " he clipped the communicator back to his belt, "I think the light means how close we are to it."

Devastator's expression turned puzzled. "I don't remember anything about that. Where did you - "

"Nowhere," said David, turning back around to the walls behind him, running his eyes up and down the rock face in search of... anything really. "Cyborg told me some stuff about transponders once. I'm just guessing."

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Devastator materialize beside him, also facing the wall, but this no longer even registered a blink. "I remember all that," he said. "But why would a transponder send you out here?"

"I don't know," said David, largely so that he wouldn't have to admit out loud that he was likely making this all up. Devastator kindly refrained from pointing that out himself, and David slowly approached the wall, lest he turn around and see the incredulity that he was certain was written all over his own face.

The rock wall was solid, or near enough, with small fissures running down it where water or plants had gouged out a tentative hold. He ran his hand over the wall, moving around it slowly, looking for anything out of the ordinary, anything to indicate that he might actually have guessed right.

He got halfway round the cul-de-sac before he saw something.

Above him, some fifteen feet off the ground, there was a divot in the rock wall, an enlargement of a fissure that ran from top to bottom. By itself this meant nothing, for the rock walls were uneven, and had hundreds of similar divots. Two things alone caught his eye about it. One was perhaps just a trick of the light, for the divot seemed... _darker_ than it should have been, the shadow veiling it deeper than a shallow crack warranted. The other was its shape. Alone among the hundreds of cracks and fissures in the rock wall, this divot was almost perfectly circular, roughly the size of the palm of his hand.

Carefully, with no real idea of what he was doing, he began to climb the wall. Had it been an actual rock-climbing wall, he would have had no chance of success, possessed as he was of neither equipment nor training in the art. But whether from Trigon's cataclysm or the ravages of time, the wall was pitted and cross-cut by numerous fissures and cracks that served admirably as foot and handholds, even for someone as ungainly as David. Slowly he managed to scale the broken rock, until finally he was within reach of the divot. He braced himself and reached up, inserting his fingers into the hole in the rock, feeling around the edge. It was deeper than it looked, deeper than his fingers could reach, but when he felt around the sides of the small hole, his fingers touched not the warm stone of the wall, but cool, smooth, metal.

Slowly he withdrew his hand, steadying himself as best he could, trying to decide what this meant. His hand slid down to his belt, and to the palm-sized communicator that hung from it, moments before his brain belatedly made the obvious connection. Straining to hold on with only one hand, he detached the communicator once more, slid it up to the divot, and inserted it into the hole, feeling only an instant's resistance before there was a soft, but audible, click.

And then the wall threw him off.

The rock shook, bucked like a living thing, and effortlessly tossed him free of his precarious perch, sending him tumbling down back onto the floor of the cul-de-sac as an avalanche of burned dirt and loose stones tumbled down around him. He landed on the ground on his back with a crash, and managed only to curl himself into a fetal position with his hands held over his head before the rockslide landed atop him.

Had the entire wall come down, that would have been it, but it was merely a shower of loose debris and pebbles, and it lasted only a few moments, before the rumbling and crashing gave way to the sound of something heavy being dragged over stone. Slowly, David untangled himself and sat up, as before him, an entire section of the stone wall in front of him receded into the wall a few inches, and slid aside, revealing a dark, open passage from whence emitted a gust of wind.

_Cold_ wind.

"_David_?"

This was not a question but a shout, and David started, whipping his head to the right to find Devastator bent down over him. It was only then that David's mind snapped back into the present, and he realized that Devastator had been calling his name ever since he fell off the wall.

"Are you all right?"

He needed a second to remember how to answer that one.

"I... yeah," he said, and he shook his head and slowly got up, brushing the rocks off of himself as he did so. Nothing appeared to be broken. "I think so..."

Devastator looked, for a moment, like he wanted to say something but thought better of it. "What _is _this?" he finally asked, though how he expected David to know was anyone's guess.

"I'm not sure," said David, turning back to the doorway, for that was what it obviously was. It was pitch dark inside, but a steady stream of cold air was emitting from it, and there was a low humming sound that seemed to emerge from within. Carefully, David approached the entrance, half expecting some hideous abomination to leap out at him from within it. No such abomination materialized however, and as he reached the threshold of the entrance, lights flipped on within it, revealing a metal staircase that descended into the earth along a shaft lined with steel.

He entered the doorway. There didn't seem to be anything else to do, and slowly descended the staircase, the only sounds his own footsteps on the metal stairs, and the low hum of what might have been machinery from within whatever this complex was. He did not hear Devastator following him, nor did he expect to. Devastator seemed to move between locations without traversing the points between. It didn't seem prudent to think about how.

The stairs finally ended some sixty paces down, and led to a short corridor that terminated with a plain steel door, above which was a large vent gently blowing chilled air down the hall and up the stairs. The door had neither knob nor handle, but mounted next to it was a small keypad set in a metal frame. Tentatively, he approached, looking for instructions or some hint as to what to do now, but there was nothing else present. He stood puzzled for a moment, but the thought occurred to him that if his Titans' communicator had triggered all this, then perhaps his Titans' security code would get him further.

The code was a twenty-four digit number, unique to David alone, randomly generated back when Robin had brought him onto the team, a time that now seemed like ancient history, even though it was barely a couple of months ago. For more than a week, Robin had made him memorize and re-memorize the code, until he was able to recite it on command, even while half-asleep, for the code would identify the bearer as David himself, and not some cunning impostor, and grant access to the Tower in the event that the security alarms had been tripped and all the other Titans were gone or incapacitated.

But apparently, it wasn't enough for whatever this was.

No sooner had he entered the code, than a panel above the keypad slid open, revealing a mounted screen that blinked on, displaying only the word "Devastator". From beside the screen, a tiny port emitted a red, wide-beam laser over the top of David's head, which it swept down slowly over his entire face. Before David could so much as blink, the lights turned red, a klaxon alarm sounded, and his name disappeared from the screen, replaced with the words "Unidentified Subject Detected".

Dazzled by the sudden barrage of noise and sound, David stepped back in confusion, in time to see a sickly, greenish gas begin to flow out of the vent above the metal door. The gas was heavier than air, and poured down the front of the door like a waterfall, pooling on the ground around him like a liquid. He had no hope of identifying what it was, but it seemed to augur nothing good, and he turned back, intending to ascend the stairs to escape it, only to find that a metal grate with thick steel bars had slammed shut behind him, blocking off all escape.

Stunned by this fresh turn of events, he tugged uselessly at the bars, trying to dislodge them and escape, but the cage was plainly designed to withstand the assault of someone far stronger than he was. He struggled and tugged, to no avail, as the gas continued to rise around him. Desperately, he turned back to the screen and keypad, re-entering his code as quickly as he could. But the procedure with the laser only repeated itself, and the screen once more called him an Unidentified Subject.

"Let me try."

David turned back, to find Devastator standing behind him, unperturbed either by the gas, or by the fact that he had apparently just walked right through the steel bars that blocked the passage. David blinked, but the subconscious part of his brain was still working, and he managed to step aside to let Devastator do as he would.

Given that this was _Devastator_, Lord of Destruction, he half-expected him to blast the door to pieces, snap the bars like twigs, or crush the vent that was spewing the gas. It was, after all, what David would likely have done were Devastator still resident within him. But rather than unleash explosions and flames, Devastator simply stepped forward, and paused before the mounted screen.

"Type in your code," said Devastator, though why he did not do it himself, David could not tell, for if Devastator had seen everything David had, then he too had to know it. Still, this was not the time to argue, and so David reached around Devastator, and typed in the code, before standing back nervously, the gas by now eddying around his waist and rising quickly. As before, a laser was projected, sweeping down over Devastator's head, but no sooner had it done so, than the monitor's message switched to "Identity Confirmed", and the gas abruptly stopped pouring into the room, as the gas began to recede into invisible vents hidden at the base of the walls.

Devastator turned around a shrug of what looked like relief visible on his features. "It was a retinal scanner," he said. "And... your eyes..."

David tried to prevent the tremor that comment brought to the surface, and might even have succeeded. "Oh," he said, gently touching the side of his own face, his fingers ashen grey and gently illuminated by the red light pouring from his discolored eyes. "Right." The last of the gas swirled away around his shoes, vanishing down the vents. "Thanks," he said, eyes darting away from Devastator's face, unwilling to rest for too long on his own features.

If Devastator noticed his reticence, he said nothing. "Don't mention it," he said, moments before there was a loud hissing sound, like the venting of steam, from somewhere behind the metal door. Both David and Devastator turned to face it, just as the door slid aside.

The room inside it was dark, only ambient light serving to illuminate a few feet inside, revealing nothing. Nothing stirred within, no sounds or movements to indicate hostility, and when Devastator made no move to enter, David stepped forward, over the threshold. Instantly, lights illuminated within, bright, fluorescent lights, mounted overhead, momentarily blinding him if only for how unexpected they were. And when finally his eyes had adjusted and he realized what he was looking at, he gasped, whether he would or not, in sudden recognition.

The room was enormous, the size of the Tower's common room in all dimensions, but the resemblance did not even come close to ending there. It _was_ the common room, or at least clearly was designed to resemble it in every way possible. It had the same metal paneled walls, the same vaulted ceiling with the same maze of ductwork, the same open division between kitchen and lounge area. The same everything, down to the furniture, only three differences distinguishing it from the real thing. First, the far wall, where the real common room's vast windows sat, was occupied instead by an enormous bank of monitors, all presently offline, that stretched from ceiling to floor. Second along the sides of the room, there stood large black boxes, three to a side, perhaps nine feet tall and four wide, their purposes indeterminate.

Third, and most elemental of all, there was the knowledge they were standing not atop the shining tower in the middle of Jump City bay, but in a hidden chamber, locked and secured and buried beneath a thousand tons of solid rock.

For a few seconds, David just stood there and stared, his brain unable to distinguish if he was actually seeing this, or if it was some hallucination dreamed up by his subconscious. It was only after some indistinct time had passed that he managed, barely, to descend the three steps into the replica common room, and slowly walk into it, moving in a daze.

"What is this place?" he asked, staring around himself in wide-eyed astonishment, as though he expected the walls to come crashing down at any moment, revealing another ruined Hellscape or another horde of monsters.

"I'm not sure," said Devastator. David heard no footsteps, but nevertheless felt Devastator entering the room behind him, though he did not turn back. Instead he walked slowly into the room, feeling uncomfortably similar to the way he had felt all those months ago, the first time Robin had led him into the common room to be interrogated by all five of the other Titans together. The same reticence, the same sense of being alone in an alien environment in which he did not belong, the same knots twisting themselves tight inside his stomach, only this time they tied themselves around a gnawing void, until he felt like he had just ingested a powerful acid.

Into the center of the room he walked, running his fingers over leather back of a couch, approaching one of the black boxes. When he got to within ten feet of the monolith however, some invisible sensor tripped the lights, and all six boxes lit up at once.

They were display cases.

David stopped where he was as lights flipped on within each box, revealing transparent cases in which was mounted equipment, _piles_ of equipment, the paraphernalia of every single Titan, one per case. The cases were not arranged decoratively, stuffed with uniforms on coat hangers, weapons and spare accessories laid out in quintuplicate on shelves and end tables, ready for use by all appearances, yet the overall effect was nevertheless that of a museum case, a monument to the people who had worn and used these items.

Behind David, Devastator stood, regarding the cases and the room that contained them, looking around from ceiling to floor and back again. "It's a safehouse," he said, sounding almost excited. "A bolt hole. A hidden backup base. It has to be. Robin must have had it built before all this - "

He turned as he spoke, and got no further.

"David?"

David stood in the center of the room, back to Devastator, eyes on the cases that lined the right wall, his hands clenched into fists at his sides, head bowed and quivering with visible strain. A moment later, and the tremor reached his entire body, his entire form tensed up, as though he had just absorbed some tremendous physical blow and was trying desperately not to let it show. Devastator approached with care, moving around to David's side, only to see that his eyes were squeezed shut, his teeth clenched tightly, breath coming in fitful gasps. He slowly bent, digging his fingers into the chair at his side, trying to keep himself together by main force, but to no avail. With a sudden jerk, his balance failed, and he fell, grabbing at the side of the chair with one hand to catch himself and slowly sliding down it to the floor. He landed in a heap, a tightly-constricted heap, head folded down into his arms, refusing to raise his eyes and look once more on the assembled symbols of everything lost and gone and burnt to cinders.

Devastator said nothing and did nothing, only watched as David slowly collapsed. With care, he raised his head, David's head, beholding in turn each of the six cases, which held what had once been the tools of the city's finest heroes, finally coming to rest on the one which contained a series of two-piece uniforms of orange and red, in front of which stood a weapons case with a half-dozen retractable police batons.

"I'm sorry, David," said Devastator, his voice a whisper like the stirring of wind. There was nothing else to be said.

**O-O-O**

"You are one stupid sonofabitch, you know that?"

Right now, laying on the pavement with his mechanical systems explaining in patient detail all of the things that were wrong with this situation, Cyborg was inclined to agree. The fact that his own voice was the one lecturing him only made this seem more like the conversation he was already having inside his head.

Cyborg climbed back to his feet for what had to be the fifteenth time tonight. He'd counted. Up in front of him, his evil counterpart was crouching leeringly on top of a low concrete retaining wall, staring down at him with a cockeyed grin, his sonic cannon held laconically to one side. He made no move to stop Cyborg as he peeled himself off of the pavement.

"It's one thing to want revenge, man, but this was just a bad idea," said the double. "This was basically the ultimate in bad ideas."

"You just gonna talk at me all day?" asked Cyborg, "or are you here to do business?"

A grin that augured no good appeared on the double's face as he stood up and leaped lightly down onto the pavement a dozen feet from Cyborg. The small army of flame demons followed in his shadow, as though unwilling to attack by themselves. "Your show, man," said the double. "You're the one who decided to kick the hornet's nest."

"Yeah," said Cyborg, slowly getting up, shoving the warnings out of his head. He did not move against his double immediately, waiting a moment this time to consider the best angle of attack. Yet he had not so much as decided if he should use his cannon or his fist before the double hit him.

Earlier that year, Cyborg had designed a pair of rocket thrusters, built into his robotic legs. Not powerful enough for sustained flight (the fuel requirements by themselves would have rendered that impossible), they were designed to provide split-second bursts of power to lend him speed at a moment's notice, a surprise for those who assumed that the hulking half-metal Titan was as ponderous as he looked.

Given that, there was something ironic here.

In a split second, Cyborg's alter ego accelerated from a dead stop to eighty miles an hour. Before Cyborg could react, before even his electronic sensors could react, the fist of his adversary struck him right between the eyes with the force of a locomotive, a punch that would have liquefied a normal person had there been one present to receive it. As it was, it hurled Cyborg through the air like a rag doll, smashing him back into and through a brick wall. Through desks and countertops he flew, finally coming to a halt against a solid concrete-and-steel pillar, sliding down it onto the ground.

For a moment he wasn't sure if his neck had broken, as his systems tried to reconstitute themselves, ran diagnostics, and tried to figure out what in the name of all that was Holy had just happened to them. He let them do their work. His concentration was focused on trying to determine which way was up.

"What are you even doin' here, huh?" came his double's voice. Or was it his own voice manifested through some mystical means? Come to think of it, might it not just be a hallucination brought on by damage and stress? "You actually think you're gonna take on Trigon, me, and his entire army all by yourself? When did you get this _stupid_?"

The voice was getting louder, punctuated by footfalls that were definitely approaching. And before Cyborg could ascertain where they were coming from, something grabbed him by both sides of his head and lifted him into the air, bringing himself face to face with his own features writ in red eye and ashen skin.

"Your friends are all dead," said the double like he was stating the answer to an arithmetic problem. "All of 'em. If you'd gone with 'em, maybe you could'a held it off for a while. As it is, you just managed to - "

Cyborg's fist ended the bragging before it could really begin.

It wasn't the equivalent of the hammer-blow that the double had inflicted, but it was a pretty decent facsimile, all things considered. A nice side-effect of having more than half your body replaced with computer-controlled cybernetics was that, no matter how addled your mind got, all you needed to do was to tell your arm to hit someone, and the stun-proof computers that governed its movement would do so for you. As such, despite the fact that Cyborg was still trying to recover his equilibrium, his arm smashed into his evil twin like a wrecking ball, picking him up off the ground and driving him across the room as though fired from a cannon. The double careened into the far wall, and, though he did not break through it, the impact sent cracks spiderwebbing across the painted surface of the re-enforced bulwark.

"You think I don't know that?" asked Cyborg, shifting his arm into a cannon.

It visibly took the evil twin a second to recover his balance, and in the instant's hesitation, Cyborg raised his arm and fired a sonic blast that could have flayed the flesh off a dinosaur, a blue streak comprised of a hundred billion motes of dust undergoing spontaneous nuclear fission from the very force of the ultrasonic waves. The double's equilibrium might have been out of order, but he could still tell when something terrible was about to happen to his present location, and he dove to the side, evading the strike by bare inches as the sonic blast tore the concrete wall apart like wrapping paper and drilled a three foot hole through the next two buildings. As he dove, the double extended his own sonic cannon, and returned the shot with one just as strong, scoring a direct hit and sending Cyborg hurtling back into the far wall.

Both metal teenagers struggled back to their feet at once, Cyborg shoving damage reports out of his mind, while his double spat words back at him.

"If you _know_, he said, then what the hell are you doin' here?"

"I'm here 'cause someone had to stand up," said Cyborg, kicking a desk aside as he strode towards his evil twin. "We all did what we had to do. If I've gotta go out, then that's how it's gotta be."

He broke into a run, charging with his fist cocked for business, but when he brought it forward, his counterpart preempted him, grabbing his fist with an open hand moving so fast that he could barely see it. The impact was like a thunderclap, yet the double did not so much as flinch, gripping Cyborg's hand in a vice of iron and steel.

"You are _so_ full of crap," he said. And then he threw him through the wall.

He barely seemed to move, simply shoving forward, and yet his gesture had the force of a howitzer, hurling Cyborg back and into and through a wall of brick, mortar, and steel rebar. Over the sidewalk and into another burnt-out street he flew, landing on the ground in a hail of sparks and sliding to a stop next to the opposite curb.

"Is that really all this is?" asked the double as he followed Cyborg at a leisurely pace, stepping through the hole that he had smashed in the wall and exiting into the street. "More 'I gotta be a man' bullshit? Ain't you done with that yet? You really think you can hide behind this macho crap from _me_?"

Cyborg slowly pulled himself off the ground, forcing his limbs to work despite the ever-more-urgent warnings that they were giving him not to do so. He rose at a run, charging his adversary with fists raised. But before he had taken more than five steps, a horde of fire demons poured forth from the ground and the walls that lined the street, and hundreds of red lava tendrils snared him like lassos.

"You ain't a man" said the double scornfully, as Cyborg struggled and roared. "You never learned how to be a man. You're not here for some damn last charge, you're here 'cause you're afraid."

"That's right," spat Cyborg contemptuously, letting the sarcasm roll off his tongue, "I came here to fight the Devil because I was afraid."

"It's written all over you," said the double, approaching at a stroll, as the combined force of the demons forced him to his knees. "Tryin' to act all tough, you think that makes you a man? You think I don't know what this is? You're here 'cause you can't face watching the others die. You'd rather delude yourself with a bunch of fantasies about blazes of glory. Shrink off to the side and pretend you're somebody else under all that armor and circuitry, just like usual."

"Shut up."

"Make me, _Victor_," shouted the double. "There ain't nowhere for you to hide this time, no garage, no workshop, no time portal gonna whisk you off to adventureland. Just you, me, and the end of the world. No more hiding."

"I ain't hiding!"

"You been hidin' your whole life, _boy_," crowed the alter ego. "Hidin' in plain sight. In the spotlights, where nobody'd ever think to look for you. You were afraid of becoming your old man, so you hid on the football field. Afraid of running your own show, so you hid behind Robin's. Afraid of your own shadow, so you hid behind God. And most of all, afraid to watch your friends die. So you ran off and hid behind _Trigon_." The other Cyborg shook his head. "I gotta say man, that one was balsy."

"So what are you?" asked Cyborg. "My goddamn shrink?"

"I'm your worst nightmare, Vic. I'm somebody who can see you even when you're hiding. I was there when you watched your mother die. I was there when you pretended to quit the Titans all those times. I was there when you turned on the Hive. And I was there when you watched them put Robin in the ground." The double approached even closer, lowering his head and sticking it in Cyborg's face. "And I'm here now, at the end, to tell you that you can run and hide all you want, but I'll always find you."

Teeth clenched, eyes blazing blue, Cyborg snarled his next words.

"Yeah?" he asked. "Did you find _this?"_

All at once, Cyborg's shoulders slid open, the blue facing replaced by dozens of small protrusions that popped up from within his chest and arms, and before the double could react, a hail of micro-missiles flew up and out, vaulting into the air for half a second before coming around and landing amidst the army of flame demons that was restraining him, ripping their ranks apart like wheat before a scythe. And as the demons' tendrils were severed or fell slack, Cyborg leaped up from the ground, intending to either blast his counterpart with his sonic cannon, or, failing that, knock his head off with a blow of his fist.

And he might even have succeeded, had he not been intercepted in mid-air.

The only warning he got was a flash of soft pink light before there was a tremendous explosion that blew him out of the air like a duck struck by a shotgun, aborting his attack and blowing him down the street like a piece of debris. Alarms and red sirens flashed within his head as he bounced and scraped to a final halt, the acrid smell of electrical smoke wafting in his nostrils. He lay like a boned fish on the asphalt for a moment before rolling over onto his back, and it wasn't until he reached back with one hand to push himself up to a sitting position that he realized that he no longer had an arm.

"Just the way it happens, man," said the double, strolling towards him with a cock-eyed grin on his preternaturally pale features. "You back the wrong horse, you lose your money. And the one you backed ain't even in the race."

His arm had been blown apart, truncated savagely an inch or two below the shoulder where it ended in a mangled stump of wires and twisted metal. Bits and pieces of it lay scattered around him, his hand and forearm a dozen feet away in the gutter. He put it out of his mind, using his other hand to struggle back to his feet, yet before he could complete the movement, his double was upon him, grabbing him by the throat with one hand and lifting him bodily into the air.

"You see," said the double, "God ain't involved in this little situation. So screamin' to him for help ain't gonna be much use. Only thing might have saved you is wising up."

"Like you?" coughed Cyborg back, trying to grab at the double's arm with his own remaining one.

"No," said that double. "Like _her_." He didn't gesture, but Cyborg saw anyway.

Up the street, behind the double, back where there had been nobody a moment before, now there stood a small figure cloaked in black and with red and pink energies dancing from her fingers. She was standing still, watching in silence, making no move to assist either one of the Cyborgs before her, but the hollow look on her face was enough to instantly explain to Cyborg what the source of the pink flash from a moment ago had been.

"Jinx..." he said, but not in disbelief or even in anger, a soft, worn note of understanding fused with disappointment. His eyes flickered back to the double. "You didn't - "

"We didn't have to," he said smugly. "We had what she wanted. The foundation of all good relationships." A smile, almost benevolent, crossed the double's face. "And all she has to do in return, is rip you to pieces."

In a single, fluid action, the double pivoted around, throwing Cyborg back down into the street some twenty yards away, letting him slide to a stop a dozen paces from where Jinx stood. Behind him, the reconstituted army of flame demons closed in a broad circle around the two of them. Yet they made no move to close in, and neither did the double, advancing through the crowd of demons to stand at the very edge of the ersatz circle.

Jinx did not move nor make an effort to stop Cyborg, as he slowly recovered his footing. She seemed to be looking right through him, at the demons perhaps, or the double, or someone else for all he could tell. No sign of bravado, no quip, no witty one-liner to announce her superiority. He might as well have not been there, for as much reaction as she gave.

"You wanna help your little friends?" came the mocking voice of the double from behind Cyborg. "Well then, why don't we see which one of you wants it more?"

A moment to steady himself, and then Cyborg looked back to Jinx, whose eyes slowly began to focus on him, even as the energy in her hand coalesced into a glyph of razor-sharp energy.

"Jinx?" he asked simply, unsure even of what he was going to ask her.

"I'm sorry, Cyborg," she said in a voice as dead as their surroundings, even as the hexes began to swirl around her wrists. "I'm... I'm sorry..."

Standing beaten and dismembered in the center of the ring of fire, his own evil twin watching and leering, as Jinx raised her hands and summoned the fel forces that she used for weapons, Cyborg could only lower his head.

"Yeah," he said. "Me too."

**O-O-O**

"Do you remember that place in Bakersfield?"

It was quiet here. Quiet in the ways that mattered. Quiet in that there was just enough background hum to drown out any tiny noises, but not enough to rise above the level of conscious thought. The air was cooler here than it was outside, not unpleasantly so, but conditioned and cleaned. No taste of sulfur or fly ash, no trace pollutants to sting the eyes. A small respite, an oasis in the midst of the desert. Maybe that was why it had been built. Not for grand purposes, not for complex chess-games or battlefield contingencies. Not for armchair fantasies of replenishment and counteroffensive. Maybe it had been built just so, at the end of all things, someone could go there, and sit for a time, and talk to the phantasms of their own mind.

Maybe.

Perched on the armrest of one of the chairs, Devastator smiled gently. "I remember that you didn't care for it," he said. "It took them two days to find you after you bolted. I'm not sure where you thought you were going."

David sat on the floor where he had fallen, back against the side of a couch, legs pulled up to his chest, arms resting on top of his knees. He did not look up at Devastator, seeming instead to stare off at some invisible thing beyond.

"I just... didn't want to stay," he said, shaking his head. "But I can't remember why anymore."

Devastator folded his hands in front of him. "Well you weren't more than five or six," he said. "Maybe it was Marcus."

"No," said David. "Marcus didn't get really bad until later." He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "He was never really _that_ bad anyway."

"I don't remember you being that philosophical about him at the time."

"It's been a while," said David. He shook his head. "I know better now. There's worse things around than Marcus."

Devastator regarded David with equanimity, but David did not lift his head.

"Well," said Devastator, "Bakersfield's near the I-5 corridor..."

A slight tremor, almost imperceptible, was the only reaction. David seemed to think it over for a good ten seconds before answering in a tone scarcely above a whisper. "Yeah," he said. "Maybe."

Devastator waited, but David said nothing further, eyes lowered at the ground. At last, he broke the silence with a question of his own.

"Do you remember anything from that night?"

The question seemed to get David's attention for the first time since he had collapsed. He raised his head to the red-clad simulacrum sitting opposite, staring at him as though trying to discern a reason for the question. Slowly, he shook his head. "No," he said. "Why?"

Now it was Devastator's turn to take a deep breath. "You always said you didn't remember anything, but I can't read minds, even yours. I wasn't really sure."

"Why did you need to be sure?" asked David.

"I didn't _need _to be," said Devastator. "I..." he trailed off, seeking for the right words, or perhaps the right language to say what he meant. "I always _hoped _that you didn't remember. I figured it would make it easier somehow."

In another time, another place, David might have taken umbrage at the notion. As it was, he simply lowered his eyes a fraction. "Maybe it did," he said.

There was something in the way he said the words, simple though they were, that seemed to hint at something else altogether.

"Were you... with me? When the accident happened?" said David all of a sudden.

Devastator, or rather the image he was projecting, blinked. "What do you mean?"

David closed his eyes, breathing deep, "I don't remember a time before you," he said. "I don't know when you... picked me." He opened his eyes again, this time looking up at Devastator. "Did you pick me after it happened, or before?"

Devastator sighed slowly. "Before," he said at last. "But not long before. I was there when the - "

David didn't reply in words, but his reaction was clear enough. No sooner had Devastator spoken, than he lowered his head, a wince of pain spreading across his face too rapid to conceal. His breath caught, and when he released it, it was plainly an effort to do so. Devastator waited for an explanation, another question, anything, but David did not respond, until finally he took the initiative.

"David?"

Still David did not answer, indeed he didn't even raise his head, one hand draped over his face. He did not even seem to notice that Devastator had said anything.

"David?" repeated Devastator. "David, is - " He stopped, started over. "What's wrong?"

Slowly, David lifted his eyes, burning red against ash-grey skin. Yet the skin around his eyes was dark, and wet streaks ran down his face. His eyes invisible behind the flaming redness that infused them. He gave no sobs, made no sound, spoke no words, but simply looked up at Devastator, the red light giving his stare an unearthly and direct look, like probing searchlights penetrating to the truth. Devastator, energy being, immortal though he was, could not help but shudder.

"... David?"

"That man out there?" asked David, voice kept steady by what was visibly an act of will. "The one with the cane and the glasses and the big coat. Was he telling the truth?"

Devastator caught his simulated breath. "David, you don't understand how these - "

"If you're not gonna give me a straight answer, then what are you doing here?" asked David sharply, not averting his eyes for an instant, difficult though it was to tell. "He said that he was me, only the way I was... 'supposed' to be. I don't know if I know what that means, but I know you can tell me if he was telling the truth. So tell me, was that guy actually me?"

"You don't need me to tell you that," said Devastator evenly, not yielding an inch. "You've already decided he was telling the truth."

"No," said David, "I _guessed_. Because that's what I can do. You _know_."

"What makes you think _I_ know?"

"Because you're an energy being. You're on some kind of other plane. 'I exist outside time and space', that's what you told Raven, isn't it?"

Devastator did not answer.

"That's how you pick people, isn't it? You can see into the past and the future and find out what they're supposed to become, and find the person you want from there, right?"

"That's _not_ how it works," said Devastator.

"But it's close enough, isn't it?" said David. "Close enough for you to answer me. However it actually works, magic or physics or whatever, you _know, _don't you?"

There were several seconds of complete silence.

"Yes," said Devastator. "He's you."

No reaction. No wince, no hesitation, no signs of surprise. Just a small, almost imperceptible tremor, one David nearly managed to mask completely. Not a shock, a confirmation. Slowly, with infinite care, David permitting himself to lower his head.

The movement broke the silence, at least as far as Devastator was concerned. "David, please," said Devastator. "You don't understand." David said nothing, but raised his eyes anew, which Devastator took as permission to continue. "That man, he's... a... a _possible_ version of you. That's all. He's - "

"He's what I would have been if I hadn't met the Titans."

Devastator hesitated. "Maybe."

"Bullshit," said David. "You know it's more than 'possible'. Warp came back in time and changed things so that I would meet the Titans. And if he hadn't done that, _that's _who I'd be, isn't it?" He let the question sit, as Devastator stood watching him with his own face, unable to reply. "Isn't it?_"_ he repeated, louder this time.

"Yes," said Devastator at last. "It is."

Again, David closed his eyes, shaking his head from side to side, his hands cupped into fists as he lightly pounded one of them against the side of the sofa he was sitting against. Devastator hesitated once more, before trying again. "David," he said, trying to sound understanding, "I know this was a shock. But you can't - "

Of all things, David started to laugh.

It wasn't a good laugh, it was an incredulous, almost bitter laugh. And he raised his head again and stared at Devastator in something approximating disbelief.

"You think I'm _surprised_?" he asked, blinking up at the weaponized incarnation of Destruction. He shook his head in what looked like disbelief. "Is that what you think? You think I'm sitting here trying to convince myself it isn't true? I've known this would be the way it would up the whole time."

"What are you talking about?" asked Devastator.

"Why do you think I never used you?" asked David. "Why do you think I spent so much time pretending I couldn't do anything? Even when Marcus or someone else decided to be an idiot, I never, _ever_ used you for anything big, except that one time with the bicycle. What did you think I did that for? Because I was afraid of what other people would _think_? Is that what you thought it was? How many of your hosts don't even try to figure out how their powers work?"

"You were _afraid_," said Devastator. "It's only natural to be afraid of powers like the ones I gave you."

"I wasn't afraid of the powers," said David, leaning forward, "I was afraid of what I would _do_ with them. Casual destruction, reflexive violence, I _knew _where all that went. I'm not an idiot, I can add two and two together. You have a bad day, someone makes you angry, and _boom_! That's why I tried to leave the Tower." He shook his head again, lowering it slowly until his forehead was resting on his knees. "You think I'm surprised by all this?" he repeated. "I knew this was what I would become from day _one_. And I _let_ myself be convinced by the others that it wasn't true, because they said it wasn't, and I wanted to believe them. I wanted to be wrong." He took a deep breath and let it out. "But I wasn't wrong."

"Yes you were."

His head shot up again. "I _murdered_ all of the Titans," he said, spitting the words out like a bitter liquid. "I murdered _hundreds_ of people getting to them. I - "

"Stop it," said Devastator, cutting David off angrily. "Just _stop it_. You didn't murder the Titans, or all those people, _he_ did. For whatever reason, _he _chose to do those things, not you."

"We're the _same _person!" exclaimed David.

"So?" asked Devastator. "You don't know the circumstances that - "

"The _circumstances_?" shouted David. "He killed _six hundred people_ just because they were in his way! He admitted it to me, I watched him do it!"

"Fine," said Devastator, "but _you _watched _him_ do it. Even if that is what you're supposed to become, it's thirty years in the future, in a totally different world. You don't know what happened, or why he decided to do all that, and neither do I. And if that doesn't mean anything to you, then it damn-well _should_!"

David said nothing, and Devastator stood up from where he was perched, stepping towards David until he was within arm's reach, as David's eyes darted downwards.

"You're right, you're not an idiot," said Devastator. "So quit acting like one and _think_. If I turned up two years ago in whichever center you were in then and told you that you would blow up Jump City's main gas line and nearly knock Titans' Tower into the water, you'd have set the building on fire just to get away from me. Well now you've _done _those things. Did you do them out of spite? Or anger? Did you do them because you're some madman who wanted to destroy the world? Or did you do them because you had a good reason to?"

David shook his head in something approximating disbelief. "Are you trying to say I had _good reason_ to kill the Titans?"

"I'm saying that you have no idea why _he _did what he did, or what led to it, or anything else. And even if he didn't have good reason to do it, _he's_ the one who did it, not you. _You _weren't there, _you _didn't do whatever led up to it. It had nothing to do with _you_, and you know it! Whatever that version of you did in some other time and place isn't your fault." "You never murdered anyone."

Slowly, David raised his eyes, turning the burning red lights on Devastator's face, his hands, his entire body trembling like he was suffering a palsy. Whatever effect Devastator had hoped for his words, had plainly not transpired. He opened and closed his mouth several times, as through trying to kick start the words to his lips, and finally managed to spit out three soft words, barely whispers.

"Yes I did."

Devastator's expression froze. He blinked, twice, standing at such proximity that David could see the wheels figuratively turning in whatever passed for a mind within the energy being.

"What are you - "

"You _know _what I'm talking about," said David. "You were there."

A chill settled over Devastator's eyes, one unmistakable to anyone as familiar with his features as David was, by necessity. He took a short, involuntary breath, no less informative for being entirely feigned. "David..." he said.

David didn't give him a chance. "Do you remember that place in San Francisco?"

"Which one?"

"The one I stayed in four years ago? The one that kid from the system wrote me from?" David's jaw tensed up, threatened to lock. "The one with the records building that had a broken basement window?"

"The one you broke?"

"That one. You remember it?"

"I remember it," said Devastator, his voice preternaturally even, yet tense at the same time. "What about it? Did you kill someone there without me knowing about it?"

"No," said David, "I broke into the sealed files, remember?"

"You weren't the only one."

"I was the only one who could break the lock on the filing cabinet by thinking about it."

"Probably," said Devastator, curtly. "What is this about?"

David refused to be hurried. "Do you remember what I found in there."

"Your file."

"_Inside_ the file, don't play stupid."

"You're talking about the accident report?" asked Devastator.

"Yeah," said David.

"What _about_ it?"

"Do you remember what it said?"

"It said that you were in a car accident, that your parents died, and that you survived," said Devastator. "Which is exactly what happened. I was there, remember?"

"I know that," said David. "Do you happen to remember what else it said?"

Devastator hesitated. "What do you mean?"

"What did it say happened, _precisely_?"

"I have no idea what it said _precisely_," said Devastator, "it was four years ago."

"Well I do," responded David. "I remember it _really _well. It said that our car swerved into the oncoming lane, and was hit head-on by a semi truck coming in the opposite direction."

"And?"

"And that's what it says!"

"I _know_ that's what it says, I was _there_ when the accident happened. Why does this even even - "

"Because it doesn't mention the divider."

Devastator blinked, several times. He had heard David perfectly, but what he had just said made no sense as Devastator understood it.

"The what?"

"The center divider," repeated David, eyes stern and cold, perceptible even through the fog of red haze. "When they built the interstate, they realized that people might lose their way in the dark or the fog or something, and drift into oncoming traffic. So they built a divider, between the lanes of traffic, right down the center of the highway."

Slowly, without any command of Devastator's, his projection's face began to fall as he realized where David was going. "David..."

"I've seen it," said David, ignoring Devastator, his voice held rigidly under controlccc as he continued. "So have you, but you probably didn't notice it. I did. I noticed it every time they bussed us back and forth on that road. It's built along the entire highway from Grapevine to Kettleman. Not one break in it in eighty miles. Not _one_." He paused, his head shaking back and forth, spreading his hands wide, as though in search of an answer. "So tell me," he asked, "if you were there when the accident happened, how did our car manage to swerve into the oncoming lane with a six foot concrete wall between it and us?"

Devastator looked as though someone had seized his heart with a grip of ice. "I..." he stammered, his voice practically a whisper. "I don't... there's a thousand things that could have happened. Maybe you went through the divider..."

"The divider's made of _ferroconcrete_," snapped David, voice thin and worn, tears coming to his eyes. "Concrete re-enforced with steel! Impervious to anything short of a cruise missile! I know what ferrocrete of that grade can take, Cyborg made me study it for weeks! You could drive a dump truck full of Nitro-Glycerin into a divider like that at two hundred miles an hour and not break through! There is _no way_ we went through that divider in a four-seat car!"

"Then maybe you went over it. Swerved into it and ran up the side. I don't _know_, David, you were asleep when it happened. I can only see through you. Why does this matter now?"

David ignored the question. "There was a medical report in the file too," he said, his voice becoming more and more rigid, almost fearful, though it was unclear what he was afraid of. "It talked about what happened to me."

"You nearly died," said Devastator. "You shouldn't have needed a medical report to tell you that."

"That's not what I mean. The accident report said that they found me bleeding."

"Of _course_ you were bleeding," snapped Devastator, "you were in a car wreck with a semi-truck! The flying glass alone - "

"It wasn't from the glass."

"What do you - "

"Subject is a child of approximately two years," said David, plainly quoting from memory, "minor lacerations and abrasions are evident due to impact. Copious bleeding evident from subject's eyes, ears, and nose appear to be caused by _ruptured blood vessels_." He pronounced the last words like proclamations of doom. "Medical examination revealed extreme stress and internal bleeding throughout the subject's entire cardiovascular system." He paused, taking a ragged breath. "Cause of effects unknown. Presumed related to accident."

Devastator stood motionless, no sound escaping his lips, staring at David, who stared right back.

"When I read that," said David, "I didn't know what it meant. I didn't know if it meant _anything_. But then I started having those headaches, during training. The blood pressure spikes, the migraines. Terra getting me to overload. And then there was that thing on the island. When I tried to kill Slade." He let the notion sit for a moment. "Every time I pushed too far with you, past where I normally went, it was the same."

Neither one said a word for a time that could have been minutes, seconds, or hours. When Devastator finally broke the silence, his voice had died to an ember of its former self, quiet, restrained, and deflated.

"I didn't think you would remember all that," he said.

"You didn't think I'd remember a report about what happened that night?"

Devastator didn't answer for a little while. "Maybe I _hoped _you wouldn't," he finally said.

"You thought it would be easier?" asked David.

"I thought it would be better for you if you just..." he let himself trail off. "I hoped you'd be able to let it go."

There was a moment's silence.

"The bleeding," said Devastator at last. "The circulatory damage. You do know that could have been caused just by raw concussion? A wreck at that speed with that much mass... it's a miracle you didn't suffer worse. It could just have been the crash."

"But it wasn't the crash," said David, his eyes locked on Devastator's. "Was it?"

Devastator performed an excellent impression of someone drawing a breath slowly and holding it in. "No," he said, at last. "It wasn't."

David's eyes closed of their own accord, silent tears squeezing themselves out from between his eyelids. He managed, at cost incalculable, to prevent himself from moving at all otherwise. Moments later, he felt a tingling sensation, faint and yet plain and easy to detect, centered on his shoulder and running down his arm, a sensation vaguely warm and electrical, and he opened his eyes once more to see that the copy of himself that had been Devastator had vanished. In its place stood an enormous man, tall and broad, with a mass of red hair that ran riot in every direction, and an enormous, curled beard, also red. Significantly taller than David, he stood above him with his hand extended out, laid on David's shoulder. David felt no weight, no physical presence, nothing but the electrical sensation, and the man's expression was soft, concern seasoned with what might have been guilt.

"It was me," said Devastator, his voice still David's, but stronger now, commanding, a voice tinged with authority and reverence, not to be gainsaid or spoken against. A voice of someone who was speaking ex cathedra. "You want the truth? You want an explanation? You know it was me. That's why you asked in the first place. You've always known that, haven't you?"

"I didn't _know_," said David, quietly now, no signs of anger in his voice. "But... I could feel it..."

"Then you felt right," said Devastator, staring directly at David, whose eyes remained averted, staring down at the ground between them. "I blew the car off the road," said Devastator. "I touched off the right front axle and flipped the whole car over the divider into the oncoming lane. It went straight into the truck."

He might as well have said nothing, for David did not lift his eyes, nor give any indication that he had heard what Devastator had said.

"David, are you listening?" demanded Devastator, moving as though attempting to shake him by the shoulder, though his massive arms passed right through David like holograms. "Did you hear what I just said? You were _right_, it was me. _I_ did it! I killed your parents. It was my doing and nobody - "

Slowly, David lifted his head to meet Devastator, and the face he lifted was wet, the eyes puffed and swollen. His mouth trembled, but he did not weep, nor accuse, nor give any other indication of anger. He only locked his eyes with those of the energy being before him, and slowly shook his head.

"It wasn't you," David said slowly. "You don't have a will. You can't _do _anything by yourself. It couldn't have been you."

The expression on Devastator's face slowly froze, something akin to a shattering disappointment crystallizing within his eyes. It was a look that, without so much as a word, spoke more volumes to David than anything that had yet been said. And in that precise instant, David knew the truth.

"That's why you need a host," he said.

Slowly, carefully, Devastator's began to melt, his entire form dissolving before David's eyes. Shrinking back into another form, the energy being became a young woman, adorned in white, a circlet of diamond on her brow. A moment later, and the woman had grown once more into a towering warrior in plate armor black as night, a sword in one hand dripping blood the color of wine. Again and again he shifted, forms human and alien, too many to comprehend, too rapidly for David's eyes to focus upon. A blur of images, hundreds and thousands of images, enough to overwhelm his eyes with a riot of color and shape, until he could take it no longer, and closed them, moments before everything gave out, and he fell.

He landed on the ground as he felt something wrap itself around him, not a physical object but an energy, like a static charge, running over him in waves. Warm and electrical, both familiar and unfamiliar, it washed over him like an ocean tide, and as it did so he felt the tears running down his face once more, this time unstoppable. He dug his fingers into the carpet, eyes squeezed shut, his body automatically contracting into a fetal position as his defenses broke down. Alone in the darkness he cried, for all that had been lost, by Trigon's actions or his own.

It no longer mattered which.

**O-O-O**

The voice was lilting and lyrical and just off-key enough to send chills racing down Starfire's spine, though that might have been the aching pangs from somewhere deep inside every time she recognized its timbre.

"Run, run, as fast as you can," came the voice from somewhere nearby, lost in the labyrinthine passages of Warp's fortress. It rolled round corners and cornices, losing and fragmenting itself until it seemed to come from everywhere at once. And no sooner had it stopped, than a similar voice, deeper of timbre and pitch but no less twisted, echoed a soft reply.

"You can't catch me. I'm the Gingerbread man..."

It was the same voice, dialed downwards, and the combination of the two was enough to make her sick to all seven stomachs.

She raced down the corridor, her thoughts too jumbled and heart too petrified to even attempt flight. She could hear footsteps, disjointed, metallic footsteps, on the stones somewhere nearby, behind her, in front of her, in hallways running parallel to this one, she couldn't tell. Apprehensively, she glanced backwards and forwards, seeking for her pursuers, yet every time she did so, there was nothing there.

Until, that is, someone swung a metal staff at her head.

It came out of _nowhere_, she would swear to that on her life. In the space of one blink there was someone in front of her with a staff swinging at eyelevel, meant to burst her head like a melon. By the barest of margins, she contrived to duck under the swing which smashed against the wall in a cascade of sparks. She jumped back, only to have her assailant leap forward and strike again, but this time she was ready, and raising one arm, she took the blow on the bracer around her forearm.

One problem with emotion-based powers was that they had a tendency to desert one at the worst possible moments. Particularly ones based on boundless confidence.

The blow was like a hammer, sending a wave of force coursing through her entire body. It lifted her off her feet and threw her against the wall as though gravity had just shifted beneath her, slamming her against the wall hard enough to smash the facing of the smoothed stone blocks.

In a heartbeat, her assailant spun the staff around and jabbed with it, aiming the end at the bridge of her nose. Once more she ducked, letting it smash against the broken stone, and reaching up, she grabbed the staff and wrenched it out of his hands, stepping back with it and tossing it behind her, only to watch as the other reached behind his back and drew forth a small cylinder, which telescoped out into a fresh staff.

Before Starfire could react to this new development, something hit her in the back of the head like a falling building, and the next thing she knew, she was lying on her stomach on the floor, with something that felt very much like the end of a pole being driven into her back. Someone bent over her as she lay on the ground, and she heard a soft click and saw a glint of light on metal as whoever it was reached around her throat with a sharp, pointed object no larger than a knife.

Certain things tended to galvanize one's attention.

She tensed up and _shoved_ hard against the stones, her innate Tamaranean strength giving her a burst of power that sent her practically flying upwards, knocking the person off of her as she leaped up and landed on her feet. In front of her, she saw the twisted, broken version of Nightwing still holding his staff, leering at her from beneath his hawk-like mask. And behind her, Robin's simulacrum was already recovering from having been shaken off, another staff held in his hands as he began to advance once more.

"What have you done with him?" asked Starfire aloud, speaking to neither one of the simulacra. She was confident that the person whom she _was_ addressing would hear her.

Her confidence was well-placed. "I've done nothing to either of them," came Warp's voice from some dark corner of the mad labyrinth, "save what they both claimed to do. I've restored the balance in the interests of justice."

"Justice is not served by this mockery!" shouted Starfire, backing towards the wall, watching both of the evil clones as they circled around her. "You do not even know the meaning of the term! Why are you doing this?"

"I understand the term _in detail_, Starfire," said Warp, icily. "It is not simply a convenient shield for you to hide your actions behind. Justice applies blindly, even to those whom you spared no thought for. Justice is indifferent to your biases, preoccupations and concerns. It is cold. It is heartless. And it is without remorse."

There was a flash of light, and suddenly Warp was before her, between Nightwing and Robin, the Book of Azar in his hand, held lightly at his side despite its size and weight, his finger extended towards her.

"I find it deeply ironic, Starfire, that I should have to be the one to tell _you_ that."

Starfire bit back the vile curses that were forming on her tongue in Tamaranean, English, and every other language that came to mind. "What have you done with Robin?" she managed to ask.

"I have turned him to my purposes," said Warp, gesturing to the simulacra on either side of him. "Purposes to which, I imagine, he would not object, were he able to make his wishes known."

"You lived with him for years!" shouted Starfire. "How can you even say such a - "

"Don't presume to judge me, princess. Robin dedicated his life towards the principles of justice, long before he ever met you. It was burnt into the very fibre of his being. I have made of him an instrument of justice and retribution."

"Revenge for your obsessions is _not _justice!"

"Oh but it _is_!" exclaimed Warp. "Justice is balance! Justice is a settling of accounts! Justice is reciprocity, a crime committed, a crime exacted! _That_ is justice! You heroes twist the term so that you might use it to justify your every action, so that nothing you do is ever wrong!" Warp smiled cruelly and spread his arms wide. "Well it is long-since time you were brought to account."

"You are _insane_!"

"Perhaps," said Warp, his smile not shrinking an inch as he gestured around him in turn. "But I'm also the one with the book, the allies, and the rarest of all gifts, just cause."

"And I am to believe that Trigon, Lord of Evil, now the patron of just causes?" shouted Starfire back. "Is it from your fine sense of justice that you have aligned yourself with him and exterminated the denizens of this world?"

"Not all of us are blessed with the gift of Tamaranean physiology, Starfire," said Warp. "Some of us require other means to enact our revenge. Trigon was a means to an end. To this end." He smiled anew, a patronizing smile, like that of a teacher amused by the antics of a truant student. "Dismiss me as a madman if you must," he said, "but justice does not require that you admit your crimes, only that you pay for them."

White fury stabbed through Starfire as she clenched her fists and leaned forward, like a racehorse straining to burst from the starting gate. "Were I you, Warp," she said, "I would not speak of payment for crimes."

"And were I you, Starfire," said Warp, "I would not take my eyes off of my two associates here."

There was a flash of blinding light as bright as a supernova, instantly washing out Starfire's vision completely, and a heartbeat later, something hit Starfire in the chest like a wrecking ball. She was hurled back, smashing into and through the stone blocks behind her. She landed on more stone, the thunderous sounds of the collapsing walls ringing her in, her eyes still washed out by the flash bomb. Blinking to try and clear her vision, she heard the sounds of metal-shod footsteps approaching from indeterminable directions.

Before the light returned to her eyes, something grabbed her by the throat and lifted her up, something with a grip of cold iron and the strength of a thousand Tamaranean warriors. She gasped, choking, grabbing at the unyielding wrists of whatever had seized her and uselessly tugging at them as she was lifted off her feet by the inexorable force. Her eyes cleared grudgingly, and she saw Warp standing before her, the book in his hand sheathed in black, his free hand extended towards her and projecting a river of dark energy that had wrapped itself around her throat like an iron vice.

"What's the matter, Princess?" snarled Warp as he held Starfire aloft. "Can't think of anything to say?"

With a broad, violent stroke, Warp swept his arm to the side, hurling Starfire into a column of volcanic glass, which shattered into a million pieces as she flew through it. She landed on the coarse ground and rolled to a stop as Warp followed at a stroll.

"What is it you sought to find here, Princess?" asked Warp as he advanced, tendrils of darkness snaking from his hand as Robin and Nightwing flanked him on either side. "Redemption? Salvation? Rescue? Were you seeking to save Robin at any cost? Some selfless act of heroism to restore him to your very arms? That _is_ why you came, is it not?"

Starfire struggled to her feet as the broken glass rolled off her, taking two steps towards Warp as she raised her hand and closed it into a fist. Yet before she could fire a starbolt, Warp's tendrils wrapped themselves around her like the lash of a whip, and bound her in place in bonds of adamant, lifting her into the air as she fought to break free.

"Foolish child," said Warp with a smirk, "there is no redemption here. No salvation, no rescue. This place is Hell. I happen to be an expert in Hell. And I can assure you that in Hell there is only pain."

Warp glanced momentarily to Robin, who obediently stepped forward, his staff at the ready. With a flick of his finger, Warp sliced off the tip of the staff into a point so sharp as to be invisible, moments before the entire staff began to glow in black energy, a darkness so profound it seemed to sap the heat from the terrace.

"You abandoned me in Hell," said Warp as Robin approached Starfire, "and left me to live or die, at the whims of your so-called friends." He lowered his hand, bringing Starfire down nearer to the ground, though not near enough that she could find purchase against any surface. Starfire's thrashings became more and more frantic as Robin closed in, yet Warp's hand did not quiver, nor did his bonds of darkness so much as tremble. Robin approached to within striking distance, raised the staff above his head, and turned back to look at Warp.

Warp did not look to Robin, but maintained his gaze on Starfire, seeming to relish the look in her eyes as his features twisted into a cruel smirk.

"Consider us even," he said, and released the bonds.

Less than a tenth of a second later, Robin drove the fel-charged staff's point straight into Starfire's chest.

"_Robi_ - unh..."

There was no scream. No cry. No wail of a stricken bird or creature. No histrionic shrieks to give pleasure to the most twisted of ears. There was only a wet slicing sound, a soft gasp, choked off abruptly, and the minute sounds of a throat closed to air and sound that still struggled to release both. Starfire hung, just for a moment, where she had been floating, and then slowly, with all the grace of a falling leaf, fell the several inches that still separated her from the terrace floor, one hand lightly grasping the staff that Robin had just driven into her, the other, almost unconsciously, wrapping itself around Robin's shoulders.

"Robin..." she whispered.

Robin twisted the spear, and shoved it forward.

Now there was a cry, stifled by iron command, but audible all the same, that leaked out involuntarily as she knotted her fingers in Robin's cape and held the makeshift spear with a hand that had lost all strength. Again Robin shoved, driving the spearpoint further in, making no effort to break away, driving in the spear until it could be lodged nowhere but in Starfire's heart.

Blood soaked into the front of Starfire's shirt, ran down the staff onto Robin's glove, yet Starfire did not collapse, holding onto Robin tightly, as though they were not in Hell but back at the Tower, as though there were no spear, no Warp, no Trigon, no plots of evil, nothing else in the world. She held him as though she feared he would vanish.

"Robin..." she whispered again, tears rolling down her face, her voice so weak as to barely be comprehensible several paces away.

Yet Warp heard her. "Robin is dead," he said. "He will never return. And neither, Princess, shall you."

Starfire shuddered, seeming all of a sudden to wilt, her grip on Robin beginning to slacken as she slowly closed her eyes. Her mouth moved, but her lungs had lost their strength, and what words she whispered, Warp could not hear. With a gleeful smile, he stepped forward.

"I'm sorry, Princess," he said, patronizingly, "what was that?"

"I am sorry," whispered Starfire without opening her eyes, as the blood trickling down the spear slowed, and her voice seemed to drift off. "I am so sorry..."

**O-O-O**

"I mostly remember how dark it was."

David did not raise his head, unsure if he could conjure up the necessary force to do so and unwilling to try. He left his eyes shut, unwilling to see the red glow that reflected off everything when they were open. He preferred to remain blind for the time being, as from somewhere overhead, Devastator spoke.

"There were lights along the road, but the fog was in, and the windows were tinted. No lights on in the car. No sound but the engine and the radio."

"They didn't say anything?" asked David, hearing his voice as though it were disembodied, coming from someone else. Every word was like a dagger through his heart.

"It was a long trip," said Devastator. "From Jump City all the way north over the mountains into the central valley. It had to be ten or eleven at night. They were tired. _You _were tired."

"What happened?" asked David, forcing out the words as barely a whisper. His fingers dug into the leather of the chairback behind him, as if in anticipation of a physical blow. Every fibre of his being wanted to run away, clamp his hands over his ears, do anything besides sit here. But there was nothing else to do, and he did not allow himself to tell Devastator to be quiet.

It took more to stop himself than he thought he had left in him.

"I don't know what happened... exactly," said Devastator, in a voice that sounded rather like prevarication.

If Devastator thought he was softening the blow, David disabused him. "Just... _tell me_ already," he exclaimed before he could stop himself, voice pained. "You were there. I don't remember any of it. What _happened_?"

A pregnant pause, discernible even with his eyes closed. He could picture Devastator hesitating somewhere over him, before finally speaking.

"It was the front, right wheel," said Devastator. "A single, clean burst, inside the wheelshaft. Stainless steel with a low chromium count, the easiest thing in the world. It snapped the transaxle like a twig. The entire wheel assembly collapsed in a quarter second."

David felt something knotting itself around his lungs, squeezing the air out through clenched teeth, and he squeezed his eyes together, if only to spare himself the sight of his own face reciting the words he knew to come.

"Your father was driving," said Devastator. That one word hit like a wrecking ball, and David had to fight to avoid doubling over as Devastator continued. "The car jolted to the right. He swung it the other way, tried to compensate, but there was too much speed." Another pause, David could practically see Devastator trying to find a way to ease this. He decided on clinical, technical description. "The car was front wheel drive. The blast knocked out the drive train, and cut the brake lines. No way to stop, no way to control it. It hit the divider at a sharp angle and went over it like a ramp. Landed on its roof in the opposing lane. It was still sliding when the truck hit."

He tried to focus on the clinical details, tried to depersonalize what he was being told, if only for a few more seconds. "The truck driver didn't say anything about that," said David, his voice sounding more desperate than he intended. "Why didn't the reports - ?"

"The driver never saw anything," said Devastator, anticipating the question. "The fog was in too thick. To him, the car just appeared out of nowhere, no time to react. And when he hit it... well you saw the photos. It was completely pulverized. Nobody noticed a broken axle in the middle of all that."

I single breath, taken in slowly between clenched teeth, and David forced his eyes open. Devastator stood before him, once more disguised as David himself, watching him in the way that one might watch a disturbed stranger on the bus, a wary look mixed with concern, the look of someone who feared what the person he was watching might do.

"It was me, wasn't it? I blew up the axle."

A hesitation. "_I_ blew it up," said Devastator at last, trying too hard to sound convincing.

A spike of red-hot anger shot through David like an industrial laser, and before he knew what he was doing, he leaped to his feet, overturning the chair behind him. "I was your host!" he exploded, screaming at Devastator at the top of his lungs. "_I_ was the one in control!"

"You weren't in control of a damned thing!" retorted Devastator. "You weren't even two!"

"Then how did it happen?" shouted David. "Ten thousand hosts and a million years of trying, and _this one time_ you managed to act by yourself? You can't stop Trigon from stealing you, you can't stop Raven from digging into my head, but you managed to blow up part of my parents' car for _no reason at all_ without me telling you too?"

There was a fractional flinch in Devastator's features, one that might not have been perceptible even at this distance had Devastator's face been anything except his own. But as it was, it gave David notice of what Devastator was going to say.

He pre-empted it.

"It _was _me," said David, stepping forward to within inches of Devastator, staring his simulacrum straight in the eye. "Wasn't it?"

David wasn't sure, given what he was looking at, but at that instant, he could swear that he saw something break inside Devastator's gaze.

"You gave the order," he said, his tone stilted and quiet. "I blew up the axle. That's how it works."

David felt the world fading around him. He managed to retain enough lucidity to ask the only pertinent question.

"_Why_?" he asked.

There was a flicker of what might have been pain, a slight tremor, like an interruption in the feed of a hologram. But in the end, Devastator could only shake his head.

"I don't know," he whispered.

Now it was David's turn to flicker with pain, to shake with the first subtle tremors of what might be an eruption or a final, total collapse, he didn't know which. He wanted to scream and throw Devastator through a wall. He wanted to explode. But more than anything, he wanted an answer at last. Yet one look was enough to know that this time, if never before, Devastator was telling the absolute truth.

"You... don't know?" he asked, half in disbelief, half in supplication.

Devastator caught the prayer in the question, but had no answer to give. "I can't read your mind," he whispered anew, and the words sounded like an admission of failure. "I know what you did. But I can't tell why you did it."

Slowly, by inches and centimeters, David lowered his head. He closed his eyes, stepped forward, into and through Devastator, feeling the electrical tingling roll over him and disappear once more as he walked past the projection of the most powerful weapon in the universe. He did not turn back, took his steps like a shambling drunk, barely able to keep his balance as his head and balance swam through the air above him, a thousand impulses battling one another to explode out of the drained husk of his body.

From behind, he heard Devastator as if through a wall, muted and soft, with only portions of his words sinking in, as Devastator tried, in vain, to assuage him even now.

"David, you were two years old, if that," said Devastator. "You couldn't possibly have known what you were doing. You'd been bottled up in a car for hours. Maybe you were tired. Maybe you were cranky. Maybe you just wanted the car to stop. Maybe you were exploring what you could do with me and just popped the axle by accident. It wasn't your fau- "

David screamed.

It was a paltry scream, nothing wild or loud or full-throated. Not some virile scream of rage against the Gods or at the tragedies of fate. It was half-choked, wracked with pain, torn unwillingly from a throat that could simply no longer contain it. A scream of agony and anguish and frustration all rolled into one, and as he did so, he half-stepped, half-lurched forward, and slammed his fist as hard as he physically could directly into one of the glass display cases wherein the Titans' equipment and uniforms were being displayed.

David was not large, not even for his age, but his fist hit the glass case with absolutely none of the customary hesitation that any thinking person would exhibit before slamming his hand into an unyielding object. Indeed, had the case been real glass, he might well have broken it despite his size, but the cases were laminated plexiglass, bulletproof and impervious to anything he could conceivably do to them. Not that this stopped him in the least. So much force did he throw into the blow that he lost his balance and fell against the case, pounding his fist against it over and over and over again as rapidly as he could, until his knuckles split and bled and he smeared the blood all over the case. Still he continued, hitting again and again, his blows losing power as they gained in speed, until finally the carpet tore beneath the case's feet. With a loud rip, the case toppled, slamming into the one next to it and tipping it over as well like a domino. Within seconds, all three cases on the near side of the room had collapsed onto their sides, spilling their contents onto the floor. David himself was carried forward by his last strike, and fell as well, landing atop one of the cases hard. Shatterproof though the case might have been, his full weight crushed one side like an egg and left him laying half-propped up amidst shattered plexiglass and the instruments of his vanished friends.

He lay on the floor on his side, feeling like he was going to be sick, drawing and exhaling breath through his nostrils and mouth in short gasps. Devastator could have still been talking, could have vanished, he wouldn't know. Whatever he thought he had previously gone through, the trials and torments and black days of defeat or self-doubt, it was _nothing _to compare to lying on the floor of a replica of his former home, surrounded by the possessions of his dead friends, while the presence that had been ripped out of him by force calmly explained to him the circumstances whereby he had murdered his own parents.

He did not weep. He did not cry or scream anew or curse aloud. He was too far gone for any of those things. He lay there in a stupor, insensible to passage of time or presence of anyone else. It felt like a million years, though likely it was less than a minute, before something managed to pierce the veil.

It was something elemental. Something deep within. Something to hold onto in the midst of a raging tempest within his head. No sappy emotional foothold, for those had all been stripped away, not a happy thought or pleasant memory or some other Hallmark Moment to be reached for in the darkness. It was a cold, simple question, one riding in the back of his mind, one that had always ridden there, safely un-askable. It brought no warmth or compassion to him, no hope, no pleasure. It was merely the absence of gut-spilling pain, transitory though it promised to be. A question he had always wondered, but never asked, for there was nobody to ask it to, and real fear of the answer.

"_Why?"_

Devastator, standing above and in front of him, was shaken out of whatever counsel he was holding by the sheer unexpectedness of the question. "Why... what?" he asked back, gingerly.

David raised his head, slowly, and the glow of red light from his eyes drowned out any sense that could have been made from his ashen face or broken demeanor. His voice was choked with disgust and reproach, at himself, at Devastator, it was impossible to tell. But there was no mistaking his words, for he turned them over with iron deliberation, as though he were speaking aloud a question long-prepared, long-dwelt upon, never vocalized.

"Why did you pick me?"

Devastator went quiet.

"Why me?" he asked again, his voice like a burnt cinder. "Why the _hell_ would you pick me? You could have picked anyone, anyone in the world, anyone in the _universe_. Why _me_?" As though asking the question had released some pressure valve, his voice built in tone and energy, his brain so out of sorts that he repeated himself without realizing it. "You could have had anybody. You could have had _Superman_! Why me?"

"I didn't come all the way to Earth to bond with a Kryptonian," said Devastator.

"Then anybody else!" shouted David, though it came out more like a plaintive cry. "There were six _billion_ of us! You could have had anybody! Kings! Presidents! Policemen, if that's what you wanted! People who knew how to protect other people, people who _wanted_ to! Anybody you wanted across the entire world, and you pick _me_?"

"That's right," said Devastator, his voice as even and still as a pond on a windless day.

David's head shook slowly of its own accord. "_Why_?" he asked, blinking in pure incomprehension. "Why would you do that? Why not a _real_ hero? Why not _Robin_ for God's sake, he didn't have any powers! Any of them! Anyone else! If you wanted a superhero, you could have - "

"I didn't want a superhero," said Devastator.

The words died on David's lips, plunging the room into silence once again. Devastator ventured nothing further, watching the young teen on the floor with something approximating equanimity. Frozen in place, scarcely daring to breathe, David needed several moments before his brain finally drew the final, inevitable conclusion.

"No," he said. "You wanted a supervillain."

Slowly, Devastator lowered his head, eyes dropping by fractions until they finally slid shut. He said nothing.

"You weren't looking for a hero," said David, his voice flat, monotone, more a recitation than an accusation. "You wanted somebody who'd use you to do what I did. Somebody who'd spread destruction. Somebody who'd kill six hundred people just to get at the Titans, and then kill them on top of the bodies." David paused, but Devastator did not react. "You _wanted_ me to do all this, didn't you?" he asked at last. "It's what you picked me for. It's what you wanted."

Still Devastator did not reply, nor raise his head, but to David's ears, his silence spoke more than any words could have.

For three, endless seconds, David stood before the Devastator in silence, until what little fire this last accusation had conjured up had died. And in the ashes left behind, he could only shake his own head.

"Congratulations," he said hoarsely, "you got what you wanted." And then he turned and walked away.

But he had gotten no more than five paces before Devastator broke his silence.

"You're really full of shit, you know that?"

Had Devastator pulled out a gun and shot David in the back, he could scarcely have engendered a stronger reaction. David stopped as though he had collided with an invisible wall. It took him several full seconds to turn around, blinking as though he had been struck in the face, so unexpected was this remark. "What..." he stammered, "what did you just say?"

"You heard me," said Devastator darkly, raising his eyes in a scowl. "I wanted a supervillain, did I? You figure that one out by yourself?"

"Did you?" asked David, teeth clenched and fists balled.

"I've got a better question for you," said Devastator, leaning forward with a glare on his face. "Does it matter why I picked you?"

"Answer me!" snapped David

"Why?" spat Devastator back. "You already decided what the answer was!"

"I don't know what - "

"Of course not, you _guessed_ again, didn't you? That's what this all comes down to. You haven't got any answers so you _decided _what you would make them into. That you were chosen to be a murderer, right? That's what you want me to say."

"So why don't you just say it?" hissed David

"Because what matters isn't _why_ I picked you," replied Devastator. "What matters is why you _think_ I picked you."

David blinked in shock. "I don't believe this," he said. "I'm not gonna sit here and listen to a bunch of positive thinking - "

"I didn't pick you because I wanted a supervillain, David," said Devastator forcefully. "If I had, I would have picked a psychopath or a serial killer and saved myself the trouble. But it doesn't matter _why _I picked you. I'm not the one who makes the decisions about how I get used. You do. And all that matters for that is why you think I picked you."

"What are you even _talking _about?" asked David. The question sounded almost plaintive.

Devastator leaned back against the wall, crossing his arms over his chest. "I've had _thousands _of hosts," he said. "Over more years than I can count. Heroes, villains, depraved monsters, I've had all kinds. I've _looked _for all kinds. I've picked people because I knew they would become killers. And others because I knew they would save their worlds. It's the only choice I ever get to make."

"Which one was I?" asked David.

"Neither," said Devastator. "And you'd know that already if you hadn't tied yourself up in knots.

David said nothing.

Devastator stood up from the wall stepping towards David, his eyes piercing and expression stony. "I'm the Lord of Destruction," he said. "The most powerful weapon ever devised. I have no soul, no conscience, and no will. I'm a facsimile of a living being, granted semi-sentience so as to permit me to wage war against a God. I make no choices, nor will I ever make any, save for the choice of my host. Inasmuch as I've armed madmen and murderers with the tools to kill, I am guilty of terrible crimes, and inasmuch as I've armed heroes and champions with the tools to stop them, I am responsible for preventing others. Through me, billions of innocents have lost their lives, and billions more have had them saved."

"Why are you telling me all this?" asked David.

"Because I know all about evil, and good, and the things that lie between them," said Devastator. "Because I've lived long enough to know what a hero is. A hero is a closed circuit. A hero is driven. Compelled. Commanded. Maybe by their family or their people, maybe just by themselves. And if that's what I wanted this time 'round, I could have picked one. Robin, Cyborg, _any_ of your friends. But with powers, without them, a hero finds a way to do what he has to, because he doesn't have a choice. He drives himself, if nobody else will." Devastator shook his head. "Maybe that's admirable. But all I get to do is pick one person, and then sit back and watch. That's my entire existence. And for me, picking a hero is like reading a book that you already know the ending to. After the first couple thousand times, you just can't talk yourself into it anymore."

David said nothing as Devastator approached, watching the projection like he was in some sort of dream or daze.

"I used to pick only heroes," said Devastator. "I thought it ennobled me. Gave me a purpose beyond fighting Trigon. So I went looking for born champions. Reformers. Revolutionaries overthrowing the evil empire. Thinking that I was making the universe a better place used to help me through the centuries of watching my hosts do anything they wanted except what _I_ wanted them to do, or watching insensate as they failed or even succeeded and lived happily ever after. After a while it just didn't matter to me who lived or died, or who my hosts stopped or how many lives they saved. And when I finally realized that no matter how carefully I picked, I would never get a surrogate for my own will, and that living vicariously will never be the same as living, I switched tracks and went after villains. I thought if nothing else, they would surprise me."

Devastator was now barely two paces away, and he shook his head. "But they didn't," he said. "My hosts spilled more blood across the universe than even Trigon could dream of. Some of them were brought down by heroes, or by outraged victims, or ran themselves off of cliffs in their own madness. Maniacs, stone killers, mad scientists, monsters conjured up from some dark pit, conquerors with delusions of grandeur, after centuries upon centuries, they all ran together. I tried alternating, picking at random, it didn't matter. All I was doing was putting a weapon in the hands of someone who already knew what he wanted to do with it, and watching him go."

Devastator was right in front of him now, close enough that David could see the shimmer behind the eyes of the simulacrum that the semi-living weapon had manifested within, a barest hint of the staggering power that lay within, trapped and rendered impotent, circumscribed within rules woven and the fabric of the universe.

"And then one day," said Devastator. "My most recent host died. Old age. Queen of her planet. And I had to choose someone else. And I realized that I didn't want a born superhero, and I didn't want a black-hearted killer. I'd seen every permutation of those things conceivable a thousand times over. I wanted someone else."

"Who?"

"I wasn't sure at first. I searched for... decades. Silently. Longer than I'd ever spent searching before. Planet to planet, galaxy to galaxy. I didn't know what I was looking for, just that I wasn't finding it. I could have taken any one of a hundred thousand candidates, but I didn't. I knew how their stories would end already. I just couldn't convince myself that there was any point in picking them."

"And then, one day, I came across a backwater planet near the edge of a spiral galaxy, and found something I'd never seen before."

"What did you find?" asked David.

Devastator hesitated before answering, looking David over for a moment, before, of all things, he smiled.

"A catalyst," he said.

David blinked. "A... what?"

"A catalyst," repeated Devastator. "A trigger. A little spark plug in an engine the size of a planet. I found _you_, David. That's what you are. You're a lit match. You're an ignition switch. You're a pivot, a hinge, a fulcrum around which massive bodies turn." Devastator reached out a hand, laying it on David's shoulder gently, sending the warm, electrical sensation running up his arm. "And you've never let yourself realize it."

"What are you talking about?" asked David, not even noticing that his voice had reduced to a whisper.

"You think I picked you because of some... destiny? To do good, to do evil, some pre-ordained thing? It wasn't like that at all. You don't _have_ a destiny, David. No ancient prophecies, no angelic writ, you never did. Most people don't have a destiny. They live their lives by the choices they make, forced or otherwise, and try to do right by themselves, and when enough of them gather together, you average it all out and call it reality. The people who stand above that, the ones who really shape the world around them, _they_ have destinies. Raven, Robin, Trigon, all had destinies, either because of some literal prophecy, or because they just drove themselves into it. Mass murderers, paragons of justice, revolutionaries. They're _born _to be what they are, they don't know how to be anything else. They rise and stand the universe on its head, because that's what they have to do. All of them, all that I've seen, all had ordained ends, ones they only needed to reach out and grasp, even if they didn't know it themselves. All of them..." Devastator shook his head and smiled again. "... all except you."

David's tongue fell still, and he could only stare up into Devastator's eyes.

"It's like you said," said Devastator. "I exist beyond time and space. I look through the possibilities of the future, and I see what people can become. I look into their souls, their essences. I see what's trying to come out, what they can't hide, it's as clear to me as daylight is to you. But when I looked into you, all I could see were fragmentary possibilities. Hundreds, _thousands_, an infinite number. Some seemed to have nothing to do with you. Some followed logic so torturous I couldn't understand it. No matter how hard I looked, no matter what perspective I applied, I simply couldn't tell anything. Not even a trendline in some general direction, it was total chaos. A billion other threads were strangling yours in every direction, but instead of choking them off, they deflected like bullets off a steel plating, or were shredded by contact and vanished into nothing. Everywhere you went, the world just warped around you, whether you meant it to or not. You weren't just without destiny, you _shattered_ destinies. Yours, other people's, for better, for worse, there was no trend. You're a catalyst, David. You trigger change. You _are _change."

Devastator leaned in close, staring into David's eyes, speaking low but with electrical intensity.

"None of _this_ was supposed to happen," he said. "You know that. This was all supposed to be different. Robin was supposed to be alive, Raven was supposed to stop Trigon, I wasn't even supposed to be _involved_, and neither were you. Neither was Terra. Neither was the Hive. And I know you didn't mean to change any of that. You didn't even know about most of it. You didn't set out to kill Robin because you were meant to or drove yourself to, not even in Warp's time. It wasn't your _doing_ that changed things, it wasn't anyone's _doing_, not even Warp's. It was..." Devastator groped for words. "It was a cascading series of events, like ripples in a pond, pulling apart what was supposed to happen and re-assembling it differently. It was threads of possibility rubbing against one another until one of them snapped. So many, so varied, that nobody could have picked them out ahead of time.

"So you wanna know why, in some possible future, you turned into that guy out there? I can't answer you. I have no idea. You'd have to go ask _him _what happened. But thirty years from now, if none of Warp's changes had occurred, you would have become one of the most powerful supervillains in the history of the world. You destroyed the Titans _by yourself_. You did what Slade and Brother Blood and the Hive and even Trigon himself failed to do. And yet Warp changes one thing around you, one simple, little thing, and now you're sitting here, in a bunker, amidst the ruin of the world, and trying to ask me where everything went wrong, because you're afraid that you somehow assisted Warp in doing the very thing that, in another world, you made it your life's mission to accomplish."

Devastator took a deep breath. "_That_, David, is why I picked you."

Quiet descended. Devastator had nothing more to say, and David could not properly remember how. Slowly, he stepped back, catching himself against one of the couches, sliding down it until he was sitting on the floor, facing the pile of devices and debris in the center of the room from the fallen display cases. He stared at them, indeed he seemed to stare _through _them, in abject silence. What he was looking at specifically could not be discerned, not by Devastator nor anyone else who cared to look, for the red glow washed out all chance of following his gaze, but he seemed only to be staring, mutely, into empty space.

At last, Devastator broke the silence. "David," he said, voice softened now, sounding almost pained. "I... _really _never meant for any of this to happen to you. The attacks, the demons, Trigon, I didn't know all this would happen. I couldn't know. And I wish I had some way to make it right..." he trailed off for a moment before raising his eyes once again. But all things being equal? If I had the choice to do it all over again, not knowing about Trigon, not knowing about Warp? I'd pick you again in an instant. I'd pick you over every living thing on this planet, over every person I encountered in fifty years of searching. I'd pick you over Robin, over Superman, over every one of this planet's heroes. Over all their dedicated villains too. Because alone amongst all the people I've ever met, David, I had no idea what you would do, or what would happen in your wake. And I just wanted to find out."

David took no notice of Devastator, did not even seem to have heard him at all. But carefully, he leaned forward, reaching with his fingertips for a small piece of black fabric half-buried by the avalanche of equipment. He took it, tugged, and pulled it out, revealing a small, adhesive eyemask, bordered in black and covered with monofiliment so fine as to be transparent at close range, but that from any distance at all appeared as white as driven snow.

Carefully, David turned the small mask over in his hands, running it through his fingers, over and over, staring at or through it like a statue. Slowly, he lifted his head once more to Devastator, who crouched on the other side of the pile of debris, saying nothing. For one beat, one second, one moment, Devastator stared fully into the red orbs that had replaced David's eyes. Perhaps he saw something concrete. Perhaps nothing at all but threads and possibilities wandering through amorphous shadows. But whether by one means or another, one glance was all it took to send a very human chill running up Devastator's non-existent, intangible spine.

"... David?"

Slowly, the mask slipped through David's fingers, falling back to the floor beside its fellows, but rather than pick it up again, David lowered his head to the pile once more, running it over with his eyes like red searchlights seeking to illuminate some dark corner. His fingers darted through the piles of loose equipment before they settled upon a small, metal cylinder no larger than a game controller, which clicked gently in his hands as he lifted it, the delicate mechanisms within softly sliding against one another.

"David?" repeated Devastator, "what are you - "

The search was in earnest now, David's eyes flicking faster and faster over the pile of extraneous objects as he selected them one by one, and set them aside. Most were steel, or at least metal, some etched finely with the Titans' symbol of a T inscribed within a circle, others with another letter entirely. Ranging in size from a loaf of bread to a cellular phone, each object was fixed with a tiny carabiner no bigger than a keyring, carved from solid titanium, designed to be easily locked or unlocked with a snap of the fingers, yet simultaneously proof against hurricane winds or solid state explosives. Some two dozen objects did David set aside, before slowly gathering them up and standing.

"What are you doing?" asked Devastator, curtly now, as one who feared to hear the answer that he was already expecting.

"I'm going," said David quietly, without lifting his eyes.

Devastator seemed to hesitate. "Going? Going where?"

"There's someone I have to talk to," said David, as he began attaching the carabiners to his belt. He neither spared Devastator a glance nor dared look up from what he was doing, and the tremor in his hands as he attached the objects was visibly being kept to a low level by act of will alone.

"Who?" asked Devastator, his voice betraying his foreknowledge of what the answer was.

David did not answer directly. "It's like you said," he said, softly. "If I wanted to know what happened, I have to go ask..."

"David, you can't... you can't go out there."

"Why not?" he asked, not looking up.

"Every demon, spirit, and creature in Trigon's employment will be looking for you by now!" insisted Devastator.

"Maybe," said David, "but they're not gonna stop me, are they? They all want me to do this."

"That doesn't make it any less suicidal, David. Please, I _know_ Trigon. Anything he intends for you to go through is just a torturous prelude to your death. You can't leave."

The last caribiner clicked into place, and David finally looked up at Devastator, standing up straight, as his red-suited double did the same. "Stop me then," he said, and with that, he walked straight into and through Devastator and out the other side, leaving Devastator's image to flicker and swirl like disturbed smoke, before re-coalescing and turning around.

"David!" shouted Devastator, as David neared the door, "wait!"

David stopped, paused at the threshold, and turned around, saying nothing. Devastator did not wait for him to speak, but approached carefully, a serious look on his face.

"We can get you off this planet," said Devastator softly, almost conspiratorially. "Trigon will be too busy playing with whatever toys he has left here to stop you if we move now."

David blinked in what looked like incomprehension. "How?"

"The _T-ship_," said Devastator urgently. "There's access tunnels that lead to it, we saw them once in a plan Cyborg showed us. I doubt you remember, but I do. If you have to go out, I can come with you, show you how to get there, and how to fly the thing. With the T-ship you can go anywhere in the universe, Tamaran, Clementia, Naltor... I've been to a hundred million inhabited worlds. I can point you to where they are, the paradise worlds, the ones with people that would welcome you with open arms." Devastator paused, trying to gauge if the words were having any effect at all. "I've done a great deal of harm in selecting you as my host," he said. "To you, and to everyone else, but at the very least I can do this much. Let me take you to the T-ship, David. You don't have to die here."

David took a shallow, ragged breath, and slowly exhaled it, before asking a single question.

"Why do you keep calling me that?"

Devastator froze. "Calling you... what?" he managed to whisper.

"My name isn't David," said the boy at the door. "Is it?"

In that precise instant, Devastator knew that he had lost.

"No," said the weaponized embodiment of Destruction, his voice hollow and empty. "David was your father."

No reaction, no flinch or change of expression or anything else. David simply took a slightly deeper breath, and closed his eyes.

"David Foster's already dead," he said quietly, before carefully lifting his eyes once more, to look down into Devastator's. "And the only place I'm going now, is to have a talk with the person who killed him and the rest of my family."

Devastator seemed to deflate, lowering his head, shaking it slowly. "David..." he said, trailing off into nothing.

"That's all there is to do," said David, "Because otherwise, what was the point of any of it?" And with that, he turned, keyed the door controls and disappeared through the sliding doors, leaving behind an empty room.

**O-O-O**

The firelight cast deep ochre shadows on the walls of ice, illuminating translucent shapes that merged and twisted around one another with each pulse of the campfire's flames. There was very little sound in here, save for the crackling of the fire, and the soft hiss as meltwater bubbled on its periphery, neither of which were enough to cover the melodic groaning of the millions of tons of surrounding ice.

Not the place Beast Boy would have picked, had he his choice of locations to try and hole up in, but given everything recently, he counted his blessings that he had found this much.

Raven was crouched next to the fire, huddling as close to it as she dared. Every sound the surrounding ice made, every creak and pop and low, atonal moan seemed to shoot through her as though she were part of the ice as well. Her cloak wrapped around her tightly like a mummy's shroud, she shivered still, but not from cold, staring into the fire with the intensity of a madman or fanatic, as though to raise her head and look away from the light would be to acknowledge the monsters that lurked in the shadows.

Among them, thought Beast Boy with a frown, himself.

When he had turned, back on the ice floe, back with his evil twin and Terra, and found Raven missing, he had instantly assumed the worst, or rather had commenced trying to think up what the worst might be so that he could start properly assuming it. She had perhaps been summoned by the evil twins (the term would do for now), or catapulted to some other dimension, or eaten by a ravening ice beast or fallen into the crevasse without his noticing and would never be seen again. Several moments of abject panic had seen him forgetting totally about Trigon, evil twins, even about the image of Terra and the man with the fiery cane. Blasting into the air like a rocket, he had flown in random, panicked circles, trying to call for Raven even though he no longer possessed vocal chords. God only knew what he might have done had his enhanced raptor's vision not happened to notice the small footprints in the freshly fallen snow, leading away from the crevasse and off into the darkness.

The footprints had led surprisingly far given that the person leaving them was both a child and still suffering from hypothermia. But he had placed every ounce of speed into the fastest form he could devise and followed them, covering half a mile in twenty seconds before coming to a series of iceblocks, thrust up by some incalculable force, each the size of an office building. The tracks led into the broken ground around the towering blocks, wound its way around and through them, until they arrived at an unbroken wall of ice that loomed up out of the snow-choked air, light blue and shimmering and absolutely vertical, rearing up into the sky until it vanished into the lofty mists. And there, at the base of the wall, the tracks had led to a small cleft in the unbroken ice, and vanished therein.

He found her a couple dozen feet inside, where the cleft widened into a cavern under the ice, huddled in a corner, wrapped in her cloak, her eyes clenched shut against the diffuse light that wafted through the ice. Inside the ice, objects were entombed, objects of all types, from cars and vehicles to trees and bushes. Shivering erratically, from cold or fright, he could not tell, Raven had shied away at his very approach. At a loss, he had, largely to give himself something to do, turned into a giant vole and dug into the ice around them, unearthing an entire tree as well as several pieces of another, stripping the ice off of them, and building a small campfire in the middle of the cavern, elevating it above the ice below by means of a small platform of stones.

That was hours ago.

Since getting the fire started, he had withdrawn into the shadows, taking care to remain within Raven's sight, yet not so close as to present a threat. She had paid his fire no mind at first, but finally the warmth it offered had overcome whatever reticence she was operating under, and she had crept towards it carefully, and now sat huddled before it, as close as she dared. The firelight illuminated her face and hair and eyes, throwing them into relief as she stared intently into the flames. Yet for all the changes she had undergone, Beast Boy would never have mistaken the little girl before him for anyone but Raven, not even at a glance. He knew it was her, and furthermore, he knew that she wasn't staring into the fire so much as avoiding looking at anything else.

And the only other thing in the cavern was Beast Boy himself.

For over an hour, he'd been trying to think of what to say or do. Not that there was any lack of ideas, there wasn't, but everything he had thought of, he had rejected as the wrong thing to say. None of his usual fallbacks, the stale jokes or the obvious questions, the strategies he normally used to get Raven to open up, seemed appropriate here. They were designed for Raven as he had always known her, the unassailable tower of strength, power, and depth of mind. They were wedges, used to pry open the defenses of one not overly blessed with reserves of patience, to set her off her equilibrium, in the hope, vain though it might have been, that she might melt the ice walls around her just a bit, even if it was only to drench him in freezing water.

But right here, right now, the last thing he wanted to do was pry open what little defense Raven had left. And that left him with nothing.

The fire was going strong now, strong enough that he could feel its heat with some intensity, though he was still sitting back against the wall some twenty feet away. Comprised of nothing but damp wood and kindling, it nevertheless roared like a furnace, burning much hotter than it should have been able to, some new quirk of this horrible place, no doubt. Kneeling as she was on the very edge of the fire, the heat around Raven had to be positively scorching, indeed the very ice beneath her had gradually melted into a shallow basin of water that now hissed and bubbled about her waist as the nearby fire boiled it into steam. Yet though the water she knelt in was literally boiling, and the flames danced barely six inches from her face and hair, she made no effort to move away, nor was she scalded or burnt, edging ever closer to the searing flames as she gave nervous glances in his direction or those of the shadows on the wall.

An idle thought occurred to Beast Boy all of a sudden that perhaps this was not all that surprising, given that Raven, as it turned out, was a demon.

He turned the idea over in his mind once or twice. She had told him, told them all, that Trigon was her father, and since then she had referred to herself bitterly as a demon more than once. He'd never paid it much mind, she had been calling herself all manner of other terrible things most of the time as well, and whatever Trigon actually was, Beast Boy had spared little-to-no thought for his biological nature. Yet watching Raven here, barely inches removed from plunging directly into the fire, the boiling water sending steam wafting up around her, it made the matter simultaneously more real and more... practical, than he had ever considered it. Raven hadn't called herself a demon to be theatrical. She had called herself that because that's what she was. A supernatural creature of flame and hellfire, daughter of devils, a demon.

Another idle thought occurred. Maybe this was why she always wore a leotard?

"Rae?"

The word slipped out before he could corral it, Beast Boy's mouth running away with itself the instant his mind wandered elsewhere, as usual. In fairness, it was hardly the most earth-shattering thing for him to say, but given that neither of them had said a word in over an hour, it came as quite a shock, both to him and to Raven.

Raven's eyes shot up with a start, the firelight reflecting off of them like polished stones of amber or amethyst by turns. Wild and fierce was the look she gave him, as though she had forgotten that he was capable of speech, and the revelation that he was had shaken her to the core. For a second, she seemed to withdraw from the sight of him, but thought better of it after a moment, crouching back down into the cauldron of boiling water that she had been sitting in, keeping the fire between her and him.

"Who... who are you?" she asked, her voice quivering but still clear, a voice that was recognizably Raven's, but younger, softer, more hesitant. Raven's voice with the armor removed. Something he'd never heard before. Something he hadn't believed existed.

The question caught him off guard. "I... um..." he sputtered, "It's... me. Beast Boy. Remember?" He ventured a small movement forward, leaning into the firelight and gesturing towards himself. The little girl before him was so obviously Raven that he had never imagined that she might not -

Raven gasped and recoiled, scrambling up and out of the shallow basin she had been crouched in, her reaction as stark as though he had just morphed into a tiger and lunged at her with fangs and claws bared. Boiling water sloshed over the ice as she scrambled up and out, and she slipped, and fell headlong onto the ice with a wet smack.

"Raven!" exclaimed Beast Boy before he could stop himself, and he lurched forward, torn between racing to her aid and terrifying her further. But when she did not immediately scramble to her feet, the fear overcame his sense, and he morphed into a grasshopper, leaped the entire distance between himself and her in one bound, and shifted back into his human form as he landed.

Eyes unfocused, blinking, Raven lay on the ice for a moment like a boned fish, yet slowly the glaze over her eyes faded, and she began to focus on the things around her once again. Beast Boy froze as Raven's eyes fell on him once again, widening and filling with apprehension, but she did not jerk away again, and he ventured a small gesture.

"It's okay," he said, trying to sound as re-assuring as he could. He considered shifting into another form, something small and fluffy, to try and put her a bit more at ease, but discarded the thought almost immediately. Somehow, he couldn't imagine Raven, even little-girl-Raven, being that interested in fluffy animals. And besides, how re-assuring would a green rabbit really be?

"It's okay," he repeated, slowly extending his gloved hand to her. "I won't hurt you. It's me. Beast Boy. The shapeshifter. You remember me, don't you?"

Raven gave no sign, but did not shy away either, looking him over as though searching for something indicative. He smiled, trying to conjure up the grin he used whenever he was trying to convince Raven to do something that he knew she wanted to do but didn't want to admit wanting to do. The fact that that grin had never really worked was not something he was prepared to consider right now.

Raven lifted her head, propping herself up on her elbows, looking up at him looking the way some kids often looked at him, the ones that were scared half to death but trying desperately not to let it show. "I..." she said, unevenly, "I'm lost."

Her tone was not a complaint, but a simple statement of fact, and that threw him for a loop. "Oh," he said finally. "Well... that's okay. I'm lost too, I guess." He racked his brain, trying to think of what to say, and finally settled on the first thing that came to mind. "Maybe... we can help find each other?" he asked hopefully, extending his hand once more. It sounded stupid even to him, but before he could back down and venture something else, Raven's expression seemed to change from fear to... well a little less fear maybe, and she sat up slowly, watching him with something that might have just been expectation.

What she was expecting, he couldn't tell, but having gotten this far, he had to try something. "It'll be okay," he said. "I'm Beast Boy. I'm a... I'm a friend. I'm here to help you." He smiled again, this time a softer grin, trying with all his might to put her at ease. And though he had intended to leave it at that, from somewhere inside him, additional words came up unbidden.

"And... I was hoping maybe you could help me too?"

That seemed to do it. Though her look was still fearful, her movements still hesitant, Raven gently lifted one hand, and placed it in Beast Boy's. Even through the thick glove, he could feel the heat of Raven's hand, of the still-steaming water that dripped off it. Yet she continued to shiver, looking up at him as though waiting to see if he was going to tear her arm off or spirit her away to parts unknown.

He closed his hand around hers, gently, barely daring to put any pressure on her fingers, yet she did not pull away or try to run again. Once more he smiled, and opening his hand again, he reached over and gently took her by the shoulders, standing her up carefully, letting her find her footing on the slippery ice. Here, even a few extra paces away from the fire, the heat was much less, and the water still dripping off of Raven had already ceased to steam and was beginning to run cold once again.

As the wind blowing in from the narrow entrance to the cavern picked up all of a sudden, Raven shuddered more strongly, her teeth chattering loudly enough for Beast Boy to hear. Gratefully leaving aside the issue of amnesia or demonic heritages for the moment, Beast Boy glanced round for anything that he might use to dry her off, but there was nothing visible even in the ice, and her cloak, the only other item that came to mind, was as soaked as she was. Thinking of anything he could, he unfastened the cloak from around her shoulders, wrung it out as best he could, and then unfurled it. Retrieving an unused stick from the side of the room, he reached up and jammed it into a crack in the ceiling directly above the campfire, and then hung the still-damp cloak from it, letting it drip into the fire as it would.

As to Raven herself, there didn't appear to be a lot that he could do at this point. Beast Boy was no lover of cold, but in his opinion, where they were standing, the fire was uncomfortably hot. Raven's opinion appeared to differ. Dressed only in her leotard, she shivered still despite the heat, and this time he was at least somewhat confident it wasn't because of him. It was something of a relief. All things being equal, he preferred it when he was afraid of Raven.

Crouching back down on the opposite side of the fire, as close as he could stand to the roaring flames, Beast Boy watched as Raven crawled closer still to the bonfire, settling once more in the meltwater basin she had been crouched in earlier. The water began boiling furiously the instant she touched it, but she seemed to pay it no mind, though it should, by rights, have steamed her to death like a lobster. As it showed no sign of doing so, however, Beast Boy was prepared to let small miracles lie.

The cauldron was already several inches deeper, as the boiling water melted the ice around it, heating it to a boil to melt more ice in turn. She watched him carefully, water bubbling around her chest, as though expecting him to say or do something, though what it was she expected, he had no idea. He couldn't risk moving her out of the cave until her cloak had dried, if even then. For several moments, neither one of them moved or spoke, until Beast Boy could stand the silence no longer, and decided to venture a question.

"So... do you remember anything?"

Raven merely shook her head, her broad, violet eyes neither blinking nor deviating from him for an instant. She said nothing.

"You don't remember the Tower? The others? Cyborg? Starfire? Robin? David?" He said the names slowly, hoping they would jar something. "Me? Beast Boy?" He looked for any sign of recognition, but she merely shook her head again, this time with eyes shut, squeezed so tightly as to cause her whole body to quiver, as though in frustration with her own inability to recall.

"No!" he said quickly. "No, it's okay. It's all right. I just..." he trailed off, not sure what he wanted to say. "It'll be okay," he settled for at last.

Slowly, Raven opened her eyes once again, the boiling water sending steam wafting up around her face. Tears were in her eyes, though she did not cry.

"I'm not the person you came here to find," she said.

Beast Boy blinked dumbly for a second. "Of course you are," he said, smiling. "You just... don't remember is all. That's no big deal."

Raven shook her head violently. "He took it all away," she said in a brittle voice. "I wanted to keep it but I couldn't. He took everything away." She shivered, curling up on herself, tucking her knees up against her chest. "Everything."

"Raven, it's okay," said Beast Boy, who frankly didn't know what else he could say at this point. "Once we're out of - "

"It's _not okay_!" she shouted all of a sudden, tiny fists slamming down into the boiling water. "I can't help you! He took _everything_. I tried to stop him but he was too strong and now it's all gone! All of it. Everything I could do, everything I was, everyone I knew, it's _all_ gone. Forever." Her head fell, as though her shouts had taken everything she had left. "You came down here for nothing," she finally said.

"That's not true," he said. "I came down here for _you_."

He didn't really think about what he was saying. It came it of its own accord, spilling out with such ease that he didn't realize what he was saying until he said it. Raven didn't react immediately, but when he neither qualified nor retracted what he had said, she slowly raised her eyes to him.

"Why?"

The sound of the boiling water and groaning ice slowly faded. Despite a sense of hearing a hundred times more sensitive than any normal human's, all of a sudden, Beast Boy couldn't hear anything but the sound of his own heartbeat.

"Because I had to."

Raven didn't answer, didn't move, didn't even blink. They watched one another for several hour-long seconds before Beast Boy opened his mouth and simply started talking.

"I... knew somebody once," he said. "She was called Raven. I never knew her real name, but that was what she called herself. She was from someplace far, far away, but she came here by herself, because she wanted to help people. She was brave and powerful, and she fought with all sorts of monsters and criminals, super-villains, because it was the right thing to do, even though it was dangerous. She saved thousands of people, protected the city, and all without anyone ever asking her to."

Raven's stare was too direct, and Beast Boy closed his eyes, trembling as he mechanically kept going, like a hiker trudging onwards against bitter winds.

"But... even though she was such a hero, she always thought that nobody would want anything to do with her. Because she looked different than other people, and acted different, and because as long as she could remember, people had told her that she was going to do something horrible. Something worse than anything the people she fought had ever done. And so even though she didn't want to do anything that bad, and tried to stop it, she was sure that, one day, she would turn out to be the worst person in the world."

"When I met her, she said that we didn't want to have anything to do with her. Even after she joined our team and lived in our tower, she always thought that if we knew what was going to happen we'd..." he shook his head, "... we'd never speak to her again or something. So she never talked to any of us unless she had to, and she never wanted us to do anything special for her or treat her like a friend. And whenever I tried, she would tell me to go away."

That was perhaps putting it mildly, but this was not the moment to go into details.

"But even though she didn't want us to do anything with her, and tried to push us all away, she was still one of the best people I ever met. She was tough and brave, and really smart, and really, _really_ powerful... but I liked her because she was kind, and caring, and because all she wanted to do was to help her friends, even if she tried to hide it most of the time. Most of the time, she would try to make me leave her alone, but I never would, even when she got mad. But whenever I really needed it, whenever something really terrible happened, she would make sure I was okay, even if it meant doing all the things she said she hated doing."

Not the most eloquent of speeches perhaps, but that would not have been his style, after all, and Raven, or whatever it was that she wanted to call herself now, did not interrupt. He kept his eyes shut, mostly because he could feel tears welling up in them, but his voice didn't waver as he continued.

"I don't think she ever really knew what we all thought of her, or what I thought of her. But even though I knew all these heroes, my friends, my family, all the other heroes we met, Raven was the best person I ever knew. Most people... they act nice and caring when everything's going fine, and then when things get really bad, they get scared or angry or just selfish, and they turn all cold. Raven acted cold when things were fine, but when they got bad, whenever someone needed her help the most, then stopped caring what everyone else would think, and let her real self come out. And it's not like she became someone else or turned into a helpless flower or anything. She was still strong and brave and smart and everything, but... she would make everything feel better, just by being there."

He heard soft movement, and when he opened his eyes, Raven had lowered her head again, shutting her eyes as the slowly-deepening water continued to boil furiously around her. For a moment, he wondered if she had fallen asleep or lost interest, but when he did not continue, she raised her eyes sharply, and he saw they were filled with tears, which ran down her face and dripped into the cauldron around her.

"But... something bad _did_ happen, didn't it?" she asked.

"Yeah," he said. "It did. Even though she tried to stop it. Even though we all did. It still happened just the way she had been told. And when it happened, she disappeared. They said she was dead, or if not dead, then gone somewhere where I'd never find her again. But I came to find her anyway."

Raven sighed sadly, sniffing and trying vainly to wipe the tears from her face. "She's not here," she said.

"Yes she is," said Beast Boy. "I can tell. And I know you don't think so, and that's okay. And I know that Trigon or whoever took everything away from you, and that's okay too. That's not why I came. I didn't want your help because you could fight Trigon or fix Robin or turn everything back the way it was. I mean if you could, then that's great, but that's not why I came. I was just hoping maybe you could help _me_."

"I can't," she said softly.

Beast Boy shook his head. "You already did," he explained. "I told you before, Raven would always make me feel better, just by being there, remember?"

Carefully, Beast Boy stood up, moving around the campfire slowly, and crouching down as near as he could to Raven, at the very edge of the bubbling pool. She watched him like a hawk, not with trepidation but something else, the deepening water now beginning to splash over her shoulders.

"Raven always was afraid that she would turn into a portal" he said, haltingly, his tongue stumbling as he tried to find the words to say what he meant, "or something else, like a weapon or a tool that her father would use to do something terrible. And I guess... I guess that happened. But I don't want a tool or a portal or a weapon or something else that Raven could have _done_. I just want Raven back. I want _you_ back. And I don't care if it doesn't mean anything. I just..." he lost his place, fumbled about with his mind, and seized on the first thing that came to mind. "I don't need Raven to do anything for me. I just... need her back."

Silence fell, not long but deep, as Raven looked up at Beast Boy from her bubbling pit. He said nothing, though a thousand things were competing with one another to explode from his head, all refused access to his tongue by irrevocable edict of his conscious mind. Raven stared silently at him, her violet eyes burning holes through his head. A second passed, then another, then a third, each one weighty like the passing of decades. And then, after an eternity that lasted only four or five seconds, Raven simply melted.

All at once, the tears that had been leaking from the sides of her eyes began to run in a flood, and she squeezed her eyes shut in a vain attempt to stem them. She fell forward against the side of the pit, catching it with both arms, and her small body shook violently as uncontrollable sobs tore their way out. Acting without thought, he reached down to help her, but she did not take his hand, instead scrambling awkwardly out of the cauldron of boiling water up onto the ice next to it. With difficulty she stood, shaking this time not in cold or fear but in nervous breakdown. And as the last invisible defenses she had shattered into a million pieces, Raven fell forward, and collapsed into Beast Boy's arms.

It _hurt_.

There was nothing spiritual or mental about the pain. Raven was covered in boiling water, and merely touching her, even through fireproof gloves or a mylar uniform, was like grasping a hot iron, sending spikes of searing pain up his nerves to his addled brain. Yet if the lightest touch was agony, the immense, tight embrace that he threw around her, clutching Raven to him like a part of himself that had been amputated and then discovered again, somehow that felt like incarnated joy. She might have lit him on fire and burned him to ash for all he cared, he wanted nothing save this, and this more than anything he had ever desired in life.

How long they stood there, Raven held tightly against Beast Boy, neither one could have determined. Long enough that the fire burned out and the cauldron of water chilled and refroze, long enough that Raven's skin and clothing slowly cooled until the pain of embracing her faded away. She cried at first, cried like the child she was now, unreservedly, unashamedly, with none of the futile attempts to stem the tears and reforge her mask of stoicism that she customarily used. No matter how tightly he squeezed her, she clung to him tighter still, crying until the ice beneath them was pockmarked with frozen tears, knotting her fingers into his uniform and holding onto him like a drowning swimmer clinging to a life preserver. Tighter and tighter he held her, until finally he shifted forms into that of a Burmese Python, and gathering her in his coils, he embraced Raven as tightly as he dared, until only the fear that she might suffocate bade him stop.

To judge from her reaction, it was still not enough.

Yet even Raven's tears abated at last, and the sobs subsided slowly. Bit by bit, her grip relaxed, though his did not, until finally he dared to open his eyes, and found her laying against him, her eyes shut, her face streaked with red, holding onto him even in what he could have taken to be unconsciousness or sleep, though he knew it was neither. And though it probably should have been no surprise at all, given that she was currently wrapped up tightly by a two hundred pound constrictor snake, for the first time since Beast Boy had found her, Raven was not shivering.

They might have stayed like this forever, Beast Boy actually considered it and Raven seemed as eager to release him as she was to race outside and leap back into the chasm they had left, but eventually, Beast Boy reluctantly shifted back to his human form, doing so slowly enough to avoid dropping Raven suddenly. Having done so, he stood up, carrying her in both arms, and held her awkwardly with one as he reached up and retrieved her cloak from where he had hung it. She was more or less dried already, he wrapped her tightly in it regardless, fastening it to her shoulder clasps.

"There," he said with a smile, setting her down on her feet and crouching down to look her in the eye. "All set."

And that's when something impaled him.

There was no pain, just a sudden, tremendous shock, and the sound of ripping fabric, and he looked down, and saw a long, white, helixical horn sticking out of his stomach. It gleamed, white against the ghostly light, like a jewel or carving of ivory, and somehow he had plenty of time to look it over, to admire the gentle curve of the spiral along its surface, to turn over what it was, a walrus tusk perhaps, or a narwhal horn, before it withdrew as suddenly as it had appeared, and all his strength deserted him at once, and he fell.

Raven jumped back as Beast Boy fell forward, face first onto the ice, her eyes wide with as much shock, if not more, than Beast Boy had had. Stepping back, wrapping her cloak around herself half-consciously, she raised her eyes and gasped as her breath was choked off by her constricting throat.

Behind Beast Boy, stood Beast Boy.

The other Beast Boy grey, grey and white all over with eyes of blood red and a grin that could have sent far greater nerves than Raven's fleeing into the night. Lightly he moved, lithe and quiet, with all the assurance of balance of a cat, stepping over Beast Boy's fallen form, and kicking aside his weak attempt to grab at the double's foot. He paid Beast Boy no further mind, ignoring the slowly spreading puddle of dark red blood that began to emerge from beneath the fallen changeling, as he closed in on Raven, who had backed into a corner of the ice cave.

"N... no..." said Beast Boy weakly. It was only the proximity that let anyone hear him at all.

The double did not turn back, only grinned at Raven, revealing razor sharp fangs.

"Well..." said the double to Raven, his form already rippling, "whadaya say we find out what you taste like?"

**O-O-O**

'_Ultima Ratio Regum._'

The silver handle of the cane was hooked under Terra's cheek as she lay flat on her stomach on the ground. It felt warm to the touch, but not hot, the flames that softly emanated from it refusing to burn her skin. From where she lay, she could see the words engraved on the handle in flowery cursive font, wrapped around it like ivy.

"I have to say, Terra," came the voice from above. "This isn't quite what I expected."

Deep beneath the asphalt, she felt the earth waiting, quivering in anticipation of her commands, and with a thought, she thrust it upwards, letting a geyser of loose dirt erupt from the ground, carrying chunks of bedrock the size of motorcycles. The vaulting hail of stone and earth threw her up into the air, but she reformed the dirt into a slide of sorts, breaking her fall and depositing her back on her feet. But no sooner had it done so, than half a dozen rocks exploded in and around the slide, and blew her back onto the ground, as the remaining dirt flew high up into the air, raining down like a soft hail.

Coughing, wafting the dust out of her face with a wave of her hand, Terra clawed her way back to her feet and turned towards where she knew her opponent had to be. He was standing at ease, amidst the falling bits of debris, one hand resting on the handle of his fiery cane, the vague hints of a smile appearing below his mirrored, expressionless sunglasses. Rocks and clods of earth fell all around him, yet any that threatened to land on or near him popped out of existence in a puff of dust some dozen yards overhead, as if he were surrounded by some invisible field of protection. The falling debris continued to pop and burst even as he slowly began to approach.

Searching for an advantage, Terra fell back at the same pace. Yet rather than attack directly, Devastator simply smiled and hefted the cane, turning the carved handle over in his gloved fingers, running them over the words she had seen before.

"It's Latin," he said, without being prompted. "It means 'The Last Argument of Kings'. Louis the Fourteenth used to have it engraved on all of the cannons in his army, as a reminder."

"A reminder of what?" asked Terra, still retreating slowly down the broken street.

"A reminder of the final recourse to which Kings can appeal, should they not get what they want. The ultimate trump card to every other form of compulsion, legal, moral, or spiritual. In the end, if all other arguments fail, kings can resort to naked, violent force, to compel their wishes."

"So what, you're some kind of king?" asked Terra, trying to sound more confident than she was.

Devastator only laughed. "No," he said with a flourish of the cane. "I'm not a king." He stepped towards her and lifted the cane like a wizard's wand, aiming down it towards the yellow-shrouded teenager. "I'm a cannon."

The entire street exploded.

Like a tidal wave of raw violence, a section of the street from sidewalk to sidewalk simply detonated, hurling burnt-out cars into the air like matchsticks and sending the remains of streetlights and telephone poles careening away like disintegrating sculptures of sand. Instantly, all view of Devastator was lost behind a wall of black smoke and fine debris, which hung in the air for moments before some invisible force directed it towards Terra. Section after section exploded, hurling buried wires and pipes into the air, a wave front of raw devastation and force that scoured the very asphalt off the ground moments before the bedrock it covered joined the explosions.

Terra did the only thing she could. Crouching down, she called to the earth around her, and pulled it inwards, packing it around herself as tightly as her geokinesis would permit, forming a sphere around her of packed earth and rock denser than granite, stronger than face-hardened steel. The blast washed over her like a tidal wave, clawing at the shield of stone, cracking it like a walnut, but she managed, barely, to hold it together for the second or two it took to subside.

As soon as the thunder and shocks dissipated, she hurled out her arms and the shield exploded into a thousand pieces, flung in every direction like bullets. Some were, of necessity, hurled back at the agent of these explosions, but she neither assumed they would score, nor expected them to. Without even pausing to gauge the damage, she reached down and pulled a three ton rock out of the ground the size of a moving van. Normally she would have let it float for a moment, taken a half-second to refocus her will, but she knew now from experience what a disaster that instant's hesitation could be. In one, fell swoop, she threw the rock at Devastator, tearing it into three pieces as it flew and letting them corkscrew towards him, in the hopes that he would not have time to destroy or deflect all three.

But he did. He did without even breaking stride, raising his cane and blowing all three rocks to pieces the size of marbles that bounced and scattered down the ruins of the street. Without missing a pace, he turned his cane to his side and blew a manhole cover into the air, sending it flipping end over end like an outsized coin, moments before sweeping his hand forward, causing a series of perfectly metered explosions to hurl the cover straight at Terra like a spinning saw blade. Acting on pure instinct, Terra dove to the ground, ducking beneath the flying cover, but it did her no good. The entire thing exploded like a bomb some ten feet away from her, sending her flying down the street and into the side of a parked car hard enough to stave it in.

"Such a waste."

Her head spinning, her ears ringing with the collision, Terra managed somehow to grab onto the side of the car she had been thrown against, and haul herself to her feet. She fought for breath, letting the shattered glass from the car's window roll off of her, blinking the blood out of her eyes, before half-turning back to Devastator, who stood two dozen paces away, shaking his head.

"I saw your campaign against the Titans," he said. "Warp showed me Slade's footage. It was _textbook_ perfect. Every element, planning, logistics, research, tactics, everything was perfect. You made my efforts against them look like a child's temper tantrum, and you did it all when you were what, fifteen?" He scoffed. "Slade can pretend all he likes, but I know that wasn't his plan. I _knew_ Slade. I know what the overcomplicated disasters he calls plans look like. That plan was yours, wasn't it?"

"That's right," said Terra, spitting blood onto the ground, trying to think of options.

Devastator shook his head. "When I think of what you could have been..." he said. "You could have been a master. A _grand_master. Bigger than Slade, bigger than _me_. But you _pissed_ it all away. In my time, in your own, you _threw _it aside, either out of fear, which at least I can understand, or now, out of this quixotic pursuit of..." he threw his hands up violently, "of I don't even know what! Forgiveness? Redemption? What exactly are you looking for here? Why would you even _consider_ standing and fighting someone you don't stand a _chance _of beating?"

"You talk too much," spat Terra, trying to force her balance to recover.

"And you _think _too little," retorted Devastator instantly. "I prefer _my _vice."

"And how much thinking were you doing when you decided to work for Trigon?" demanded Terra.

"A shade more than you did when you decided to work _against _him!" blasted back Devastator. "What was your master plan, exactly? Thaw out David and hope for the best? Or did you even take the time between about-face turns to conceive of one? If you had only killed David back when you had the chance, back when Cinderblock near beat him to death. If you hadn't _hesitated_ instead of finishing the damn job that time in the park, then _none_ of this would have happened, and _you know it_! It's a bit late now to turn around and claim that you didn't want him to win all along, when you weren't willing to do what was necessary to see it stopped back when it might have mattered!"

Terra tried to reply, but the words dissolved on her tongue like sugar cubes. Devastator spat, actually spat on the ground next to him in something that looked like disgust, and began to approach.

"You haven't got the first idea what you're doing here," he said contemptuously, swishing his cane through the smoky air as though trying to strip leaves off an invisible hedge. "Just some half-assed sense of expiation and guilt. You don't care about David. You don't care about the Titans. And while you might care that Trigon has conquered the world, you certainly didn't lift a finger to stop it. So don't sit there and pretend to me that this is some noble stand against the darkness. Because, young lady, this, right here, is nothing but euthanasia."

With an angry cry, Terra spun around, hurling her fist at Devastator and commanding the rocks around her subconsciously to follow her command. A stone the size of a car engine shot at Devastator's head at her command with speed so blinding that she was unable to see it herself. So fast, so spur-of-the-moment was the shot, that even Devastator could not deflect it in time. His instincts alone saved him from being struck dead on the spot, as he lunged to one side, and the rock flew by, merely grazing the side of his face, leaving a small scratch behind on his left cheek.

Surprised by her own initiative, Terra did not have the wherewithal to follow up, and Devastator stood back up straight, for once silenced. He brought his free hand to his face, running his fingers along the scratch she had given him, feeling the blood and bringing it around to his eyes. It was several seconds before he looked back up at Terra, his expression completely changed. Of all things, he seemed almost amused.

"Well," he said, "touched a nerve, did I?"

Terra let out a shout, and brought her hand around once more, commanding another rock to do as the first had, but this time, Devastator was ready for it, and swung his cane and he blotted the stone out of the air with almost contemptuous ease, before lifting the cane to the heavens. Terra had not a moment to react before the ground beneath her feet exploded like a volcano, hurling her and the car next to her into the air. The car wound up smashing into the roof of a nearby building, collapsing through it into the interior. Terra fetched up on the pavement some thirty feet behind where she had started, laying prone and motionless like a boned fish.

Slowly, Devastator began to walk towards her.

"Tell me," he asked lightly as he approached, "do you know happened to _you_ in Warp's little alternate future?" Terra, laying flat on her back, could barely convince her lungs to work, much less talk. She lifted her head gingerly, watching as Devastator approached, slowly but inexorably. She said nothing, she couldn't say anything, but he seemed to take her silence for an answer in and of itself.

"I have no idea," said Devastator with a smile. "Nobody does."

Coughing, tasting blood on her tongue and lips, Terra struggled to get back up once again, but her limbs refused to obey her, and she could only watch as Devastator closed in.

"I was hired once, to try and find you. A research firm wanted your DNA, no doubt for some deranged plan to take over the world" He shrugged. "Their reasons didn't interest me. I searched for the better part of two years. Followed every lead I could find. There wasn't so much a trail as... dots to be connected. Incidents and appearances, verified or speculative, all over the world. Landslides, earthquakes, the occasional pitched battle with someone. You know the sort well enough, I imagine."

Weakly, Terra raised her hand, conjuring a rock up from the ground and lobbing it at Devastator, but it had neither force nor accuracy, and Devastator deflected it not with an explosion, but with his cane itself, knocking it lightly aside like a tennis player as he continued forward.

"I never found a living trace," he said, smiling. "The trail was too cold, and nothing had been seen in years. After two years of searching, I finally had to admit defeat. Some of the researchers speculated that you had somehow found a way to finally control your abilities, and settled down somewhere quiet, but... I think we both know that's highly unlikely, isn't it?"

He was right in front of her now, standing above her and looking down, his cane held in both hands, red flames licking at his fingers as he inspected her the way a teacher might have done a particularly disappointing student.

"My theory," said Devastator, turning the cane over in his hands, "is much simpler. I believe that at some point... you simply died. An accident, an unremarked battle, perhaps a disease, who knows?" His hand slid up to the cane's handle. "Whatever the cause, you clearly... just died. Alone. Friendless. And forgotten."

He twisted the handle and pulled, drawing the sword out from within the cane. In one swift stroke, he swept the thin tip of the blade down and planted it on Terra's throat, directly under her chin, forcing her to lift her head, to look him in the eye. He stared down at her, at the fear in her eyes, and smirked.

"I guess some things _don't_ change," said Devastator.

Without conscious command, Terra closed her eyes, and waited for the sharp prick that would augur the end.

But it never came. The light pressure of the swordpoint remained as constant as ever, and after a second, she re-opened her eyes. Devastator still stood above her, the sword held as evenly as a surgeon's scalpel. His blind eyes, peeking over his sunglasses, were as blank as billiard balls, yet she could see them moving, darting from side to side as though in quest of something. Slowly, he lifted his head, turning it slowly as he furrowed his brow, the fingers of his free hand working slowly as he seemed to search for something. And then all of a sudden, as quick as lightning, Devastator pulled his sword back, and swung it around as fast as possible to his left, the razor-sharp ribbon of steel making a sharp 'whooshing' sound as it cut through the air.

An instant later, there was an explosion in mid-air.

The explosion seemed to emerge out of nothingness. Terra's eyes could catch nothing beyond an instant's glimpse of something moving so fast as to be a blur before the fireball blossomed out of nowhere. It was a paltry explosion by the standards of what had come before, but before it had even ended Terra saw something drop out of the air near its epicenter. A small cord, made of spooled steel fibre, which terminated abruptly, whatever it had been attached to having just been peremptorily detonated. The cord landed limply on the ground, and Terra's eyes automatically followed it, running along the shattered street, up the broken curb, and finally to -

"What the - "

At the edge of the street stood a small figure dressed all in grey. Skin, clothing, hair, even the belt around his waist was some shade of ashen grey, save only for his eyes, which glowered like smouldering coals. He stood at the side of the street, in front of a gutted and ruined building, one arm raised towards Devastator. In his hand was held not a proper weapon but a grappling gun, over-sized and attached via spool to the end of the cord.

For several long seconds, neither the grey figure, nor the man in the street moved a muscle, staring at one another with eyes either milk-white or cherry-red, that revealed nothing of the thoughts of their bearers. Yet in expression they could not be different. Devastator stood in open surprise, mouth slightly agape, the sword in his hand held limply at his side, as though he were looking at something that his brain was unable to properly process. He seemed to have forgotten that Terra was there at all. His counterpart on the other hand might as well have been a statue, staring unblinkingly at Devastator with the gun extended rigidly, though with the grappling hook destroyed, and the cord laying on the ground, there was nothing further he could do with it.

It was Devastator who finally found the wherewithal to speak.

"What in God's name are _you_ doing here?" he asked, and his voice was as surprised as his expression.

David did not speak immediately. Slowly, he lowered the grappling gun, letting it fall from his hand and clatter to the ground. When he finally replied, he did not answer the question.

"Leave her alone," he said.

Devastator's puzzlement, if anything, seemed to increase. "Why?" he asked, but without swagger. It might well have been Terra's imagination, but for the first time tonight, he looked like someone not in control of the situation, as though David's re-appearance had broken some unwritten code somewhere. "She tried to kill you," he said, "both of us. Why should I leave her alone?"

"Because I said so," said David, and Terra recognized the tone. It was the same one he had used on that night in the catacombs beneath the library, when he had refused to go with her to meet Slade. It wasn't bombastic, but it was the tone of someone whose mind was absolutely made up.

Devastator did not seem impressed. "You tried to kill her yourself once," he said.

"And now I'm telling you to leave her alone," said David without missing a beat or raising his voice a single decibel. "Or I'll kill you right where you're standing."

Slowly, an incredulous smile began to spread across Devastator's face. "Really?" he asked, not sounding in intimidated in the least. "And how, pray tell, will you do that?"

David didn't say a word. Instead, in one, single motion, he reached to his side and pulled a small object off of his belt, which snapped open in his hand into a razor-sharp blade shaped like a crescent. Without a moment's hesitation, without even changing expression, he reared back, stepped forward, and threw it as hard as he could at Devastator's head.

The result probably not the effect he was hoping for.

Devastator watched impassively as the birdarang bounced a couple of times before rolling to a halt some six feet away from him. He smiled again, this time in the manner of an adult amused by the antics of a child, and casually stepped forward, stooped, and picked up the titanium throwing knife, turning it over in his free hand before looking back up at David.

"You know," he said, as casually as if he were discussing the weather, "I'm told there's a trick to using these."

David reached for another birdarang.

There was a series of loud 'pops', and David was blown back off his feet onto the ground, as every one of the birdarangs around his waist burst into slivers of metal. The explosions were tiny, no flames, no flashes, barely enough to break the birdarangs apart, but it left David laying flat on his back, cradling his hand.

"What exactly did you think you were going to accomplish by coming back here?" asked Devastator, walking towards David carefully, his flaming sword held casually at his side. "Kill me? Save her?" he asked, sweeping the sword back towards Terra. "What's she to you?"

"She tried to help me," said David, getting back to his feet.

"She tried to _murder_ you," replied the older man. "You and all your so-called friends."

"So did you," spat David back venomously.

Devastator stopped, his expression changing to one of smugness. "And?" he asked. "At least I never pretended otherwise."

"This isn't about her," said David. "It's about you." He paused, just for a split second, before correcting himself. "It's about _us_."

"Really?" asked Devastator. "And what about _us _do you wish to discuss, David?"

David did not hesitate. "You killed them."

"I've killed a lot of people," replied Devastator. "Who are you talking about."

"You _know_ who I'm talking about!"

Devastator smiled. "Yes, I suppose I do. Why? Do you have a problem with that?"

"Yes," said David.

"So what do you purpose to do about it?"

David's red eyes were as level as he replied with a voice made of ice. "I'm gonna wipe you all over this street."

Devastator was not intimidated. He shook his head as if in amazement. "With what?" he asked. "A handful of trinkets you don't even know how to use? Match sticks and stones against Devastator? I must have hit you harder than I thought. What exactly do you - "

"_Shut! Up!"_ shouted David, kicking aside a piece of rubble for emphasis. "Close your mouth and _stop talking_! I don't want to hear any more of your bullshit!"

"I'm not here to do what _you _want," scoffed Devastator. "I don't dance to your tune."

"No, you dance to Trigon's, or to whoever put you up to killing them in the first place."

"Put me _up _to it?" retorted Devastator, and now his voice was angry too. "Your '_friends'_ put me up to it, every day of their lives!"

"That's a lie! They wouldn't - "

"Don't tell me about things I know better than you, _boy!"_ shouted Devastator. You have no idea what they would and wouldn't do!"

"I _lived _with them!" yelled David.

"For a _year_," retorted Devastator. "I've lived in their shadows for over twenty. Ducking for cover, hiding from every bird call, spending a quarter of my life waiting for some damn bone to knit back together because they thought it would be funny to listen to the sounds it made when it broke. You think you're the only one shocked to find out what his alter ego's been up to while he was away?"

"They took me in!" snapped David, teeth clenched, eyes wet with tears that he refused to allow out. "They gave me everything! Everything I have! And you killed them like animals!"

"They _were_ animals" said Devastator, his voice pitiless and cold, yet brimming with rage. "And I killed them because they needed to die every day they drew breath. I killed them for what they did to me, and to every other person who crossed their path!"

Devastator's voice became louder and louder, the flames at his hand burning higher with every breathless word. "Sanctimonious, self-righteous hypocrites who would stand by and let six million people die at their own pace rather than dirty their hands by acting to stop it. And they had the temerity to turn around and accuse _me_ of malfeasance because I saw fit to use what was given to me in a way they didn't _approve of_! To come after me all across the planet, to intercede on behalf of the _scum_ I was burning off the face of the Earth, to stand up and judge me because they were so much holier than I was!"

"You were murdering people!" shouted David

"I was murdering people who _needed murdering_!" thundered Devastator. "I was doing what they wouldn't dare to face, because they couldn't stomach it. I was the one who refused to look away when a job got dirty or when the hard calls needed to be made, and they turned on me for it like _vultures_! And you stand there and defend them, _why_? What did they ever do for you, except let you wear one of their ridiculous outfits and chase after shoplifters alongside them? All your protestations of self-reliance, and the instant they give you a roof and a bowl of soup, you turn into their little lickspittle."

David's burning eyes narrowed. "They were my friends," he said, his voice choked and bitter. "I doubt you understand what that even means."

"I understand it well enough," said Devastator. "They taught you to think like they do, share the same bias, the same hypocrisy. Until you'd believe them over your own self."

"I don't believe _anything _anymore," said David quietly, though with no less emotion for the lack of volume. "But I know them. And I know you."

Devastator frowned. "Oh you _know _me, do you?"

"Yes," said David without a trace of doubt or hesitation. "You're what I always knew was going to happen." He stared at his older counterpart with an unwavering gaze so direct, that even the unflappable Devastator seemed to flinch. "You're me without brakes. Without anyone to stop you. You're what I always knew that I was going to become. All the years I knew I had these powers, you're the reason I was afraid of them."

"You were afraid of them because you didn't have the spine to act," snarled Devastator.

"I was afraid of them because I knew what I would use them for if nobody stopped me," responded David. "I was afraid of them, because I was afraid of you. That's why I never used them. That's why I never told anyone about them. Because I was afraid that I would turn into you."

"You were afraid of your own shadow," said Devastator. "You became me in sound mind, once you finally stopped this childish obsession with an absolutist morality and predestined stock roles. Not everything is a matter of black and white."

"Murdering the Titans," said David, "_was_."

"Then I'll ask you again, _boy_, what do you purpose to do about it?"

There was only a fractional hesitation, but a moment later, David reached behind himself, and from his back pocket, drew a small, metal cylinder, the size of a telephone receiver. He brought it around to his front, holding it in his right hand, and then, still staring straight into Devastator's lifeless eyes, he pressed an invisible button somewhere on its surface. There was a series of soft clicks, the sound of oiled metal sliding over metal, and then all of a sudden the cylinder telescoped outwards into a four-foot steel pole, featureless and colorless, save for an etched monogram on either end, an elaborate "R", the meaning of which needed no explanation.

There was, perhaps, a certain mindset whereby David's action could have been seen as laughable, even hilarious, for a staff made of stainless steel, in the hands of someone who had no idea how to make proper use of it, was not precisely the weapon calculated to offer the greatest threat to the wielder of Devastator. Yet Devastator watched as David drew the staff, saying nothing, and only when it was fully extended did he lift his eyes to meet his younger counterpart's.

"Do you even know how to use that?" he asked.

David didn't hesitate or flinch. "Not a clue," he said.

"And what's to stop me from snapping it like a twig, or turning it into a pipe bomb?"

"Nothing at all."

"So then let me get this straight," said Devastator. "Because your choices led directly to the annihilation of Earth and the reign of Trigon, you're going to stand there, cognizant of the fact that I have the most powerful weapon in human history at my absolute disposal, and, with a metal stick you don't even know how to use, attempt to beat me senseless for the crime of having killed people you never met that happen to share the same names as your so-called friends?"

David didn't even have the courtesy to look embarrassed. "That's right," he said.

Several seconds passed in silence.

"You know, I think I _did_ hit you harder than I thought," said Devastator, but his voice was stilled, and his heart wasn't in it. Indeed of all the things thrown at him, by Terra, or David or anyone else so far, this last confirmation seemed to have struck the hardest. His sword hung limp at his side, as he stared at David not in disgust, not in amusement, not in the terse, tried patience of an adult addressing a child, but in what looked like total bafflement, as though for the first time, he was witnessing something truly outside his understanding.

"You did," said David, and he took a step towards Devastator, to no reaction from the other. "But that's not why I'm here." Of all things, David smiled, bitter though it was. "Do you want to know why?"

"Enlighten me," said Devastator, mirthlessly.

David drew a small, round object off his belt with his free hand and held it out towards Devastator. Terra recognized it instantly as one of the Titans' communicators.

"Look inside this," he said. "And you'll see,"

Devastator's puzzlement deepened. "See what?"

"The circuitry," said David. "What's it made out of?"

Devastator fell quiet for a moment, before his eyes darted to the communicator with a grumble for effect. It took but a moment for him to find the answer, and when he did, his eyes slowly moved back to David's. "Gold," he said.

David's face remained impassive. "Do you even know what that is?" he asked.

"An all but useless, hyper-conductive metal that people chase after because it's rare and shiny," said Devastator, now with a pronounced growl to his voice. "What's your point?"

"My point," said David, "is that you don't have any."

Devastator scoffed. "I'm not a teenaged girl, David. Gold isn't exactly my highest priority. And besides, I will have some once I take that off your dead body."

"No," said David, utterly serious. "You won't. And you never will. You threw it all away, burned it out of yourself, because you couldn't find any use for it, because it couldn't hold an edge or stop a bullet or do something practical for you, could it? So you don't have any, and you think that makes you tough or pragmatic or whatever. So now all you are is ice and smoke, plated over with a sheet of iron so that no-one will see just what you're actually made of."

Devastator's face slowly lost its smugness, its self-assured superiority, and his lifeless eyes ceased to roll as he stared at David like he was watching something with which he was wholly unfamiliar. His mouth worked several times before he could coax the words to life.

"Is that all you have for me?" he asked, but his voice was hollow and stilled, and carried none of the self-assurance of just minutes before. "Petty symbolism?"

"That's what we are," said David, raising his arms and sweeping them around the area. "That's _all _we are." He gestured to himself. "The color fade, the eyes, what do you think this is?"

"Trigon's idea of a theatrical joke," replied Devastator.

"Maybe," said David. "But he's not wrong. Not this time. We're the same person, but I'm not the real one, am I? I'm the deviation. I'm the one who went off the rails." He pointed the staff at Devastator. "You said it yourself. You're me, the way I was supposed to be. You're the original. I'm the alternate."

Another step closer, and another, until David was standing within three or four feet of Devastator, and Devastator had only to reach out with his sword, to strike David's head off. And yet Devastator did not so much as lift his arm, and David did not even glance at the sword burning quietly at Devastator's side, his red eyes still locked on Devastator's empty white ones.

"You wanted to know why?" asked David. "Why I turned my back on your path, why I decided to trust them instead, even though I knew what I was supposed to be, even though I knew how it would end?" He held the communicator up to Devastator's face. "Because of this. Because they gave me this."

"A communicator?"

"A communicator," said David, perfectly straight, "and everything _inside_ of it. _That's_ what they gave me. And they didn't have to. There were good, _solid_ reasons why they shouldn't have done that. In fact, if they hadn't done it, then none of this would have happened. And they knew that. And so do I. But they gave it to me anyway. For a long time I couldn't figure out why, and now I know that it just doesn't matter."

All of the ambient noise, for Terra, began to fade into nothingness, and she felt her breath catch as she caught the tone in David's voice. The golden aura around her hands faded as she watched the two David's staring at one another, one preternaturally calm, the other looking much as she must have. David did not glance in her direction, did not seem to notice overtly that she was there, yet to her ears, it was as though he was speaking directly at her.

"I'm not here to _punish _you," said David, "or get revenge. I'm not gonna fight you _for_ them, because I can't, and you know it. But I'm here, we're _all_ here, because they gave me something I didn't have, and you never found." David reached forward, and placed the communicator in Devastator's free hand, before drawing his own hand back. "I'm your evil twin," said David, as Devastator slowly lifted the communicator, staring down at it as he might a magical talisman, his expression unreadable. "I'm not supposed to exist. But I _do _exist. And I'm here because, if this is really the end, then I won't let the last piece of me alive on this planet, be someone made of nothing except ice, and iron..." he stepped back from Devastator, and only then did he seem to catch Terra's gaze, if only for an instant, "and smoke."

Very slowly, the man called Devastator lifted his head, his gaze passing from the communicator to the younger version of himself in front of him. His face was rigid and mask-like, his movement precise and carefully controlled, as he lowered his arm to one side. He locked his eyes on David, his fingers gripping the hilt of his sword, and the ridged surface of the communicator.

"You've got me all wrong, David," said Devastator, his voice a flat, hoarse tone that seemed to tremble with the effort he required to keep it still. "There's no smoke here. No iron either. I did away with them a long, _long_ time ago. All I've got for you is ice." He stepped forward, leaning in towards David, his voice beginning to tremble as it shrank to a harsh whisper.

"Ice," he repeated, "and _fire_."

The ground exploded beneath David's feet, a blast more shocking for the silence that had preceded it, hurling David up and away in a shower of asphalt and gravel. He landed twenty feet down the street, sliding to a stop against the curb, stunned and coughing, the metal staff still clutched in one hand.

Devastator walked towards him with deliberation and poise, neither speeding his step nor lifting his arms, yet there was something wholly different about him, an intangible, ineffable thing, found in his bearing and expression and the mechanical way in which he moved, as if each motion had to be precisely controlled for him to avoid flying apart.

"You want to talk about my shortcomings?" he asked, his voice a deep snark. "Tear me apart and see what makes me tick? It's late in the game to get introspective, David." His teeth clenched, and he hissed the words out like bad-tasting liquids. "Very. Late. Indeed."

David struggled to his feet, before swinging around with the staff in hand, aiming at the side of Devastator's head. With a single slash, one that he managed to make look contemptuous, Devastator blocked the blow, before lashing out and clubbing David in the face with the hilt of his sword, staggering him and sending him stumbling back against a car.

"Maybe you're right," said Devastator. "Maybe _you_ were created to torture me. Maybe this is all just an elaborate put on to get through to the man who dared to wield what Trigon thought was rightly his. Have you considered that? That your bout of enlightenment was nothing more than the afterthought of a demon bent on tormenting me for some perceived slight? Hrm?" Louder and louder got Devastator's voice, as he paced back and forth like a caged animal. "You insignificant _afterbirth_, what gives you the right to judge me? If I'm so _broken_, so incomplete, then what's it say about you?"

There was a roar, not of monsters or people but the earth itself, from behind, and Devastator turned to see a barrage of boulders the size of minivans hurtling towards him. Yet he neither wavered nor hesitated, sneering as he turned and raised his sword to the heavens like an angelic warrior. The rocks exploded as one, flying to pieces like massive fragmentation bombs, casting debris and rubble about the ruined street in a cacophony of violence and rage, leaving a cloud of impenetrable smoke behind. With a swipe of his sword, he bisected the cloud itself with two thunderous explosions, revealing Terra standing on the other side, sheathed in her golden glow. She moved, as though to summon more stone, but with a contemptuous overhead slash, Devastator blew a car into the air effortlessly, before propelling it towards her with a series of rocket blasts, forcing her to abort what she was doing and erect a shield of bedrock, against which the car smashed and detonated.

Back swept Devastator to David, who was still picking himself up, and he strode towards him with purpose, the sword tracing fiery figures in the air around him. From within his coat, he drew out the canesword's sheath, and slid the sword back into it bare instants before the reconstituted cane caught 'fire' once more. Yet before David could determine what this augured, Devastator walked up to him, knocked his clumsy swing aside with his cane, seized him by the collar, and smashed him across the temple with the head of the cane.

"You think this is a game?" he asked, voice quavering with emotion. "You think I made my decisions in a vacuum?" Another blow, sending David reeling, propped up only by the iron grip Devastator had on his collar. "You want to know what pain is?" asked Devastator, hitting him again. "What it's like to be helpless and broken and with nobody to come and save you? You want to find out what it's like to be discarded and abandoned? _Well let me show you!"_

Reeling from the blows, blood tricking down the side of his head, David could not resist or even speak, as Devastator strode off down the street, dragging him by the collar, one hand gripping his throat, the other holding the blood-spattered cane. From behind, he saw Terra lower her shield of rock, and despite her own injuries, half-limp, half-run after them, pulling rocks from the ground as she did so. Yet Devastator sensed her without turning his head, and raised his hand with the cane without bothering to turn back. An entire section of the street between Terra and David exploded like a thermite bomb, sending a wall of flames hundreds of feet into the air, blocking all access.

Ahead, the road dropped away sharply, running down from the shallow ridge they had been ascending, and Devastator reached the edge of the ridge before hurling David to the ground at its very lip. Before David had a chance to get his bearings, Devastator stepped around him and grabbed his head, forcing him to raise it, and to look out upon the scene before him, a ruined cityscape that trailed on into the darkness, seemingly forever, choked by smoke and the red flames of wrath.

But there was something else.

Ahead, far far away, in the distance, there was movement, so far off and with so much dust and smoke between, that David could not tell what was actually there. The figures were tiny, mere ants at this distance, yet they moved, unquestionably, towards and away from one another. For a moment, David thought that they had to be demons, more of Trigon's minions, dancing at some unspoken command, but then, faintly but visibly, one of them emitted a light.

A bright blue light.

David froze.

"That's right," said Devastator, releasing his head and standing back up. "You know what that is, don't you?"

His head still reeling from the blows, David struggled to form coherent words. "C... Cyborg?"

"Of course," sneered Devastator. "Who else would it be?" He pointed to one side with his staff. "And have a look over there."

David followed the gesture, and thought he saw more movement, this time atop what looked like an enormous black edifice, all but invisible through the haze. The moving figures _were_ invisible at this distance, save that every so often, one of them emitted a flash of bright green, seemingly from nowhere, but of a color that had been burned into David's very soul, that he would have recognized anywhere.

"They're _alive_?" he choked out, staring wide-eyed at the far-off display.

"Of course they're alive," said Devastator. "Trigon doesn't kill outright if he can avoid it. He likes to play with his food. He'll keep them alive until the torture isn't worth it any longer. That's what he does. David's eyes slowly turned back to Devastator, as the demolitionist stared daggers down at him, cane in hand. "But it's not what _I_ do, David."

Something like ice wrapped itself around David's heart. "What do you mean?"

"I mean that I'm tired of this waste of time. It's not my style, and it's not my preference, but Trigon wanted you tortured to death for presuming to hold Devastator back from him, and I'm a man who completes the jobs he's given. So what I'm going to do, David," said Devastator, as he gestured in turn at the near-invisible figures, "is go to each and every one of your friends in turn. And I'm going to kill them. All of them. In front of you."

David's voice deserted him, his eyes widening to saucer size. "No," he managed to say.

"_Yes_," snapped David. "Every one in turn. I'm gonna kill them, the way I killed them once before. They didn't have a prayer of stopping me then, even all together and with thirty years experience under their belts. What chance do you think they'll have now, alone, surrounded, mere children?"

"No," repeated David, "no, no, you can't!"

"Oh yes I can!" roared Devastator. "but that's not the best part! The best part, David, is that they'll know who's doing it. We share more than a name, you and I. You recognized me instantly. So did Terra. They'll do the same. They'll know who I am when I come after them. Only unlike _their_ evil sides, I'll be coming at them in living color! And it's possible that they won't know the difference, but I would bet all the money in my pockets against all the money in your pockets that they've got just enough left in them to put it all together! And when they do..." he smiled ferociously, raising the hand in which he still held the communicator, "... then they'll know, once and for all, just who it was they gave this to."

"_NO!_" screamed David, and he leaped up, swinging the staff at Devastator once more, who blocked the swipe with his cane almost laughably easily before smashing the communicator against David's forehead, knocking him back to the ground. An instant later, and Devastator was crouched over him, tossing the crushed communicator aside as he grabbed David by the throat.

"And the _whole time,"_ he hissed, as David struggled and squirmed wildly, to no effect, red fog dancing before his eyes as the rest of the world began to fade. "You'll be watching. Free and unhindered, no ropes, no cuffs, no restraints. Free to do as you would, just so that you can experience the wonder of them _begging_ you to save them, to help them, to defeat what they will initially assume is just your weaker, darker self. You'll be there to witness their reactions when they realize that I'm _not _some figment of Trigon's imagination, not some dark side of you conjured up from his imagination, that _I am you_! I am _everything _you ever were, _everything _you ever might have been, _everything _you ever could have amounted to! I am you distilled, condensed, reforged, and cut loose from my leash. And I want you to be there, at their last breaths, when they realize what it was that you always were."

The fog descended into totality, and as he felt something explode within him, David threw back his head and screamed.

**O-O-O**

_The most painful thing in the world is a functional sense of scale._

_Scale kills more people than cancer. Scale destroys more dreams than all the tyrants, mischances, and disasters of history put together. Scale ruthlessly slaughters entire ideologies, brutalizes and demeans and grinds one into the mud. Not content to slay indiscriminately, scale is unrelenting, assaulting its victims over and over, relentlessly, single-mindedly, a myopic brute satisfied with nothing but the abject surrender of its chosen victims. Scale is the bully whose existence is only validated when his targets are utterly degraded, for whom the pleasure of subjugating others is no pleasure at all, but the only purpose of existence. It strikes in the night, in dark hours, when the clouds have closed and the stars refuse to shine. It cloaks itself in reason, introspection, cold analysis, wheedling its way inside with appeals to superiority and cynical pragmatism, laying the greatest of wonder-workers to waste until all is brought to ruin._

_For the universe is unfathomably large, time unspeakably vast, and compared to its immensity, what is man? What are his works? His geniuses and triumphs? Scale reduces all to ash and mockery. What is a symphony, but symbolic instructions for the production of a momentary arrangement of vibrations in the air of a tiny portion of a planet, gone moments later, meaningless to anyone besides a small subset of the living beings on this one, insignificant rock? What is a soaring cathedral, but a minor re-arrangement of stones at the surface of the same? An arbitrary symbol of an invisible delusion produced at the command of petty nothings who flatter themselves with importance. What are these things by comparison to a sun? What are they to a galaxy? To a universe entire? Should they have never existed, would the universe notice the lack? Would God? Flatten a city, burn a continent, destroy a planet or a galaxy, and the universe barely blinks, for such is its scale._

_The knowledge of this is a terrible thing. The understanding of the futility of oneself by comparison to the universe is sufficient to drive men mad. This is not mere idle speculation. Men have destroyed themselves in despair of the scale of their universe and their own place within it, disowning all their works, cursing themselves for having had the vanity to imagine that they mattered. The work of a lifetime invalidated in a heartbeat of sudden doubt masquerading as realization. What purpose to labor and create? What purpose to compose, to paint and sculpt, to build or design or dream of anything, what purpose these things, when scale proves them all vanity? What purpose to fight for anything, to rage against the dying of the light, to struggle against odds not merely insurmountable but whimsical and arbitrary, constrained by nothing? What purpose to write deeds? What purpose to compose and struggle, in late hour or dark room, in the service of creating a thing the universe will neither notice nor recognize, a pale imitation of the tales of one's betters, whose very existence cannot be spoken of in polite company, tarred with illegitimacy, mired in legal and moral speculation. An arbitrary act with arbitrary consequences, signifying nothing. A road leading nowhere._

_What purpose to write this story, if every sense of scale weighs against it? What purpose to write these words and this sentence, whose language and symbolism are arbitrary, whose pretensions of meaning and importance are laughable? What purpose to create it at all?_

_What purpose, dear reader, for you to read it?_

_Scale is a terrible thing, hiding in a million guises, the words of scoffing cynics, the dry figures of a textbook, the sneers of a million 'experts' and doomspeakers who revel in their own superiority of reason or comprehension, seeking to deflect the quiet desperation of their own empty lives onto others. Scale is nihilism writ in physical form, a death to all things, even the intangible concepts of idea and faith and wonder. It is the death of the soul. If embraced, it can even make one complicit in the murder._

_And yet, there are two sides to every story, even that of scale._

_To peer into the heavens is to be humbled. To measure oneself against eternity is to be found wanting, to conclude the uselessness and vanity of life and action, of creation or struggle. But the very desperation with which scale assaults our sense of worth belies its great weakness: That scale itself is also arbitrary. And if the scale one employs is arbitrary, then cannot one select another?_

_If there exists a universe wherein our actions are so dwarfed and pathetic to be meaningless, if there exist a million such universes, are there not also ones where this is not so? For there are an infinity of things infinitely greater than ourselves, it is true, but the road runs in both directions, and thus there are an infinity of things infinitely lesser than us as well. If we can define our lives as meaningless when compared with the greater universe, what are they when compared with a lesser one, the universe of our own lives, of those of our loved ones, our pets, our friends? What are we by comparison with insects? With bacteria? With the dust beneath our feet and the air that dances through our hair? What are we, ultimately? The cynic may answer that we are insignificant insects, and by a sufficient sense of scale, so we are. But by another sense, we are towering collections of fifty trillion living cells, each of which lives and dies and labors to ennoble the whole. Within us reside hundreds of billions of living things, of bacteria and viruses, beings smaller to us than we are to the planet entire. Yet they labor endlessly, in their billions and trillions, and change minute elements of us, in their own manner and image. Through us, do their labors sum to perform actions unfathomable to themselves. Through us can they move distances that must seem as remote as interstellar space, ascend to layers of action and creation to which they have no suitable conception. Perhaps through us, they can even make their mark on a universe infinitely greater._

_Thoughtless and brainless though they may be, governed by the most pitiable of instincts, as we understand it, one wonders if they ponder, as we do, their place in the universe. Do they think on the vastness of ourselves, and their minute scale by comparison, and know despair?_

_To them, might we not be Gods?_

_And if, to them, we are Gods, then how can what we do be anything but of the greatest possible import?_

_We live, we love, we create, we struggle, we build, we compose, we craft and we seek meaning in it all, and it eludes us, and some of us fall prey to despair. Our fine sense of scale contrives to drag us from our pedestals and beat us into the dirt among the slimy things we imagine so far below. Yet our perpetual defeat, overcoming some, waiting in the wings for all, does nothing but cast relief upon the ultimate truth. What we do is both of no meaning and ultimate importance, simultaneously and at once. In this, as in so many other ways, we are creatures of paradox._

_What we call moments of clarity are many things, but often times, if we look back on them, we find that they are nothing but sudden, dramatic adjustments in our conception of scale. A shift in scale can change everything, for "the odds" are a function of the scale whereby we evaluate our ambitions. A negative shift can arrest one in mid-word, tear down all the work of a lifetime, reduce a man to groveling misery within his own head. But a different shift entirely, discarding the old conception and refocusing upon what we consider our essential universe, engendered by anything from external abuse to internal enlightenment, a sudden shift in that direction can do almost anything. It can open a conduit to wonders, transform men into angels or poets or warriors of virtue. It can raise the dead and set the heavens to singing, carve temples to imagined gods from the living stone of mountains. It can raise the dead, protect the living, give those who might have been imagined to have no hope at all against the all-encompassing hatred of an infinite malice, a chance, however faint, to stand in defense of that which is, to us, the most important thing of all._

**O-O-O**

"I am so sorry..."

The green flash lit up the air like a firework detonating in the midst of all present, as sudden and unexpected as a bolt of lightning on a clear day. Warp jolted, leaping back a pace as he wafted the ozone-tinged smoke from his face, blinking back the flash as he tried to see what had happened. Something warm and wet splashed across his face, and he did not have time to think through what it had to be before his vision cleared, and he saw what was in front of him.

Starfire stood at the edge of the pit, leaning forward, one arm wrapped around Robin tightly, her head resting on his shoulder, eyes squeezed shut. She was holding him in place, perhaps using him as a support to stay on her feet, perhaps vice versa. She stood there, motionless, as did Robin, neither one moving so much as a muscle, locked, for all anyone could tell, in a frozen embrace.

The eight inch hole that had been blasted through Robin's chest glistened in the preternatural twilight.

Warp stood in mute shock, Robin's blood running down his face, coating the floor and the pillars and everything else within twenty feet, staring at the greenish glow from her hand that shown through the hole in Robin's chest. He watched as Starfire stood holding Robin up, her fingers dug into his titanium cape, before slowly opening her eyes, revealing slits of radioactive green that seemed to churn and boil like the fires of some infernal reactor set to motion. In the searing green light, could be glimpsed the roiling, inconceivable rage that bubbled like molten iron beneath the surface of Starfire's motionless form. And in the void left by the shock of what had just happened, Warp felt the first tinges of fear creeping into his conscious awareness.

"Warp," said Starfire, in a whisper so fine it could cut a blade of grass, "you have made a _terrible _mistake."

The green glow in Robin's chest vanished, as Starfire released Robin, letting him tumble lifelessly to the ground.

"You have made _many _mistakes, Warp," said Starfire, tears shimmering in her eyes, yet refusing to fall, "so many that they cannot all be catalogued. But of them all, there is one that stands above. You believed that by bringing me here, and presenting me with these puppets of your will in the shape and form of Robin, that you would destroy me. You thought this, because you envisioned me as broken. You pictured that which Robin and I had as a candle, in the darkness, which with the tiniest motion, you could extinguish between your fingers, and thus cast me into nothing."

Starfire took a step forward, and without even glancing towards him, reached out her hand and shot Nightwing between the eyes with a starbolt that could have levelled a building, instantly turning the entire upper half of Nightwing's torso to vapor.

"In this," she said, "you were mistaken."

Warp recoiled, not in horror so much as shock, stepped back despite the book in his hand, despite the shield that even now shifted around him, stepping back through commands unconscious and unsummoned.

"What Robin and I shared," said Starfire, her voice as even as a plane of obsidian glass, not the slightest tremor audible to hint at what might rage beneath, "was beyond your capacity to harm. There is no torment you could devise, no outrage you could contrive, no crime you could fathom in your darkest of nightmares that would serve to tarnish its luster in the slightest degree. Were you capable of understanding this, you would have known that these puppets you summoned had no greater chance of disrupting the memory I hold of Robin, than your curses do of bringing you peace. You have failed, Warp, in every degree, to comprehend what it was that you sought to tear down."

Starfire's hands glowed with emerald light, as she stared at the dark-mantled supervillain, her eyes washing out slowly with the volcanic fires of Tamaran.

"It is said that the greatest weakness of the darkness, is that a single candle suffices to hold it back," said Starfire as she strode towards Warp, outwardly poised and calm, hands sheathed in flame. "What Robin and I shared was not merely a candle," she said, only the tears in her eyes serving to reveal what dwelt within. "What Robin and I shared, Warp, could _ignite the stars._"

**O-O-O**

"Yeah," said Cyborg. "Me too."

There was a flash of pink light, the sound of air being sliced apart, and an explosion, and when the smoke cleared, Cyborg stood alone.

All around him, demons lay crushed and thrown about, several hurled though windows, others laid out in stacks on the street. Behind, the evil duplicate of Cyborg stood blinking in confusion, surrounded by fallen demons and broken pieces of sulfur, trying to replay what had just happened so as to figure out what could possibly have happened. Cyborg ignored him, looking instead forward, at the girl dressed in violet and black who lay on her back in the middle of the street, staring up into the air and blinking, as though she could not figure out what had led her to this pass.

"I'm sorry," repeated Cyborg, "that I've gotta do this."

And then he shot her.

Jinx had scarcely had a chance to lift her head when a wave of sonic energy like the finger of god tore the very ground she was laying on apart, ripping it to pieces and sending her careening down the street into and through one of the flame demons that was presently trying to get back up. She hit a car, bounced over it, and fetched up on the broken sidewalk, coughing and bleeding from the head, trying to force her trembling muscles into rising.

"I don't have a choice..." she coughed out, rising to her hands and knees before spinning around in place and hurling a hex at Cyborg like a shiruken. Cyborg made no attempt to dodge, turning into the shot, letting it strike the stump of his mangled arm and detonate there. The explosion kicked up dust and smoke and sent pieces of metal flying in every direction, but the smoke cleared to reveal Cyborg undaunted, his broken arm simply broken further, and he turned back to her, and fired a sonic blast that tore the car between them in half and would have disintegrated her had she not contrived to leap aside.

She landed unsteadily on her feet, further hexes forming in her hands, though she did not form them instantly. "He can bring them all back," she said, her words carrying the fevered intensity of a fanatic who dared not consider the horrible alternatives to their own faith. "He told me he could bring them back. If I do what he says then he'll - "

"He won't do jack," said Cyborg. "You're not stupid enough to believe him. He ain't gonna do a damn thing except laugh."

Jinx' fists and teeth clenched of their own accord. Tears spilled down her face as she half-shouted, half-cried in response. "But I have to... I have to _try,_ don't I?"

"Yeah," said Cyborg without a change of inflection. "You do. And I really wish I could help you, Jinx, but I've gotta try somethin' too. I've gotta keep people like you off BB and Star. And if you think I wouldn't blow your head off a thousand times to give them one more minute for whatever _they_ gotta try, then you'd best think again."

Slowly, Jinx seemed to calm herself down, opening her hands once more to receive the crystalline hexes that she formed within them. She took a deep breath, letting it out slowly, as she faced the unmoving robotic Titan. "You can be as angry with me as you want," she said, firmer now, poised and ready for what might come. "I _have _to do this."

Cyborg shook his head, contemptuous of the demons rising once more around him, staring down at Jinx like a wizened schoolteacher dismissing the plaintive excuses of a truant student.

"Jinx," said Cyborg. "Whatever you think you know, believe me. You've _never _seen me get angry..."

**O-O-O**

"Well," said the double. "Whadaya say we find out what you taste like?"

Raven did not answer. She did not get the chance.

All of a sudden there was a terrible roar.

It was like the roar of an animated jet engine, the roar of an earthquake, the furious, interstellar roar of a supernova exploding into the night sky with all the power of a galaxy within it. A roar so profound that it emanated from nothing and everything at the same time, a roar that shattered the icicles on the ceiling and cracked the ground around them, a roar with physical force, blood-soaked and terrible, as though the air itself had come to life and chosen to assail the living. It was a roar of pure, outraged hate and malice, a roar of violence and anger and primal, inconsolable rage. Beast Boy's double, caught mid-transformation into something else, turned about in shock, to see what could possibly have generated such an offence against hearing.

Perhaps he suspected it was Beast Boy, howling in defiance in a desperate attempt to prevent him from devouring Raven. If so, he was mistaken. What he saw when he turned around was not Beast Boy.

It was not even the Beast.

What he saw when he turned around had no name at all.

For an instant, a fatal instant, the sight of the loathsome _thing_ that loomed behind him seemed to stun the double into inaction, as his eyes froze and his breath caught and his mind tried in vain to wrap itself around the horrible, non-euclidean shape of the terrible form that he beheld. His mouth worked up and down in horror, his limbs all acting of their own accord as his conscious mind seemed to shut down temporarily. And as the cacophony of horrors built and the noxious being lurched and slithered and leaped into the air like a tower of horn and hide, Beast Boy's double had time only to take one step back, and then it was upon him.

There are strange things that dwell within the hearts of men, terrible things, loathsome things. To some such things we give a name and assign a place in the makeup of man, confident in our categorization and diagnoses. It is upon these things that demons feed, praying on our baser natures, seeking to overthrow us and drag us down to Hell.

Yet ultimately, there are places even demons do not walk, for they have no name, and no category, and exist at the whim of impulses that cannot be governed nor pandered to, not by all the Legions of Hell, for they are innate, and eternal, and they do not sleep.

As the howls and the hideous shrieks merged with the unspeakable roars that rent the air and sent waves of ice cascading down across the chamber, alone in her corner, wrapped in the fragile protection of a white cloak, Raven squeezed shut her eyes, held her hands over her ears, and began to scream.

**O-O-O**

_And in the right circumstances, it might even change the world..._

**O-O-O**

There was a _deafening_ explosion.

David could see nothing, could make out nothing, his eyes clouded with rage and desperation and terror so far past mortal as to lack description, but the explosion aborted his scream like nothing else could have, and he felt warmth on his face, on his hands, everywhere, as flames bathed him and debris sailed past, but only for a second. And then suddenly, there were no more hands at his throat, no more blows to his head. Suddenly, without even needing to see, he knew that he was alone.

He realized that his eyes were shut, and opened them.

There was smoke and blood, blood on his sleeve and hand and dripping onto the ground, blood from his own head, which pounded in pain from the beating it had sustained, but he ignored it all, and raising his head, he saw something he did not expect to see.

Across the way sat a burnt out automobile, charred black like the rest of the world, and still emitting a trickle of smoke. And against it lay Devastator, crumpled against the side of the car like a marionette with its strings cut, beneath a man-sized dent that marred the car doors which David was fairly sure had not been there moments ago. The sheer unexpectedness of this sight derailed his train of thought, and he sat there in silence and watched as Devastator slowly rose to his hands and knees, retrieving his cane from where it had landed next to him. Devastator groaned as he blinked and gripped the car for support, looking more shaken than seriously hurt, but plainly as surprised to find himself there as David had been. And then slowly, he turned back to David, a soft smile on his face, chuckling at something, as though this were all some joke.

He took one look at David, and froze solid.

David waited an interminable second for Devastator to finish moving, but he did not, frozen like a statue, with the only motion in his face, as the older man's blind eyes slowly widened, and his mouth dropped open and hung there. Of all the possible reactions that Devastator could have had, that was the one David had been least expecting, and it jolted him, such that he turned his head slightly, and saw Terra out of the corner of his eye. She was standing in the middle of the street, fists sheathed in her yellow energy, having somehow contrived to get past the wall of fire that Devastator had conjured in her path. Yet she too had stopped dead, as motionless as that day in the park when Raven's time stop had frozen her along with the rest of the world, her eyes wide in astonishment, mouthing words that she could not find the wherewithal to speak. Like Devastator, she was staring right at him in some cross between astonishment, horror, and awe, and David had no idea why.

That was when he noticed that his fingers were still warm.

Slowly, David lowered his eyes, but he had not gotten far before he too, froze solid, blinking in disbelief at what he saw before him. Robin's bo staff of stainless steel, now truncated at one end by some unknown means, the staff he had taken from the survival bunker, was held tightly his hand.

And it was sheathed in fire.

* * *

**Author's Note:** Thank you for reading, you who have managed to get this far, and it is my hope that you have enjoyed what you have read. Please, if you have a moment to spare, leave me a comment below, but either way, I hope to see you again soon with the next installment of this humble tale.


	37. The Apes and the Angels

**Disclaimer: **Even after all that, I still don't own anything.

**Author's Note:** I imagine that many if not most of you assumed that I was dead, or had forgotten this story, or given up on it entirely. Several of you all sent me messages with those very suppositions. Given the time it took to finish this chapter, I can't exactly blame anyone, and yet the truth is that, while I wasn't able to finish this chapter quickly, I never intended to abandon it. The list of reasons and excuses for why it took so long to finish is boring and unimportant. My life has undergone several fundamental changes over the last year, and I have had many other duties I could not ignore. And yet this chapter, and the story it belongs to never left my mind. I can only ask the pardon of those who hoped to see it come out earlier, and pray that the result is to your liking.

I do not know if anyone will still be interested in reading this story. After all this time, I can hardly lay claim to anyone's continued attention. But for those who do cross its path, I assure you that any feedback you offer me will be used as best I can to improve the story. As always, I do not make any claims to quality in the paragraphs below, but I live in the hope that improvement is always possible.

No more words from me. I hope against hope that you will enjoy this offering. Thank you so much for all your patience.

* * *

**Chapter 37: The Apes and the Angels**

_It is an ancient Mariner,  
And he stoppeth one of three.  
'By thy long beard and glittering eye,  
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me ?_

_The Bridegroom's doors are opened wide,  
And I am next of kin ;  
The guests are met, the feast is set :  
May'st hear the merry din.'_

**O-O-O**

The boy and the girl and the man stood apart from one another, surrounded by ruin and red flame and the ambient noise of the pyre that had once been a city. They stood where they were, looking at the same thing, all three expecting reality to return to its regular programming at any moment.

But the staff in the boy's hand burned red with silent, heatless flames. And whatever the expectations of those watching, it showed no signs of ceasing to do so.

For what might have been a full minute, David stared down at the staff in his hand, his arm and body absolutely motionless, not daring even to breathe, as though the slightest thing might dispel what had to be some kind of illusion or hallucination. He could hear his own heart thundering in his ears, loud enough to drown out everything else around him, and with each beat, he felt the staff in his fingers pulse warm and cold, as though it were a living thing with a heartbeat attuned to his own. Only after an eternity had passed did David raise his head and turn it back up the road towards his alter ego, who was standing in the middle of the street staring at him with an expression of confusion.

"That's impossible," said the man.

No scream, no protest, simply words, uttered to himself perhaps, for he seemed to have forgotten that anyone else was present. The anger from before, the threats and icy rage were gone, their place usurped by simple disbelief.

David stood up slowly, keeping his eyes locked on his counterpart, half-afraid that looking back down at the flames on the staff in his hand would cause them to extinguish. The man made no move to stop him, his own cane burning quietly in his hand, forgotten for the moment like everything else.

"You don't have Devastator," said the man, though who he was addressing was an open question. "You don't have anything." He began to walk, pacing back and forth, his lifeless eyes never leaving David's own, seemingly oblivious to whatever else might be occurring. He appeared to be on the cusp of saying more several times, before he suddenly stopped where he was.

"There's no way..." he said rather cryptically, and then extended his hand back behind himself.

There was a deafening blast, shattering the relative silence, and the burnt-out husk of a car suddenly vaulted into the air on a cushion of fire as if the ground had suddenly decided to eject it into the sky. It lofted up, spinning in place and shedding pieces of itself as it flew, before Devastator swept his hand forward, and another rocket-propelled explosion hurled the car ahead and down, directly at David himself.

All this happened in a fraction of a second, a series of moves so sudden that David could not react consciously. Had his mind not been addled by everything that had happened, had this been a normal situation or one remotely resembling it, he might have dodged to one side, or ducked, or done something smart. But as it was, his brain could not fire the proper synapses in time, and instead of doing those things, his higher functions froze, allowing muscle memory and months of rote training to take over in their stead. All of its own volition, without central control, David's eyes took in the spectacle of the flying, burning car, his fingers tightened around the staff in his hand, his arm raised the staff towards the object hurtling down towards him, and in the same manner that an amputee might order his missing legs to walk, David's lower mind pushed in a manner indescribable against the edges of a hollow void deep inside him that stood in the place of something that had once been there.

And there was fire.

A great fireball, blossoming in orange and yellow and vibrant red, erupted into being and consumed the car like a ravenous beast. A peal of thunder tore through the air, sending bits of debris and pebbles scurrying for cover as streaks of flaming rubber and gasoline rained down and the echoes of the blast gave way to the pitter-patter of metallic hail. Dense, boiling smoke billowed forth from the annihilated car, but the stiff wind caught it and swept it aside, as the fire faded and the street reverted once more to near-silence.

And as the rain of metal faded, and the last wisps of smoke were whisked away, all of a sudden, David's mind remembered how to control the movements of his body, and he exhaled, and breathed in again, and lowered the hand that held Robin's staff to his side, and his eyes until they sat upon his counterpart.

His counterpart had not moved. His counterpart had not, it seemed, even breathed. Indeed, for the first time, his counterpart was visibly, recognizably David. Weathered and scarred though the face was, with eyes as blank as billiard balls, the expression was one that was instantly recognizable. It was the one that David himself had been wearing seconds ago, the same delicately blank look that represented astonishment and wonder and awe and fear all at once, the product of a mind that had suffered a computational fault and left all physical business in abeyance as it tried to recover. The cane hung from his fingertips, flickering with fire, but the man did not raise it to conjure forth more destruction. He seemed to have forgotten its existence. It was many, many seconds before he finally contrived to retrieve himself, and to speak, his voice hollow and empty of bombast.

"You clever little bastard..."

David said nothing. Instead he took one step forward, and swung his staff underhand, forwards and up like a polo mallet.

Always before it had been a matter of conscious, or at least semi-conscious will. A target selected, molecules categorized and acted upon, energy contained, re-routed, twisted upon itself to produce the proper effect. Not the artistic choreography of a magical spell, not the raw, elemental emotional outburst of kinetics or psychic power, using Devastator was as mechanical as laying pipe, a matter of formulaic repetition, work of the ego rather than the id. Raging emotion impeded Devastator. It did not enhance it.

And perhaps that was all still true. Perhaps the rote training and repetition of the last nine months had simply cemented the necessary steps so deeply in the back of David's mind that he could no longer discern the specific mental motions involved in conjuring them up. Or perhaps something else was acting here, some impenetrable explanation related to Trigon, to Hell, to the end of the world, or to the process of resurrection by stone. Perhaps it was a matter of great importance, and perhaps it didn't matter at all. Ultimately, all that David ever knew was that he raised his staff, and called for destruction, and received it.

The ground midway between David and his counterpart exploded, as though an artillery shell had just landed, throwing up dust and dirt and debris but doing very little else. Less than a fraction of a second later however, another explosion five feet in front of the last burst into being, and another before that, and another and another. A walking series of detonations advancing down the street at the speed of a racehorse, throwing asphalt and streetcar rails aside, aimed straight at the man with the fiery cane.

The man in question watched with equanimity the advancing line of explosions, his face tight and guarded, each blast exploding closer than the one before. At long last, as the explosions closed to within twenty feet or less, he raised his burning cane by the neck like a priest brandishing a holy cross, and thrust it forward towards the advancing pillars of fire.

The explosions stopped.

Slowly this time, the smoke cleared away, as though the wind itself could not decide on a proper course of action. As the shroud of dust and flame wafted aside, David saw the man once more, his cane still held up as though he were warding off vampires. Slowly he lowered it, though he did not act further, did not move or run or strike out with his own powers, his body trembling slightly, though why this might be was impossible to tell. He seemed to be waiting for David to say or do something, but David did nothing, standing still as a statue, watching his flesh-toned counterpart with his searing red eyes cutting through the ashen air like smoldering coals.

"So is this it then?" asked the man at length. "We kill each other here, at the end of the world, all because of your little friends?"

"I won't let you hurt them," said David, largely the only thing he could think of to say.

"You can't stop me," said the man. "Not even with Devastator or whatever parlor trick that was. You know that."

"Then try it," said David, "and watch me."

A flash of anger, clearly visible, passed over Devastator's face. "I will," he spat from between clenched teeth. "I'll watch you scream when I mount their heads on pikes. I did not come back from death just to let someone like you get in - "

"SHUT! UP!"

There was a loud crack like a peal of thunder, and the ground split, asphalt and concrete cracking as in an earthquake, sending thin, jagged rents spider-webbing across the street and sidewalk from about David's feet, even as nearby buildings groaned and swayed, shaking dust and ash from their fire-scored walls.

"I don't care what you threaten me with!" shouted David, oblivious to the damage, brandishing his broken staff like a flaming torch as it stabbed the air with it in Devastator's direction. "I don't care what you think of me! _Who the hell are you_? You're just a re-animated corpse brought back to torture me! What did Trigon offer you to make you come back and do this?"

"Have you ever been dead?" demanded Devastator. "Your soul on fire, twisting in agony for all eternity? Try it some time, and tell me what _you _wouldn't agree to in exchange for clemency." He sneered. "Besides, the chance to kill the people responsible wasn't a hard sell."

"The Titans weren't responsible for what happened to you."

"And just how the _hell _would you know what they were and weren't responsible for?"

"Because I know them."

"Not half as well as you think you do," said Devastator. "I've known them for much longer than you ever did.

"All you did was try to murder them," said David.

"Oh, you'd be surprised how well you get to know someone when they're on your hit list for as long as the Titans were," said Devastator. "Besides, that hardly matters now, does it? I don't need to know them to kill them, now do I?"

"You won't get that chance."

"Oh really?" scoffed Devastator. "Says who?"

"Says _me_," said David evenly. "You won't get near enough to hurt them. Not by five miles. You won't lay a finger on one of them."

Devastator groaned, shaking his head. "Son, I've tolerated this crap long enough. I'm not gonna stand here and debate morality with a child when – "

"I'm not your son and I'm not a child," said David coldly. "I'm the chosen host of the Lord of Destruction." He lowered his staff until the tip touched the ground, the flames flaring up as his fingers tightened around it. "I will _not _let you hurt the others. Not ever."

Devastator's already unreadable face went almost completely blank. "Is that so?" he asked at length.

David raised the staff slowly, gripping it with both hands, his fingers automatically finding the shallow grooves worn into the metal by another pair of gloved hands. "It is."

Devastator took a long, deep breath, and released it slowly, his fingers drumming silently on the silver handle of his walking cane.

"Fine," he said simply, "have it your way." And with a movement so fluid and fast that David scarcely had time to even blink, Devastator reached into his coat, withdrew a walnut-gripped semi-automatic handgun, aimed it at David, and fired.

Tensed like a coiled spring though David was, the gesture was so unexpected that his mind did not have time to process an appropriate response, and he saw the gun rise almost in slow motion, staring straight down the barrel, before the burst of flame from within it augured the end.

But the bullet never arrived.

There was a crunch of something unyielding being ruptured and suddenly a slab of stone and loose earth eight feet tall simply appeared right in front of David, shooting up from the ground like a geyser. David heard a wet 'thwack' as the bullet buried itself in the dirt pile and stopped, leaving him and Devastator to stare blankly at the unexpected obstacle interposed between them as if by magic.

It was Devastator who realized first what had just happened.

"God _dammit_!" snapped Devastator, and he whirled around in place, handgun extended towards the target that both he and David had momentarily forgotten existed. He was almost too late. A stone the size of a medicine ball nearly ripped his head off, missing by the barest of millimeters, and he was forced to detonate the one behind it so close to himself that he was almost knocked off his feet by his own explosion. It was only now, belatedly, that David's stunned mind caught up with the situation, and he scrambled around the shield of earth and stone to see what he could see.

Terra stood behind Devastator, fists closed and sheathed in gold, her eyes fixed on the man with the scarred eyes and red cane. How she had traversed the wall of fire that had cut her off from them was unclear, yet here she was, undaunted, and it was perhaps a testament to her overall bearing that Devastator did not attempt witty banter or a wry remark, but simply narrowed his lifeless eyes, raised the gun once more towards her, and fired again.

The gunshots were like thunderclaps, booming though the empty street as fire blossomed from the muzzle of the gun, but Terra raised one hand, tearing from the ground another shield of earth and rock, into which the bullets thudded with no effect. This time, however, Devastator was expecting this reaction. With an angry snarl he raised his cane to the air, and the rock shield exploded like a bomb, casting up a cloud of dust which blew swiftly away to reveal –

Nothing.

Both Devastator and David blinked in equal confusion as the smoke cleared to find that Terra had vanished like a ghost. For a second or two they stood as though transfixed, but as before, it was Devastator who made the obvious leap first.

"Alright then," he growled, sounding put upon, and holstering his pistol once more, he spun his cane through the air and drove the tip down into the ground. Instantly the ground heaved as though something was trying to hammer its way to the surface, bouncing everything from pebbles to cars into the air, and a two foot wide section of the street first lurched upwards, then collapsed back to form a deep pothole. Again and again he lifted the cane and drove it downwards, and each time another pothole fell into the street as explosions deep within the earth pulverized the bedrock and substrata like depth charges beneath the sea.

David, left momentarily forgotten as Devastator tried to smoke Terra out from her underground hiding place, did not make the mistake of trying to think things through. His brain still running only at its most basic level, he did not stop to try and analyze how it was possible for him to be channeling the very powers that Trigon had ripped out, nor any of the other ten thousand questions that needed only a second's inattention to spring to mind. Seeing Devastator trying to crush Terra with underground shockwaves, he responded immediately as he would have if nothing else odd were going on.

And given everything, this, probably, was the only thing that let him get away with what happened next.

Explosions, from Devastator, were a matter of energy. The larger an object, the more energy had to be corralled to detonate it. More energy meant more time, time that David had, through prodigious effort, managed to reduce to a minimum, but time that was still appreciable nonetheless. Hard enough as it was to destroy something with Devastator on-hand, he now had no choice but to simply go through the motions and _hope_ that somehow, whatever had happened to give him the ability to destroy once more, would do the rest. Had he tried to detonate something huge, a truck, a building, even the street on which his counterpart stood, it would have taken time. Time for his counterpart to retaliate or block him or simply get off one more subterranean explosion. Time that he didn't have.

But whether it was because of Robin's endless lessons about creativity, or simply because he had Terra on his mind, David's target was not something huge. Indeed, it was the most mundane of objects, something so common, so simple, that he could have detonated it in his sleep.

And as Devastator raised his cane again, right behind him, a parking meter exploded.

There was the waspish sound of flying metal, as a thousand coins of various denominations flew in every direction like the shrapnel of a fragmentation bomb, and a second later, Devastator let out a howl of pain as a hundred such coins slammed into him. He staggered forward, nearly dropping the cane, whose flames instantly extinguished as the will commanding them into being evaporated like smoke. Stumbling, Devastator lashed out clumsily, but even such an offhand gesture sent a broken piece of pavement the size of a wall safe hurtling at David's head with the speed of a cannonball. Reacting on instinct, David swung his staff like a baseball bat, and the pavement chunk exploded into a million pieces, forcing him to cover his eyes with his arm to deflect the fragments.

There was a loud crack to David's left, and he tensed up automatically, dropping his arm and turning his head with his staff ready to deflect whatever Devastator had thrown at him from this new direction. But instead of a projectile, David saw the asphalt beside him shattering like glass, revealing the broken ground beneath. A second later, and Terra suddenly appeared from within the loose dirt, leaping up onto the street in a cloud of dust, the dirt rolling off her like water off a duck. Her fists were sheathed in gold, and small stones orbited her body in every which way like electrons around an atom. Though she said nothing, she did turn her head David's way, her eyes asking all the questions necessary.

"You two _clearly _do not know what you are dealing with..."

The voice was practically a hiss, a snarl layered with contempt and anger, so cold that it seemed to chill the very air. Both David and Terra turned to see Devastator standing back up, his long coat torn with dozens of small holes from the flying coins. The staff in his hand burned brightly once more, like a blazing torch, and he held it by the neck, before reaching over, twisting the handle, and drawing forth the sword concealed within. Both blade and sheathe burned brightly, like the damned city around them, and the light of their fires cast crimson shadows across the scarred countenance of the enraged metahuman who stood before them.

From the corner of his eye, David saw Terra start to take a step back, saw her hesitate, think better of it, and force herself to stand her ground. David might have done the same had he not been rooted where he was, watching his double with trepidation.

"You want to be heroes?" asked Devastator, slowly lowering both sword and cane. "Well this is what happens to heroes." Taking a single, heavy step forward, he swung both implements back and around and upwards, crossing them in front of his chest as he did so, and half an instant later, a volcano erupted in front of him.

The street was already pockmarked by the aftereffects of explosions, thrown vehicles, and subterranean detonations, but this was to them as a fusion bomb was to a firecracker. The entire street, from sidewalk to sidewalk, lurched and split and blew a solid piece of pavement a hundred yards long and thirty wide, into the air like the lid of a pressure cooker. Shedding debris and cars as it rose, the thousand-ton block of bedrock and asphalt rose on the wings of a fiery explosion that shattered what little glass remained within a mile and knocked both David and Terra back like bowling pins struck by a cannonball. David landed on his side, Terra on her back, and both of them slid to a painful stop a hundred feet from where they had stood. His head spinning, David managed to prop himself up on one arm, and turned his head back up the street in time to see Devastator swing both his weapons down towards them, and another explosion hurled the entire block at them like a meteor.

There was a crack to his left, as Terra summoned a pillar of rock right through the asphalt, using it to push herself back to her feet faster than she could stand herself. Still swaying on her feet, she nonetheless threw both hands out, releasing a beam of golden light that stretched out and struck the front of the flying block of stone and roadway. The light wrapped itself around the block as Terra leaned forward as though pressing against an invisible wall, her eyes closed and teeth clenched. The block's flight slowed, its trajectory wobbling, but that much mass and momentum would not be arrested so easily, and the block flew on regardless.

Staggering to his feet at Terra's side, David aimed the staff at the approaching block, balancing it on his wrist and shoving it forward like a pool cue. Instantly, the entire front facing of the block exploded in fiery ruin, slowing its approach yet further, but not enough. Again and again he jabbed the staff forward, each successive jab blossoming forth new fire from the broken face of the stone block, as Terra dug her feet in and shoved forward, and the golden glow redoubled in brilliance. Wobbling despite its immense momentum, the block dipped and its leading edge struck the ground like the blade of an enormous bulldozer, dredging up a wave of asphalt and dirt. Desperately, David redoubled his efforts, explosions peppering his face and shirt with red-hot bits of stone and pavement, as the wave and the block slid towards them inexorably. Terra screamed, whether from fright or the mere effort of channelling her kinetic powers, David couldn't tell, and he closed his eyes and fired one more explosion at danger-close range, the backblast strong enough to nearly knock him off his feet. The explosion rang in his ears, drowning out everything else. But as it faded out, it was replaced, not with more crashing or cacophony, but with silence.

One second. Two. And David opened his eyes to a smoldering wall of stone and burnt asphalt, sitting motionless some six inches from his face. For a moment he simply stared at it, half-expecting it to rise up and lunge at him once again. And then slowly he flicked his eyes over to his left, where Terra was holding her breath, her hands trembling at her sides, staring as he was at the immense block.

And then the block exploded.

Had the entire thing detonated at once, it would have disintegrated David and Terra down to the molecular level. That it did not was evidence of the rushed nature of the explosion, Devastator not bothering with a complete energy transference in favor of speed and surprise. Only a relatively small portion of the block, that directly facing the two teenagers, actually exploded, shattering the rest like so much glass. But at point blank range, it was more than enough. David felt only an tremendous impact, then weightlessness, and then nothing at all.

**O-O-O**

_He holds him with his glittering eye-  
The Wedding-Guest stood still,  
And listens like a three years' child :  
The Mariner hath his will._

**O-O-O**

"_**If you do not learn this lesson and well, you will destroy everything and everyone you ever come to love."**_

It was quiet now. Quieter than before. The shrieking and howling had gone, fading slowly into sobs that quieted in their turn and finally stopped altogether. It was quiet enough to hear the dripping of water and the groaning of the ice that surrounded her. Yet the silence was not quite absolute, for every so often, she heard a noise that was clearly no product of ice or water, some awful, grinding, gurgling sound, that conjured to mind every nightmare she had ever had, and sent her shivering back down into the recesses of her cloak.

Everything from before this point was flashes, violent flashes of green and white and red, always red, as blood spilled over the ice and melted it into a vile, steaming mess. Screams of abject horror and pain mingled with sounds of rending, of claws and teeth on yielding flesh. Sounds of ripping, and tearing, and mutilation, horrified cries drowned in gushing blood, death-rattles and the splintering of bone. Hot wind on her arms and legs imbued with awful smells. All of it waiting to consume her, devour her, searching for her with every waking instant. No place was there to hide, no chance of evasion, no escape. Where before she had screamed without hearing her own voice, so awful was the noise, now she no longer dared to even breathe, for fear that _it_ would contrive to find her. Expecting it to at every second.

She could not remember what had transpired to bring her to this place, this cave of ice in the middle of a frozen world, surrounded by waxy, ghostly figures and objects buried in the walls. How she had come to be here, and why, were entirely forgotten. Her whole life had been spent here, for reasons that were important, if somewhat indistinct. Something Azar had said. Something she had warned about.

"_**We do not do this to you as punishment. We do this because there is no other choice."**_

"Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos. Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos..."

No magic burst forth at these words, none of the eruptions of power that she remembered someone else performing. She did not expect it to, for the words weren't meant as a spell. They were a charm, a blanket, just something for her ears to hear that wasn't screams and slavering. Something she remembered from a time that wasn't this one, neither before nor after, but _other_. She recited the words over and over, like half-remembered prayers called forth at the moment of need, faster and faster, stumbling over the words in her haste to get them out.

Something wet touched her knee, and she screamed.

In a heartbeat, her muscles moved of their own accord, and she reared up and back, slipping on the slick ice and falling onto her back with a wet splat. Thick, goopy liquid splattered over her, sticky and lukewarm. She tried to scramble back, away from whatever was in front of her, but her feet and hands could get no purchase on the ice, until, in her impotent flailings, her hand found something solid, and grabbed it, and swung it around.

It was a piece of wood, still burning at one end like a torch, and as she brought it around, the light it cast filled the cavern of ice, revealing -

She stopped.

- nothing.

The walls were coated in blood. Blood and... other things. It ran down them in rivulets, hissing as the residual heat melted the underlying ice. It dripped from the ceiling like a light rain, plinking against the sodden floor with hollow strikes that resonated throughout the crystal cavern like invisible bells. Yet the looming monster she was so certain that she would see was not there, and the empty space where it should have been taunted her more than its presence would have. Her eyes darted back and forth and back again, catching glimpses of it from the corner of her vision, imagined or real, she couldn't tell and dared not assume. Around and around and around she spun, hunting for something she did not even know the sight of, more certain at each second that the next would see her come face to face with it, until the her balance finally gave way entirely, and she fell once more.

Only this time, she did not land on ice. Or blood. This time she landed on something that cried.

A horrid, warbling cry, like a wounded animal, froze her where she was, long enough for her to feel wet fabric against her cheek. Only when the sound subsided did she open her eyes once more, and find that she was laying half-draped atop something. Someone.

Someone green.

And through the haze that was her reality now, she remembered a name. A title really. One said thousands of times before. One she now interrupted her chant to repeat.

"Beast Boy?"

The previous magic words had done nothing, but these did. The sodden cloth she lay upon heaved weakly, up and down again, and shook as the person she had fallen upon tried to lift themselves, but did not succeed. For an instant, she thought it was her own weight, slight though it was, and she slid off of him, expecting him to rise, but he did not, and it was only when she sat back and raised the torch once more that she saw why.

Beast Boy lay on his stomach, his head on one side, eyes closed and fangs clenched tightly together, his chest rising and falling slowly as air whistled through his teeth. He was _soaked _in blood, covered in it until his purple uniform was dyed black with the stuff, so much that it seemed impossible for it all to have come from inside of him. Heaped about and over him, lay wet clumps of organic matter, unidentifiable by sight, which was probably a kindness, all things considered. Midway down his back, his uniform was torn open, a gash eight inches long ripped down it, yet beneath the tear, she saw only Beast Boy's green skin, whole and unblemished, save for the blood liberally splattered over it. Given that this rent in Beast Boy's uniform had been caused by him being impaled on a narwhal spike not ten minutes earlier, this was not something that could be explained. Yet there it was.

One more mystery in this frozen wonderland hardly merited notice.

Beast Boy's eyes remained tightly closed, but he continued to try to rise, sliding his hands palms-down onto the ice to push himself up. Unsuccessful in this effort, he finally managed, at length, to roll himself over onto one side, the hissing breath that escaped his lips as he did so revealing what the cost to do this much was. Only after he had turned, and rested, and waited for the pain to go back down, only then did he open his eyes, search for a moment, and then find Raven, still kneeling not five feet away, the torch still held in her trembling hand.

Slowly, incredibly, a broad grin crossed Beast Boy's blood and viscera-stained face. "Hey, there" he said, as though this were the most normal circumstance in the world. Gingerly, he extended a gloved hand towards Raven. "I gotcha."

In retrospect, that was probably not the wisest way to have phrased matters.

Exactly what transpired in the following couple of seconds, Raven could not possibly have described. It was all a blur of shouting and crashing and the grinding of ice against ice. When finally it all subsided, Raven was laying on her back, propped up on her elbows and staring at the sheer wall of ice a foot thick that had slid down into place between her and Beast Boy like a portcullis, slamming shut with a booming echo, and then silence.

For several moments, Raven simply lay there in shock, unable to process what had just happened. The wall of ice separating her from Beast Boy was transparent, or near enough, and she saw him on his feet, staring slack-jawed at this new obstacle that had just appeared. Slowly, Raven mirrored him, trying to understand what was going on and failing. Had she done this, her demon powers reacting in a moment's thoughtlessness? Had someone else?

"_**An instant's lack of focus is all it takes to lose everything."**_

She wished that they would leave her alone, just this once.

Behind the ice, Beast Boy was on his feet, his pain apparently forgotten, studying the barrier that had just manifested itself. He said something, or at least his lips moved, but the barrier blocked all sound, and she couldn't figure out what it was. Carefully, she approached the ice, eyes oscillating between Beast Boy and the ceiling that had voided the sheet onto them. Fingers outstretched, she touched it as gently as she could. It felt cold of course, but also wet and slippery, and this close, she could see rivulets of water running down it onto the floor. Uncomprehendingly, she touched one of the rivulets, letting the clear water wash over her fingertip trying to determine what this could possibly mean.

There was a loud noise.

It was like the groaning of some enormous bulkhead or ocean liner, a deep, low, melodic sound, like a foghorn muffled by an arctic storm. Judging by his reaction, Beast Boy had heard it too, but the sound had unquestionably emanated from somewhere behind her. Cautiously she turned her head, looking over her shoulder, half-expecting to see some fresh monster looming up behind her. But instead she saw only the back wall of the cavern, dark and imposing as ever, the ghostly images of buried objects hidden within its milky depths. Eyes searching the remotest corner for any sign of what could have caused the sound, she raised her makeshift torch and slowly walked towards the far wall, peering into it, as more sounds, albeit softer ones, began to emanate from it.

And then something in the wall moved.

She jumped, screamed actually, as a shadow crossed before her eyes, so quickly that she couldn't tell what it was or where it had gone. She staggered back, searching desperately for the culprit, and not finding it. The sound repeated, closer now, more urgent, an angry groan, like the restless dead conjured to life, yet still she could see nothing.

But then, by chance, her eye fell upon a large object, a car maybe, or a sidewalk kiosk, it was hard to say at this distance. And at the precise instant she happened to glance at it, the groaning sound repeated itself, louder than before, and the object seemed to shimmer, and twist, and blur, and then vanish entirely.

And suddenly, Raven understood what she was looking at, and why the shadow from before had vanished. The sound wasn't being caused by an object moving in the ice. The sound was being caused by the ice itself moving.

There was an ear-splitting explosion.

Raven jumped. So did Beast Boy. So did the multi-ton sheet of ice that separated them, so loud and powerful was the cannon-shot that exploded in the room, ricocheting around it until Raven thought that all the guns in all the world were discharging around her. She staggered back, hands cupped over her ears, eyes wide, as she saw large cracks spider-webbing across the wall of ice that formed the back of the cavern. And before she had a chance to process this new development, there was a tremendous rending howl, the sound of something giving way before unfathomable pressure, and then suddenly something dowsed her in freezing water.

It was as though a firehose had just been turned on her. Instantly, she was swept off her feet, buffeted to the ground, coughing and sputtering as a stream of water like a horizontal geyser blasted her. Gasping for air, she crawled through freezing water on her hands and knees until she was out of the direct line of fire, and able to stand up without being knocked off her feet again. Only then did she turn, and see that the back wall had ruptured, splintering and cracking like a glass windshield, and through the foot-wide hole that was left, an entire ocean of water was pouring in.

"_**If you persist in warring against yourself, nobody will be able to save you from the consequences."**_

CRASH.

Yet another booming sound, quieter than the previous one, yet still enough to make Raven jump, and she turned to the sheet of ice that separated her from Beast Boy. But instead of Beast Boy, there stood a bighorn ram, green of fur and white of eye, its horns pressed up against the shuddering ice sheet. As she watched, the ram backed away and lunged forward, smashing its horns into the sheet of ice. The blow sounded and looked hard enough to simply crush any thickness of ice, yet it shivered and shook and somehow held against it.

Dropping the sodden and useless torch into the swirling water, Raven tried to stay on her feet as it rushed and roiled around her, rising up her legs, past her waist, past her stomach, rising ever-higher as it poured into the cavern. She felt the chill of it like knives being driven into her body, a chill she had never before experienced or even imagined, colder somehow than the ice around it, colder than death, a liquid cold, not merely devoid of heat, but devouring it, swallowing every erg of energy in her body as it rose inexorably upwards.

The blows against the ice sheet came faster and faster, harder and harder, as the ram shifted and shook and suddenly exploded into a rhinoceros, then a bull elephant, and then a full scale stegosaurus so large that it could barely fit within the truncated cavern, slamming its spiked, armored tail against the ice with blows that could have staved in a steel blast door, and yet did not suffice to even chip the sheet that imprisoned her.

"_**You can't rely on anyone else to fight your battles for you. This evil was brought into the universe by your creation. You will be responsible alone for what becomes of it."**_

The water was up to her chest now, so cold that it seemed to tighten around her like a straitjacket, squeezing the air out. She gasped for air, her throat refusing to open to admit it, the roar of the water all but drowning the insistent, earth-shattering impacts from Beast Boy's ever-more desperate attempts to punch through the intervening ice. It topped her shoulders, swirled around her neck, whiplashing currents beneath the surface threatening to sweep her off her feet. She raised her head as far as she could gasping for air, moments before the water closed over her head entirely.

Quiet descended like a thick blanket, all sound gone save for the eternal rushing of the streaming water. Her cloak hung around her neck like an anchor, dragging her down as she struggled to unclasp it, her numb fingers refusing to work as commanded. Desperately, she pawed at the water, trying to force her way to the receding surface, but the cold seemed to suck the very life from her body, and she could generate no force. The chill tightened around her like a vice, wiping away the world outside. Even the currents seemed to die. And when at last she could no longer hold it, she barely felt the air leaving her lungs, watching it instead as it bubbled towards a non-existent surface, vanishing into a descending black fog.

But at that moment, something happened that even the cold could not suppress.

What it was, she could only determine in hindsight, for all she felt was a sudden, powerful jerk, as though the entire world had been violently turned on its side, or lifted into the air and shaken. Swept from her feet, she spun underwater in three dimensions, chunks of ice the size of water coolers striking her and bouncing away again. Stunned and caught by surprise, she inhaled reflexively, water cold as death itself pouring into her throat. She coughed, retched, bright lights flashing before her eyes, so cold and disoriented that all sense of where she was vanished into the wind. And as the last vestiges of Raven's dwindling strength finally deserted her, her eyes slid shut as she opened her mouth and inhaled one final time.

And found air.

Warm air.

The air flooded into her like nectar, displacing what seemed like gallons of icewater, which she coughed and spat up for an indeterminable amount of time. And once that was more or less done, she simply breathed the heavy, warm air that was miraculously all around her, her entire consciousness, her entire essence focused only on the mechanical miracle of being able to breathe. It could well have been hours before she finally became aware that she was no longer suspended within an endless void, but laying on her stomach on something soft, wet, and quite clearly alive.

She opened her eyes, not that this did any good, for her surroundings were pitch black. Gently, she raised herself onto her hands and knees, feeling the surface beneath her. It felt spongy, with a rough but giving surface that kept it from being slick, and it seemed to not merely tremble but pulsate beneath her. The hot, heavy air swirled around her in what seemed like every direction simultaneously, accompanied by deep, atonal sounds, like a badly-tuned pipe organ played by an epileptic. Only now did she notice that the air had a strong scent to it, an unpleasant, bacterial smell that would ordinarily have set her to coughing, but her lungs had not yet recovered enough to be discriminating. Feeling around with her hands and feet, she found that she was on a small, elevated island, surrounded on all sides by water which was still cold to the touch, but warming rapidly as the hot air washed over it.

Her equilibrium returning, albeit slowly, Raven chanced a thought for where, in all the universe, she could possibly be. Shivering violently, despite the warm air, she drew her dripping wet cloak tightly around her shoulders, and chanced a sound.

"B-... Beast... Boy?"

There was an immediate reaction, though not the one she had hoped for. A loud, blaring, foghorn-like sound rent the air, a toneless groan like the creaking of giant icebergs, and suddenly she was thrown to the side, and back again, as whatever she was kneeling upon lurched this way and that. Vague sounds of some distant cataclysm, heavily filtered as though by distance or some other separation, floated through the air. Things crashing to the ground in ruin, shattering before some irresistible force, all of it muted like an avalanche heard from a great distance. And then suddenly there was light, dim but visible, coming from somewhere to the right. Tinted green, filtered as it was through a thickly opaque membrane, it barely served to illuminate Raven's immediate surroundings. Yet it was enough for her to see that the spongy island she sat upon was also green, dark and emerald in color, and so was the ridged roof of the cavern. Indeed, the only thing in this place that wasn't green proved to be several enormous plates of white bone, each nearly a dozen feet long, attached to each of which were entire forests of long, fine bristles.

And then, with a sudden flash, Raven realized where she was.

Gradually, the sound of collapsing ice faded into nothingness, replaced by the same low groans that had been present before, but this time more understated, rhythmic, in time with the air currents that ebbed and flowed around her. Huddled in the gloomy cavern, she waited expectantly for something to transpire, but nothing did, and it was some time before she realized why.

"Can I... can I come out?" she asked aloud.

The response was immediate, as from somewhere before her, the cavern split wide open, admitting both dazzling light and a cold wind that whistled through the brush-like bristles. Beneath her, the spongy island she sat on shifted and moved, the water around it draining away, enabling her to stand and gingerly walk forward, stepping out of the cavern onto the open ice beyond, before turning around to face the entrance.

But of course what she saw was no cavern, natural or otherwise. And though it was more or less exactly what she expected to see, that made the sight no less astonishing.

Before her, half-embedded within the wall of sheer ice, was the largest living thing Raven had ever seen. Of this she was absolutely certain, even if her memory of times before her imprisonment in this frozen hell was fragmentary and painful to dredge up. A hundred and thirty feet long and twenty tall, it loomed above her like an ocean liner, its watermelon-sized eye staring down at her as a fluke that could have carried a mid-sized car gently slid back and forth over the empty ice. But unlike any whale Raven had ever heard of, this one was green, not solid but painted in fantastic patterns and subtle shades, its back and head a deep evergreen, while its underside was the color of fern leaves, while streaks of everything from teal to neon ran down its body in stripes broad or narrow.

Ignoring the cold, Raven stared up unabashedly at the half-million pound whale wedged securely within what she had thought a large cave in the ice. The cave was no longer there, for large though it was, it could not accommodate a whale this size, whole or in part. Looking at the ice face that ran round the whale's circumference, formerly solid, now riven with cracks and missing chunks, Raven understood. She did not know with what force Beast Boy's sudden changes in size, shape, and mass were accomplished. Perhaps he did not either. But whatever the force was, it had been sufficient to rip the entire cave apart, sending chunks of ice the size of power boats avalanching down onto the plain around her. Enormous gashes, large enough for her to have climbed inside, were torn in Beast Boy's head and back and the few parts of his tail she could see, but he did not seem to writhe in pain or even notice them, simply looking down at her expectantly, if whales could express such sentiments with their eyes.

Exactly what he was expecting, she had no idea, but bereft of any other notion of what to do, she fell back on his name, once more.

"Beast Boy?"

There was another formless rumble, strong enough to shake the ice beneath Raven's feet, and suddenly Beast Boy shrank prodigiously, sending an avalanche of loose, suddenly-unsupported ice crashing down from the now-empty whale-shaped cave. For a second, he was lost from view behind a cloud of ice particulates and falling hail. But by the time she had brushed these away from her face and looked again, he was climbing back to his feet, the enormous lacerations from before reduced to little more than scratches on his scalp or his black and purple uniform. And then, stepping around massive chunks of ice he had effortlessly held aloft seconds before, Beast Boy walked up to Raven, knelt down in front of her so as to look her in the eye, and... somehow... managed to smile.

"Hey," he asked with a beaming grin, "are you all right?"

It was the tone that did it, really. Beast Boy could have asked that question in a thousand ways. He could have asked it quizzically, perfunctorily, even with real concern and fear that she had been injured, but he did not choose any of those. The way he asked it, with a grin on his face and a sparkle in his eye, was like a joke. As though the notion of her being anything besides all right was farcical.

She blinked. Twice. And then when his grin didn't go away, something simply popped inside of Raven, all strength spontaneously left her limbs, and like a puppet with her strings cut, she simply fell.

But she didn't hit the ground. And for once, she knew that she wouldn't.

Beast Boy caught her effortlessly, not even needing to transform for the occasion. He said something, something soothing, or maybe funny, or even completely idiotic, she had no idea, for she didn't hear him. It wasn't that she didn't care to pay attention, or that her ears had stopped working. It was that for the first time in... essentially forever, she no longer felt afraid. And like a weary pilgrim come home after years in exile, all she could do was lay there as the world, for once, did not seek to chase her down.

How long it was before Beast Boy stood up, lifting her up with him, she had no idea. But at some point, she became aware that he was carrying her at shoulder height, and opened her eyes to see him standing before the endless wall of ice that loomed before them.

"_**You can trust nobody. None who are not bred to understand the unfathomable evil you represent will be prepared to accept the risks you entail. They will fear, hate, and reject you forever."**_

"So," asked Beast Boy with a grin, "you feel like going for a climb?"

**O-O-O**

_'And now the STORM-BLAST came, and he  
Was tyrannous and strong :  
He struck with his o'ertaking wings,  
And chased us south along._

**O-O-O**

Someone was shouting his name. Someone close by.

There was an awful lot of noise, general noise, the sound of bricks shattering and wood splintering, fires roaring and rocks clashing against one another. But those sounds had occupied his entire world for long enough that it no longer was surprising, nor even worth notice. What _was _worth notice, what he was trying his damnedest to keep his mind on, was a familiar voice calling his name, and the inexplicable feeling of something rough scraping against his back.

"David! Wake up!_"_

It was the desperation in the words that made him open his eyes. It was the sight he saw with them that made him pay attention.

Terra was crouched over him, one hand grasping the back of his collar, the other held up like a ward against what appeared to be a nuclear firestorm emanating from somewhere in front of them both. Great sheets of earth and stone burst from the ground at her command, shields against the nuclear fires that boiled and churned just yards away, but each shield in turn was blasted to pieces almost contemptuously, shredded like tissue paper by gouts of flame that seemed to burst forth from every surface at once. Desperately, Terra dragged him backwards over the broken ground, while simultaneously trying to ward off the flames with one hand and half her mind. It was a battle she was plainly losing. And as soon as she saw David's eyes flicker open, she released his shirt and grabbed his shoulder, pulling him up as hard as she could while literally screaming a command down at him.

"_Move!_"

David moved.

His head still reeling, David managed with Terra's assistance to clamber to his feet and keep them, staggering like a drunk as he ran from the fires behind, the broken staff still clenched in one hand. The street behind them destroyed, they ran now through a parking lot of some sort, surrounded by the ruined forms of vehicles large and small. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw nothing but a whirling vortex of flames obscuring everything beyond it save for a single faint shadow in the shape of a man, brandishing two thin spires of living fire.

"Look out!"

Another tremendous blast, this time from somewhere in _front_ of them, sent a ruined taxicab pinwheeling their way. Facing the wrong way, David turned back without enough time to react, but Terra grabbed him by both shoulders as she dove to the ground, dragging him down with her as the taxi passed overhead. David landed on his side and glanced back in time to see Devastator step out of the roaring flames, deflecting the taxi he had just thrown at them with a wave of his sword.

To their right, a small stone wall lined the side of the parking lot, and it was to this that Terra extended her arm, clenching a fist before sweeping her arm towards Devastator. Instantly, fifty of the largest stones burst out of the wall at her command, hurtling towards Devastator like the pellets from an enormous shotgun. Devastator whirled in place, spinning sword and cane alike back and forth across himself, and a dozen of them exploded, scattering the others like so much debris, but the deflection cost him time, and Terra used it to struggle to her feet. She reached down and pulled upwards as though lifting an invisible weight, and dredged up two more boulders right through the tarmac. Rather than throw them directly, she clapped her hands together, and both stones shattered into a thousand pieces, before a frontal shove sent the entire mass of fragments hurtling at Devastator, a mass of shattered stone that, surely, even he could not destroy.

Yet destroy it he did. Without missing a beat, Devastator stepped forward and lifted his sword like a magician's wand, and twisted it, and the entire mass of stone simply disintegrated in a hail of explosions so rapid that they sounded like a single roar. What fragments were not blasted apart were thrown every which way by the concussive shocks of the others, and not a single pebble got within ten feet. Smiling, he raised his other hand, the one holding the cane-sheathe for his flaming sword, and performed his favorite trick, blowing a car from behind him into the air before sweeping his hand forward and hurling it at the two teens with a rocket-propelled explosion.

But not this time. This time, David had ideas of his own.

The explosion went off all right, but instead of sending the car flying at Terra and David, it dropped it like a meteor directly at Devastator's head. Devastator had only bare instants to abort his own explosion and throw himself backward, before two tons of steel slammed into the ground he had just occupied, missing him by inches. Lest that seem like a reprieve however, before Devastator could possibly recover, David stretched his staff and mind out towards the car, found the keypoint within it, and blew the entire thing to pieces.

The smoke and flames cloaked whatever effect the explosion might have had, but neither David nor Terra were prepared to wait. Without hesitation, Terra pivoted, reaching behind her and tearing stones out of the ground the size of shopping carts, hurling them indiscriminately at Devastator's position, while David, scrambling back to his feet, reached to one side and blew a car of his own into the air before launching it at Devastator like a cruise missile, not even stopping to see what effect it might have had before turning and seizing another one. Cars and boulders alike smashed into the area Devastator had occupied, detonating either of their own accord or at David's command. Neither David nor Terra was willing to cease fire, and they deluged Devastator's position with projectile after projectile, until the parking lot was empty of cars, and the ground cratered like a moonscape from the rocks ripped out of it. Only then, with adrenaline failing and exhaustion returning, and with no ammunition left to fling, did David and Terra stop.

Breathless, doubled over with the effort, David half-stood, half-knelt on the ground, his head raised towards the scene of incomparable annihilation into which he and Terra had just deployed enough fire to destroy a battleship, an area at the edge of the parking lot choked with flames and smoke and the smashed remnants of two dozen cars, motorcycles, and minivans, covered in a layer of shattered stone and earth three feet thick. Beside him stood Terra, hands on her knees, watching for the same signs of life that David was sure he would see any second now, too exhausted to do anything but stare. She chanced a glance at him, wordlessly, but he did not say anything. There was nothing to say. And for an eternity, five seconds, eight, ten, twelve, they waited and watched and dared, perhaps, to hope.

And then there was a dull boom.

The dullness was due to distance, for these new blasts were not direct attacks, but emanated from someplace reasonably far away, so far that neither David nor Terra reacted to them immediately. Slowly, David stood back up, as did Terra, and they peered into the shrouded air, and sought to see what could possibly have caused these new noises. Gradually, their eyes made out dim shapes floating in the distance, shapes that seemed to dance and twist and slowly to grow larger, oblong and rectangular shapes that David was sure he knew but could not immediately identify, not at least until they grew large enough to resolve, and, all at once, he realized what was happening. One of Devastator's favorite tricks was to blast cars into the air for use as ersatz missiles, but these objects were not cars.

"Oh my _God_..."

They were tractor-trailers.

Terra's reaction, as always, was more pragmatic.

"_Run!_"

The first truck, a sixty-ton gasoline tanker, landed thirty yards behind them and exploded like a bomb, but the blast was drowned out almost instantly by the impacts of its fellows as eighteen-wheel trucks rained down from the sky like javelins. Pulses of intense kinetic force buffeted them as they ran, hurling them off their feet again and again as pieces of debris sized from screws up to truck wheels flew in every direction like bullets. And as the trucks rained down, light posts and shattered walls and bits of the broken parking lot began exploding around them of their own accord. Terra's summoned walls of rock and earth, David tried desperately to ward off the nearest projectiles with explosives, but it was all in vain, barricades of sand to ward off a tsunami of violence, and all they could do was run.

Ahead loomed a huge building, a factory perhaps, or warehouse, made of brick and cement with no windows and enormous double doors of solid iron. No words did Terra and David exchange, yet they both ran for its tenuous shelter, whatever help that might provide against Devastator. They were within fifteen yards of the doors when an entire cement mixer landed directly behind them and detonated, and one of the cab doors hit Terra square in the back at automobile speeds, driving her into the brick wall of the factory like a bug on a windshield.

"_Terra_!" shouted David, and ducking under some new piece of bodywork-turned-shrapnel that hurtled his way, he skidded to a stop and raced over to where the door now leaned against the wall of the factory. Grabbing it with both hands, he shoved it off, revealing Terra laying motionless on the ground, her head hanging limp and eyes shut, blood running down her face. He grabbed her arm, shouted her name, but she did not respond.

For an instant, he despaired of moving her, thinking in some momentary fantasy that he might have to stay here and ward off the incoming debris with his own powers, but his rational brain had finally fought its way back to the forefront, and instantly dismissed this notion as lunacy. Whatever the risk, to remain here was suicide, and so he grabbed her arm once more, pulled it around his shoulders, and clumsily lifted her up, half-supporting, half-dragging her towards the entrance to the factory. The doors were shut, locked, and chained, but he blew the locks and chains off with a wave of his hand, shoved one of the doors open, and flung himself and Terra inside. The door slid shut behind them, and there was silence.

Not absolute silence, of course, but close enough, the sounds of world-ending destruction outside muted by thick brick and solid metal, and the difference was so stark as to be almost calming. For a moment, David paused, and still holding Terra up, took stock of his surroundings.

The building was some kind of factory, it seemed, but what was made here, he couldn't tell for sure. It looked like a smelting plant, or at least like pictures of what he assumed one would look like, with enormous steel basins designed to pour liquid metal into casting moulds below. The dark shapes of enormous machines, purpose indeterminate, lay scattered over the factory floor, and overhead were gigantic metal storage bunkers and cisterns for holding bulk freight of some sort.

A soft moan and a twitch from Terra brought him back to the immediate problem. He moved, limped really, deeper into the factory, still holding her up as she slowly came to and found her footing once more. He had no idea where they were going, but if the factory had a backdoor, or even a wall he could knock a hole through, they might be able to escape into the city and figure out...

"Oh no..."

Terra opened her eyes, and gasped.

The entire back half of the factory was missing. In its place, the factory floor simply ended at the lip of an enormous chasm filled with boiling lava, as though the earth had opened up underneath the factory and ripped it in half. The far side of the chasm was completely invisible behind the haze of smoke and ash, and might well have been a mile away for all either of them could tell. There was no escape.

Behind them, the doors to the factory exploded.

Both David and Terra jumped, and spun around in time to see the mangled remains of the doors fly over their heads and disappear into the chasm below. The maze of machinery blocked them from seeing all the way back to the doors, but neither one needed to ask who it was that had just entered.

Stepping back almost reflexively, until he was standing at the edge of the chasm, David tried to think of something, anything that he might do, some weapon he could use to ward of Devastator. But though the metal shapes of the machines about the factory beckoned, he knew they would do no good, no more than the cars had. Helplessly, he turned to look at Terra, but plainly she had drawn an equal blank. In perfect condition, Terra could have summoned a flying stone to bear them away, or solidified the lava behind them to form an escape route, but she was simply not up to any such thing any longer. Barely able to stay on her feet, exhausted and bleeding, her hands trembled at her sides as she tried to summon her powers once again, but while a few nearby pebbles trembled at her feet, nothing rose to her command. Terra was spent. And Devastator was coming.

"I... I can't," she whispered, more to herself perhaps than him. Gritting her teeth and squeezing her eyes closed, she managed to force a piece of coal next to her to lift into the air, but only for a few seconds. All at once, the coal fell back to the ground, followed moments later by Terra herself. She landed on the floor next to the lip of the chasm like a boned fish, unable to muster the strength even to stand.

Scarcely in better shape than Terra was, David considered nonetheless pulling her to her feet and trying to find another way out, but the unmistakable sound of approaching footsteps dissuaded him. He turned sharply back towards the entrance to the factory, too sharply, for he lost his balance and slipped, nearly plummeting off the edge of the chasm. Desperately, he waved his arms and managed to avoid falling, turning back as he did so in time to watch the piece of coal from before tumble over the edge, spinning down into the chasm and hitting the side of the chasm. The coal shattered on impact, exploding into a cloud of black dust which flitted down into the lava chasm and disappeared.

David suddenly froze.

Sitting helplessly at his side, Terra fought to recover her breath. "Where..." she stammered, "where can we... we've gotta hide... find somewhere to - "

"Terra," said David, suddenly. "Don't move."

Terra paused, blinking in confusion, but whether by David's command or because she was simply too tired to move anyway, she remained where she was, as David turned back towards the factory, took a deep breath, and lifted his broken staff.

There were two booming explosions, and then a deluge.

Above them, in the rafters, two gigantic storage bunkers burst like pinatas. One was a water cistern, designed to pour water down on the factory in case of runaway fire or other emergency. Sealed tight against the storm outside, it held some fifty thousand gallons of water, water which now voided down onto the factory like a biblical flood. Terra yelled as the water drenched her, then coughed and gagged as it poured into her throat, and grabbed onto anything nearby to avoid being swept over the side of the chasm by the flash flood. Beside her, David had grabbed hold of a steel support beam to prevent the same, as thousands of gallons of water rushed past them, flying over the side of the chasm before striking the lava and exploding back upwards in thick, billowing clouds of steam.

The other container was no cistern, but a storage bunker filled with coal, no doubt intended to feed the furnaces of the smelting plant. David's explosion blew it apart, dropping twenty tons of loose coal indiscriminately into the factory. Yet the effect was no avalanche, for the majority of the coal, packed into loose briquettes for easy burning, was shattered by the destruction of the bunker. Thus, just as the water began to drain away, Terra found herself enveloped in a cloud of thick coal dust, which boiled through the factory like a pyroclastic cloud, mingling with the steam to form a shroud of black smoke, and with the remaining water to form a deep black sludge.

Coughing uncontrollably, half-drowned by the water and half-suffocated by the coal dust, David and Terra ducked their heads and fought desperately for breath. Were the factory intact, they would assuredly have been smothered, but the open half allowed much of the smoke to vent away, and the steam suppressed enough of the rest for them to find a pocket of air. Beside him, David saw Terra wheezing and coughing, and he opened his mouth to explain why he had just done this. But then he heard footsteps right in front of them. And when he lifted his eyes, there was Devastator.

He loomed up out of the darkness of smoke and steam like an apparition summoned by some baleful sorcerer, his sword in one hand flickering with fire, the cane in the other shimmering with the same. The light of his powers twinkled in the inky twilight, framing him in red like a god of destruction. His coat was soaked at the fringes, his shoulders and hair sprinkled with coal dust, yet it seemed that none of these violent explosions had harmed him in the least. Standing now, less than ten feet away, he did not even seem to be having trouble breathing.

Glancing back at Terra, David saw within her frightened eyes some reptilian instinct awake, a portion of her psyche that cared nothing for pain or exhaustion, but that recognized this fire-bearing swordsman as Death incarnated, and which resolved, since escape was impossible, to sell her life as dearly as possible. It was a sight he had seen before, in the pit in the library when she had been unexpectedly confronted by himself and Raven both, and he knew what it augured. She tensed up, focusing her powers for one last effort, visibly preparing to strike a final, defiant blow.

But before she could, David reached out and grabbed her, holding her back, and when she turned her head, he simply stared at her wordlessly but with an intensity that could have melted lead. The message was perfectly clear, and he saw the instinct die in her eyes. And having seen it, he simply turned back to face Devastator, holding his breath against the smoke and steam.

And nothing happened.

The smoke and steam boiled around them like living things, thick, but not thick enough to obscure Devastator, who stood before them and did not act, his blank eyes staring into the roiling fumes like searchlights. He did not strike, he did not even move, save for turning his head slowly back and forth, his gaze passing right over them more than once. At any instant, he might have lunged forth and finished them both off, and yet instant after instant passed by, and he did no such thing. David's lungs pleaded for air, and yet he did not dare take a breath, for fear that it might dispel what little magic it was that was holding Devastator at bay..

And then, suddenly, Devastator began to laugh.

It was a short one, for no sooner did he begin than the smoke filled his lungs, and he coughed and retched and covered his nose and mouth with a gloved hand. Yet still he chuckled, smirking at some private joke that he did not appear to see fit to share with the rest of the world. Moving with absolute deliberation and care, he raised sword and sheathe and carefully slid the former back into the latter, locking it in place with a twist of the cane's handle. And then, spinning the cane around lazily before resting it on his shoulder, as though he were without a care in the world, Devastator turned away from Terra and David, and nonchalantly walked away, disappearing into the dust and smoke.

**O-O-O**

_And through the drifts the snowy clifts  
Did send a dismal sheen:  
Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken-  
The ice was all between._

**O-O-O**

It was at least ten seconds after Devastator left before before Terra permitted herself to breathe again.

Next to her, David flopped down onto the ground like a puppet with its strings cut, as though Devastator's disappearance had drained all the strength remaining in him. He lay in a puddle of coal-dusted water, the smoke and steam still billowing around him, soaked to the skin and covered in thick coal gunk, as of course was Terra. For a time he simply breathed, looking like he might well pass out then and there on the edge of the lava pit.

Terra, frankly, might well have done the same, but exhausted as she was, she needed to know what had just happened. "Hey," she whispered, less from secrecy and more because it was all she could manage at present. "What was _that_?"

David wearily managed to lift his head, and even managed a small smile, a euphoric smile, like he was punch drunk. He might well have been. "Camouflage," he said.

Terra blinked. "Camouflage?"

"He's blind," said David softly. "He can only see us through Devastator. So... I thought maybe we could hide."

Terra shook her head. "But..." she protested weakly. "But he was... right there."

David nodded. "Yeah," he said. "But Devastator doesn't see with light. To Devastator we're not people. We're just... collections of molecules or particles. He sees things based on what they're made of. So... I thought maybe if I filled the air with coal dust and steam..."

She still didn't see. "Coal and steam?" she repeated.

"Carbon and water," said David with a smile. "Just like us. He couldn't tell us from the background. To him it probably looked like we got swept over the side. And even if it didn't, he can't find us in all this, he'll have to wait for it to clear."

Something, relief maybe, swept over Terra like a blanket, and heedless of the sticky mess that now coated the floor, she lowered her head to the ground, resting it on a soft pile of the same waterlogged coal dust that she was presently covered in. Her limbs felt like they were made of lead, and it was a fight just to keep her eyes open.

From where she lay, she couldn't see David, but she felt the need to whisper an explanation anyway. "I just need a minute," she said weakly, "and then we can go."

"No."

No explanation followed that soft declaration, and slowly, painfully, Terra lifted herself up on elbows to look over at David. "What?" she asked.

David was sitting up, straight up, staring into the impenetrable gloom where Devastator had disappeared. He looked like he might pitch over at any moment, his hands trembling, rocking gently back and forth as though having trouble maintaining an even keel. Yet he did not fall over, and he did not turn his head. For a moment, it looked like he hadn't heard the question. But just as Terra was about to repeat herself, he answered her.

"I'm not done here yet."

That tone. That tone was in his voice again, the one she'd heard that night in the catacombs of the Jump City library when she had pleaded with him to come with her to visit Slade. That tone, neither bombastic nor even loud, the one that came over him when he was past anger, his psyche burned down to a simple declaration, for all Terra could tell made as much from incoherent intransigence as any principle.

"What are you talking about?" asked Terra. "We have to get out of here, find the others, get away from him until we can come up with a plan."

He took his time replying, his red, glowing eyes cutting searchlights in the dusty air. And when he did answer, it was the same tone, dismissing everything she had just said with a single word.

"I'm not going anywhere," he said.

"Then what are you gonna do?" asked Terra, who had a sinking suspicion that she already knew.

"I'm gonna find him," said David, "and I'm gonna kill him."

"And how the hell are you gonna do that?" asked Terra, suddenly wide awake. "Walk up and hit him with that stick?"

"If I have to," replied David. "I don't really care how."

"You're out of your mind," said Terra. "You _can't _kill him. He's practically a cosmic being!"

"_Devastator_'_s_ a cosmic being," said David, still not turning his head. "But that guy's human, just like me. If I can die, then he can too."

"Not while he's got that kind of power," said Terra, and when David didn't answer, she put some force into her voice. "Look at me for a second."

David turned to her, his grey skin now covered in a layer of black mud, through which his red eyes burned holes like glowing coals. The effect was that of some kind of demon, an effect she studiously ignored.

"I'm more powerful than you," she said directly. "You _know _that. And he's way, _way_ more powerful than me. I thought maybe I could hold him off for a little bit while you got away, but I couldn't. I only lasted as long as I did because he wasn't really trying. If you go up against him, he will kill you _dead_. You _can't_ beat him."

"Then come with me," said David. "Help me take him down."

"_I_ can't beat him either, David," said Terra, forgetting that they were supposed to be quiet. "Neither of us can, not even together. He's _that_ powerful. You saw what he could do, the skyscraper, the trucks, that nuclear ball of ice. He killed four of the Titans at once." She took him by the shoulders, resisted the urge to shake some sense into him. "You _have _to trust me on this one," she said. "I've been doing this a lot longer than you have. I've fought all kinds of different people. He's the most powerful metahuman I've _ever seen_."

"Yes, he is," said David immediately. "And if we don't stop him now, what do you think he's gonna do? He told me he was going to hunt the other Titans down and kill them. They couldn't stop him all together as adults, what chance do they have of stopping him now? Separated, with Trigon's army all over them and no Robin? He'll cut them down like paper targets."

Terra hesitated. "Then... then let's go now. We can find the others before he does. Get them all together. Maybe with _all _of us, it might just be enough to - "

David shook his head violently, throwing off Terra's grip. "No!" he said. "Don't you see? That's _why _he's here. That's why Trigon brought him back! Not for me, for _them_. He's Trigon's trump card! His weapon of mass destruction."

"What do you mean?"

"Trigon lost before," said David. "The first time he woke up, before Warp changed the timeline, the Titans beat him. They got together, and they found a way to win. Trigon _knows _that. So this time, he brought back someone he _knew_ could beat all of the Titans put together, an ace card, someone who could smash them _all_ if they looked like they were gonna do what they did before. He didn't just do it to torture me. Trigon doesn't _care _about me. He did it to stop _them_. We get everyone together and try to fight Devastator like that, and he'll blow _everyone_ away. He's done it before."

"But if he's actually that strong, David, how are _we _supposed to stop him?"

David didn't answer immediately, but he did not look like he was struggling for words. "I don't know," he said at last. "But I know someone who does."

Try as she might, Terra could not think of who David could possibly be referring to. "Who?" she asked.

David's demon-red eyes didn't shift a millimeter. "You."

Terra blinked. "What?"

"You know how to beat him," said David. "As far as I know, you're the only one who does."

"What are you _talking about_?" asked Terra, frustration welling up into her voice despite her best efforts. "I don't have any idea how to stop him. If I did, I would've done it."

"No, that's just it. You do know. Or at least you're the closest thing to someone who does."

Terra regarded David as though he had just asked her to swallow a moving van. "Are... you sure you're okay?" she asked.

David gave an annoyed groan and shook his head. "No, Terra, please. Listen to me. I know you're powerful, but Raven was stronger than you. _Robin_ was stronger than you. But when you went up against them, you beat them _both_. Nearly killed them. I don't know how you did it, but I know it couldn't have been through brute force, because you don't _have_ enough brute force to break Raven. Nobody does. So how did you do it?"

Terra closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and forced herself to remain calm. "I... did research," she said. "Slade and I both did research. We came up with a battle-plan based on what I knew about them. It took weeks."

David nodded. "So?"

A flash of frustrated anger shot through Terra. "So _what_?" she exploded. "I _knew_ Raven, I knew Robin, I'd been living with them for months. I was a traitor, remember? I don't know _this_guy at all, I've never seen even seen him before!"

"Yes you have," said David.

Terra's words died in her throat, her anger quenched as though someone had thrown water over it. She stared into David's shrouded face and blood-drenched eyes, and suddenly couldn't think of anything at all to say.

David spoke instead. "Slade sent you to kill me," he said. "You'd met me before. You saw me fight Cinderblock. But even with all that, you didn't know how powerful I was gonna be when you took me on. _I_ didn't even know that. I know you were stronger than I was, but even so, you _had _to have a battle plan. You'd have been an idiot not to."

"It didn't work," said Terra.

"Trust me, it _almost_ worked," said David. "If Raven hadn't stopped time, it would have." He leaned forward, reaching over and putting a hand on Terra's shoulder. It felt cold.

"Terra," he said, "you _have_ to tell me what your plan was. How were you gonna kill me?"

Slowly, Terra lowered her, head, bringing her hand up to her face and rubbing her eyes. "You don't understand," she said at length. "It won't _work_ here."

"It might," said David.

"No, it _won't_," said Terra sharply, looking back up. "You want to know what the plan was? The plan was to make you upset. Not just upset, _panicked_. Scared and desperate and unable to think."

"Why?"

"Because I'm a Kinetic, and you weren't one, and I knew that, even if you didn't. Kinetics like me, we _explode_ when you make us that angry, we can't control ourselves, we start destroying everything around us. But when I saw you fight Cinderblock, there was none of that. No control problems, no random explosions, nothing. The only things that went off were the things you wanted to. Even _Raven_ couldn't control herself that well, and she'd been trying since she was born. That's how I knew that you just worked _different _than everyone else. You needed concentration, calm in order to make your powers work. So I pushed you. That's why I kept talking while we were fighting. I wanted to push you over the edge. Force you into driving Devastator so hard that you couldn't maintain it." Terra exhaled and closed her eyes again. "And it worked. Sort of."

"So why wouldn't that work here?"

"Because you had something to be _afraid _of," said Terra. "I needed to push, _really_ push, to get you to lose your focus. I knew you were too angry to be afraid of me, but I guessed you might still be afraid of what the others would think. That's why Slade and I set it up the way we did. We knew that you'd never..." her tongue caught, she saw the hesitation in David's eyes, but she forced herself to continue. "We knew you'd never... had anything like them before. And I knew how hard it was to think of them... hating you." Something sharp and cold stabbed through her stomach, but only for a moment, even as she felt David's hand tense up.

"That's why it won't work, David, not against him. I know you're the same person and everything, but... he never had that. If he's afraid of anything, I don't know what it is. It was hard enough to push _you_ into losing control, but he's got thirty years' more experience with Devastator than you did. I don't even know if he _can_ lose control. And even if he can, whatever his trigger is won't be the Titans. I know they're your friends, but they were his arch-enemies. I don't think he _cares _what they thought of him."

David didn't answer, at least not immediately, staring off into space as though he had temporarily forgotten that Terra was present. He remained silent for a space, five seconds, maybe ten, until finally, he looked back up, his expression hidden behind red light and black coal mud.

"Maybe not," he said, his voice hoarse, his searchlight eyes cutting beams through the darkness, but he sounded distracted, as though he had half-forgotten where he was, lost in his own head perhaps or somewhere else. And then, slowly, he stood up, and began to walk away.

"Hey!" called Terra, before she could stop herself. "What are... where are you going?"

"I'm gonna find out who's opinion he _does _care about," said David.

"Are you out of your _mind_?" replied Terra, not caring who heard her this time, scrambling to her feet as she called after him. "I just told you, it won't - "

"I heard what you said," said David, turning back sharply.

"Then what the hell are you doing? You can't talk him down. He's a mass-murderer!"

There was no expression on David's face as he answered. "So are you," he said softly, giving no reaction as Terra froze in place. "So am I."

They stared at one another for a time in the eternal twilight of the ruined factory.

"Go find the others," said David finally. "Help them. Get them all together again. They were able to stop Trigon once. Without me interfering, they can do it again, especially with your help."

"And what the hell are _you _gonna do?"

David took a deep breath, and slowly slid his hand down to the broken staff now clipped at his side. "I'm gonna make sure I don't interfere," he said.

"You can't - "

"I _have_ to! I'm the catalyst. I'm what separates this time from last time. The Titans can beat Trigon, but not if some version of me gets in the way. And that's exactly what's gonna happen if I don't stop it." He paused, but Terra did not answer, the words falling out of her brain before they could be properly assembled. "You know I'm right," he said at length.

"How are you gonna stop it?" she asked.

"If Devastator can't find me, he'll find the Titans," said David. "So he has to find me."

A chill descended over the area, despite the open lava. And though no words were spoken, Terra knew immediately that it was hopeless to remonstrate further. As though to signal the same, David took a deep breath and sighed, before turning and walking away.

"Find the others," he said as he walked off. "Help them do what they did before. Help them win."

"David..." said Terra, lifting her head. "If you do this, he's just gonna kill you."

David stopped, holding where he was for just a moment. "Maybe," he said at last, turning his head back to Terra, the twin red beams from his eyes dowsing her in light, "but I'm not running away from myself anymore." And turning away one last time, David walked off into the darkened factory and disappeared.

**O-O-O**

_And I had done an hellish thing,  
And it would work 'em woe :  
For all averred, I had killed the bird  
That made the breeze to blow._

**O-O-O**

She stood on the battlements of the black fortress, surrounded by the bodies of her friends, a jagged spear still sticking into her chest, and stared her enemy in the eye with the pitiless gaze of an extraterrestrial warlord. And in the eyes of the man opposite her, she saw only shock, astonishment, and to no small degree, fear.

For one, fleeting moment, Starfire permitted herself the time to fix this moment, this scene, the sight and sound and scent of all that was transpiring here, locking it within her memory forever, as the moment when she knew, whatever else might happen, that Warp knew that all his plans were about to come undone.

"You wished for vengeance, Warp?" she asked him. "_Let me show you what vengeance is._"

And then she became someone else entirely.

In a single, fluid swoop, she lunged forward, energy pouring from her eyes and hands, energy so intense and hot that it appeared not green but solid white, scything the very air apart. The wave blocked Warp, the balustrade he stood before, indeed the entire castle from view, obliterating everything in a retina-scouring burst of dazzling light. But Starfire's retinas were not made of the same stuff as those of a human, and in a hundredth of a second, she saw through the blinding glare of her own incarnated rage, as Warp scrambled back, an opaque black shield manifested before his extended hands. Smoke rose from the shield as gigajoules of energy poured into it, setting it to shaking like a leaf in a hurricane, yet ultimately it sufficed, if barely, to hold the tide back.

But if Warp thought himself safe, he was rudely mistaken. The shield could contain Starfire's energy bolts, but right now, in this place, nothing alive could contain Starfire herself.

Not half a second after her energy beams drenched the entire area, before Warp could even think of some fresh conjuration, Starfire herself slammed into the shield fist-first like an artillery salvo. There was a fractional instant of resistance, a moment of harsh, electrical current coursing through her fist and up her arm. And then the shield simply shattered, flying apart like a pane of glass, and the last thing she saw was Warp's wide eyes and petrified countenance before she collided with him like a meteor, and then everything collapsed.

There was a hard shock, followed by several more, each heavier and thicker than the last, and the sound of stones clashing against one another. Starfire felt herself striking something hard and unyielding, and feeling it crack around her as she rolled and slid and finally ground to a stop, laying on her side, covered in flecks of pumice stone and obsidian. Behind her lay a carpet of black rock, the smashed remains of the castle wall she had just driven Warp through. And before her, off to one side, lay Warp, surrounded by the shattered remains of the balustrade he had been standing beside, swaying like a drunk as he sought to recover his balance and rise to his feet.

Starfire was no less shaken than Warp, but unlike Warp, she had experience with the gyrations of physical flight, a Tamaranean's solid sense of balance, and most importantly of all, all the fury of a howling storm to drive her on.

Kicking rocks the size of cannonballs off of herself, she rose to one knee and fired a starbolt at Warp, hot and powerful enough to melt through lead. Warp raised his hand, conjuring another shield, arm-sized this time, and it absorbed the shot, but as before, Starfire didn't wait to see it strike. The next bolt she threw was her own body, and this time Warp had no defence. She could not hit him as hard, but the half-charge, half shoulder-ram she dealt him slammed him into the far wall hard enough to knock chips of stone from it, leaving him to sway and stagger to retain his fragile balance.

"Is this not what you desired, Warp?" she asked, catching her breath and infusing herself with energy once more. "Did you not wish to see me in pain? To see me suffer and cry at what you had done? Did you imagine I would melt before your tortures, and beg for your twisted mercy?"

Growling in frustrated anger, Warp suddenly vanished in a flash of light. Yet rather than stand and blink and wonder where he might have gone, Starfire turned on one foot, reaching behind herself and catching Warp's fist with her open hand. His fist was shrouded in black energy, shaped by his will into the form of a cruel dagger, which sliced into her palm. Yet she did not blink, or flinch, or even hesitate, closing her hand around the psychic blade moments before she seized Warp by the collar, pivoted ninety degrees, and pitched him over her shoulder onto the floor of the chamber hard enough to crack the flagstones. The impact shook her like an earthquake, but she did not hesitate, dropping to one knee as she drove her fist down as hard as she could at Warp's frightened face.

Warp managed, barely, to roll to one side, evading the strike by bare inches, leaving Starfire to hammer an eight inch divot into the granite floor with her empowered fist. Yet as he rolled aside, he foolishly chose to arrest his motion and roll up to one knee, raising a laser from his wrist, aiming it in her general direction, and firing. The range was too short to miss, but Starfire did not care what he shot at her, and even as the laser burned into her shoulder, she retaliated with a shot of her own, a starbolt brimming with fire and rage, that blasted him clear across the room, and left him crumpled in a heap against the far wall.

Rising to her feet once more, Starfire reached over with her other hand and clasped her injured shoulder, feeling the heat and the burned flesh from it, willing back the pain by burying it in her own rage. On the other side of the room, Warp slowly crawled back to his feet, staggering like a drunk, his golden armor smoking and dented, his mouth smeared with red blood.

"Well here you have it, Warp," said Starfire, spitting out the words like a bad tasting liquid. "This is your victory. These are the fruits of your labors." Her eyes blazed with nuclear flames, a seething reactor of incandescent fury that seemed to set the very stones to tremble. "_This_ is what it is to break a Tamaranean," she intoned, her voice distorting with rage. "This is what it is to break _me_. This is your reward."

Her hands engulfed in raging fire, Starfire clasped them together in front of her chest, extending them towards Warp like a cannon.

"I hope you enjoy it," she said. And then she let go.

The flash was blinding, even to her, and the roar of exploding energy, displaced air, and crumbling stone, was enough to force her back a pace or two. She raised her hands to her face to ward off the flying debris. And when she lowered them again, Warp was gone.

So was most of the wall.

Carefully, Starfire made her way towards the gaping, smoking hole in the wall. Beyond it, a lengthy corridor, broad and tall like the hall of some king or baron, loomed in the distance. Butressed by flying stoneworks and laden with rich tapestries, all bearing the Mark of Scath, the hallway echoed with every step she took. Starfire knew better than to assume that Warp's mere lack of presence meant anything concrete concerning his survival. And so she walked on, ears primed for any sound, eyes for any sight, of the elusive teleporting devil-servant. She reached the threshold, stepped over it, entered the hall, and then stopped as something caught her eye.

Down at the end of the hall, there sat a great altar of black stone, covered in a cloth of unmarked sable, atop which were various objects. Iron braziers were mounted in a semicircle around it, each burning with a sickly green flame, though the light scarcely sufficed to illuminate the black altar. Glancing this way and that, looking for the sudden sheen of gold springing upon her, Starfire approached the altar with caution, moving in close enough to identify the objects, until suddenly she stopped.

The objects were a motley lot, a chalice, brimming with a dark red liquid she could not identify. A set of what might have been embalming tools or even torture implements, laid out in a triangle within a circlet of gold. A book with an impossibly dark cover, that seemed to grow and recede as she stared at it, from which the faintest sound of whispering could be detected. But what stopped Starfire was none of these strange objects, but the one mounted in the center of them all, one that seemed oddly out of place in the midst of all of these tools of the occult and the damned. The object in question was a gun, a rifle of some sort, futuristic of look, polished chrome and blue steel. Pressurized tanks of some compressed substance, covered with condensation, were strapped to its sides, connected by tubes to the center of its mass. The barrel was topped with a telescopic sight, which glowed red in the faint light, displaying numbers and tactical information concerning whatever it was aimed at.

Starfire did not know one gun from another. To her, they were all simply weapons, universal of use and intention, their specifics of no particular importance. But yet, this gun was, to her, plainly distinguished from every other that had ever existed. The distinguishing characteristics were partly that it was here, now, in this place, at the end of the world. Partly it was the vague recollections she had of the forensic reports from a month ago when everything had begun to fall apart. But mostly, it was the small symbol etched into the butt of the rifle, the sole blemish on its otherwise immaculate surface. A tiny bird, colored in red, mounted on one side in astonishing detail, such that it took her no time at all to identify just what type it was.

A robin.

And right then, before she could stop herself, Starfire simply exploded.

With a scream of incoherent rage, Starfire drew her head back and threw it forward, releasing a torrent of energy from her eyes into the black altar. Stone and metal melted, canisters and liquids exploding into boiling ruin. No blast did she fire, but a solid state beam of annihilation, rending the altar down to the floor and leaving a burning, smoking crater in its place. Only when all trace of the gun and the black altar that had supported it had been reduced to steam and smoke, did she finally stop.

But as she did, she heard a soft pop from behind her, and realized the mistake she had just made.

She spun around, fist extended, a starbolt primed and ready, and as she expected, she saw Warp behind her, standing erect now, a black shield held before him, the Book of Azar clutched in one hand, his other raised palm-forward in her direction. With a cry, she launched the starbolt, Warp had been given time to re-enforce this shield, and the bolt glanced off uselessly.

An evil sneer crossed Warp's bloody face. "Show me your vengeance now..." he said.

Starfire didn't hesitate. Roaring words of battle and violence in Tamaranean, she leaped from the ground and hurled herself at Warp, her entire form glowing green as energies incalculable coursed through her. Yet even as she threw herself into the air, she knew it was too late, for Warp did not seek to dodge or flee or teleport anew, but spoke words of his own in some arcane language she could not identify, and from his outstretched hand there leaped a ribbon of white light which whip-lashed across the hall before striking her full on in mid-air. She had time only to shout one last cry before the entire world washed out white, and then she saw and felt no more.

**O-O-O**

_About, about, in reel and rout  
The death-fires danced at night ;  
The water, like a witch's oils,  
Burnt green, and blue and white._

**O-O-O**

The mosaics on the floor were particularly intricate, swirling patterns of Parian, Tennessee, and Sylacoga marble, the work of a famous modern artist hired ten years ago to embellish the mall with something unique. But he saw only calcite mineral inlaid with low quality brass, and walked on. The ceiling was hung with Halloween ornaments, even though the holiday was not for a month and more. Jack-o-lanterns and witches and goblins cavorted up the walls and supporting columns and chased one another along the dome of the mall's rotunda. But he saw only silhouettes of construction paper and cardboard studded with LEDs and polyethylene chads, and walked on.

Statues of civilians, men, women, children, lay scattered about the mall in clumps, huddling together in groups of two and three wherever they had chanced to take shelter when the apocalypse hit. Pain was writ on their faces in the most clinical of detail, every curve of screaming mouth or frightened eye captured perfectly in petrified stasis, forever. Small children clung to their mothers' skirts, husbands and wives clasped one another in their arms, the brave stared forever from windows at the sight of their doom approaching, while the fearful took what shelter they could.

But he saw only basalt stones, piled atop one another and coated in soot and fly ash. And he walked on.

His gait was unhurried, his cane held lightly with three fingers as it tapped a soft meter against the marble floor. Past storefronts and display windows he walked, giving them only the most momentary of glances before walking on anew, no sounds but his own footsteps echoing down halls that were never meant to be silent.

Ahead loomed the central rotunda, three stories tall and capped by an intricate dome of stained glass, ringed by the remnants of food courts and confectionery shops. The glass was gone now, its crushed remains laying underfoot, while the shops and courts were burned out pyres, and he slowed only slightly as he entered the vaulted chamber, giving only the most perfunctory of glances to the left and right.

He reached the center of the rotunda, and stopped.

The ground was covered in crushed glass, dust, and cinders, but studded along the floor were a series of small black patches, smeared on the marbled mosaics as though scraped off the bottom of someone's shoe. Anyone else would have needed to crouch down and examine them in detail to determine what they were, tar perhaps, or bitumen, or simply dog droppings that someone had stepped in. But he was not anyone else, and with only a glance, he recognized pulverized carbon mixed into a slurry with the addition of water.

He sighed.

"David," he said, loud enough for his voice to echo, "this is a waste of time. I know you're in here, and I'm in no mood for hide and seek. Now are you going to come out and finish this with some semblance of dignity, or am I simply going to have to level this entire building?"

There was no immediate response. Just the muted sound of the dying city filtering in through the broken roof dome, and the crackling of glass shards underneath his feet. For ten seconds and more the man waited, alone in the midst of the ruins.

And then there was the sound of a door opening.

On the far side of the rotunda, where it tapered to meet the rest of the shops and arcade, a small utility door slid open with a click, and from it emerged a single figure, small and thin, a teen-aged boy still slathered with streaks of slurry made from coal dust and condensed steam, his skin as grey as the statues around him, and his eyes as red as burning coals. A steel telescoping staff, broken off at one end, was clipped onto his belt, but his hands were empty, and he made no move towards it, nor did the area around him begin to tremble with the frosted preludes to supernatural detonations. The boy advanced some half dozen paces out the door, just enough to take him into the rotunda proper, and stopped.

Devastator smiled.

"You know," he said, "I half-expected _you _to try and bring the building down first."

"I don't know how," said David.

His smile broadened. "No," said Devastator, "I suppose you wouldn't, now would you?" He looked his younger counterpart over with an appraising eye. "Awful hard to hide though, when you're trailing sludge everywhere."

"I didn't have much choice."

"It was a good trick, with the steam and the coal," said Devastator. "But not good enough."

David seemed to take it with equanimity. "I thought about ambushing you from one of the storefronts," he said. "Hiding behind the glass and... I don't know... blasting something through the window. It's transparent to me, but to you it's just a wall of silicon."

Devastator considered the option for a moment, shrugged and nodded. "It's not the worst idea ever," he said. "But while I'm blind, I'm not stupid. I do remember what it was like to be able to see through glass."

"Yeah," said David. "And I remember what it was like to not."

Neither one said anything for several moments.

At length, Devastator took a deep, almost theatrical breath, sliding his cane up lightly in his hand. "Well," he said. "I suppose we should resolve this little matter, now shouldn't we?"

David did not stir from where he stood, nor reach for the broken staff at his side. Instead he narrowed his gaze somewhat, and calmly spoke, his voice even and calm.

"You mind if I ask you a question?"

Devastator raised an eyebrow either at the unexpected request, or at the manner it was phrased in. "And what's that?" he asked.

David took a deep breath, steadying himself, before replying. "Why am I still alive?"

Devastator's brow furrowed with confusion. "Say that again?" he asked.

"I think you heard me," said David, crossing his arms in front of himself and staring evenly at his counterpart. "Why am I still alive?"

Devastator did not answer immediately, watching his teen-aged counterpart as though looking for a hidden weapon. "I suspect you'd need to ask Terra that, now wouldn't you? I assume she's the one who brought you back."

"She was," said David. "But I don't need to ask her. I need to ask you."

Devastator let the cane slide through his fingers until the tip landed on the ground. "Look, if you're trying to make some kind of obtuse philosophical point, this really isn't the time or place."

"You killed the Titans," said David. "I watched you do it. You killed all four of them together in less than ten minutes. Even Raven, who's fifty times more powerful than I'll ever be."

"To be fair, she had the minor disadvantage of being unable to hurt me," said Devastator.

"The others didn't," said David. "But you wiped them out anyway. You even killed Robin by popping an artery in his brain. I didn't even know Devastator could do that."

"Long practice can accomplish wonders," said Devastator. "What's your point?"

"My point is that you slaughtered them. All of them. And six hundred other people besides. People with guns, and grenades, and armored cars. That was a fortified compound that they were barricaded in and you tore it apart like a cereal box. Slade, Brother Blood, even Trigon, none of them were ever able to do what you did. You're a killing machine. You're the most perfect killing machine I've ever seen."

"I try," said Devastator.

"I know," said David, unfolding his arms and slowly stepping forward, into the rotunda. "Which is why I can't figure out why, when it was time for you to kill me and Terra, you just started throwing cars in the air."

Devastator smirked. "You have something against cars?"

"No," said David. "I've used them too. But I've been doing this for nine months. You've been doing it for thirty years."

Devastator raised his eyebrows, staring at David like he couldn't decide whether or not to laugh. "Are you actually critiquing my combat style?"

David did not seem to perceive the joke. "I'm wondering," he said, "why you starting throwing cars, and trucks, and bits of the street around, and making lots of smoke and noise, instead of just _killing_ us."

"The idea _was_to kill you."

"Really?" asked David, and he stopped, staring at Devastator as though trying to peer right through him. What he was looking for, and whether he found it, he gave no sign, but after a few moments, he began to walk towards the older man, his pace slow and careful.

"I had two dozen birdarangs attached to my belt," said David. "You blew every one of them apart individually. But all you needed to do was target the belt itself." He gestured at the belt at his midsection. "It's titanium steel, easy stuff. You could have torn me in half with it, but you didn't."

Devastator let that comment sit, as David carefully closed the distance, giving no sign of what he thought of the question.

"You blew an entire skyscraper apart, just to show me you could," continued David. "But when you lost sight of us in that factory, you just turned and walked away." He spread his arms wide. "You knew we were in there somewhere, why not just vaporize everything within half a mile?"

Devastator stood motionless, watching as David continued to approach, step by step. "You make it sound so easy."

"Please," said David. "I saw you draw enough thermo-kinetic energy out of atmospheric gases to freeze _nitrogen_. My entire life, I've never been able to do gasses."

"You never wanted it enough," said Devastator.

"You conjured a bomb powerful enough to flatten a city block out of thin air, _literally_." He stopped again, now less than ten paces away. "But I'm still here," he said. "And I'd like to know why."

"I'm going to guess that you have a theory?" said Devastator.

"Yeah," said David. "And I don't think you're gonna like it."

A smirk crossed Devastator's face. "Well, heaven forbid, David, that we should ever disagree."

David watched him in silence for a few moments.

"What happened to you?"

The smirk disappeared.

"Excuse me?"

"What happened?" repeated David. "What changed your mind. What did... _this_?" He gestured at Devastator's coat and gun, his hidden sword and the various accouterments concealed within his coat.

"Changed my mind?" asked Devastator, enunciating each word slowly. "What exactly gives you the idea that my mind ever changed?"

"Stop it," said David. "Just stop it. You know what I'm talking about. You and I are the same person. Until nine months ago, we lived the same life. So what the hell happened?"

"The Titans happened."

"_**Bullshit!**_" roared David all of a sudden, and his shout was like a banshee's scream in a quiet field, so visceral and angry that even Devastator flinched. "_Bullshit_!" he repeated, stabbing his finger at Devastator accusingly. "The Titans had _nothing_ to do with it! Nothing at all! And _you know it!_"

"Is that so?" hissed Devastator.

"It _is_ so!" shouted David. "I _never_ wanted this. Not _ever_, not even before the Titans. All this... this... _death_. The swords and guns and ruins everywhere, I _never wanted any of it_! It's the whole reason I never _touched_ Devastator. Because I knew where it would lead!" He paused for breath, rubbing his eyes and flinging away the moisture, before rounding on his counterpart once more. "And I don't give a _damn_ if you think it's stupid, because _you didn't want it either_!"

"You're awful certain about what it is that I did or didn't want."

"That's because I still remember it well," said David. "For me it wasn't that long ago, less than a year. For you though... I don't know. Maybe it's been too long, and you can't remember anymore. Or maybe you just convinced yourself that it had never been this way, because when you're running around murdering thousands of people at a time, it's probably pretty inconvenient to be reminded that there was a point when all you wanted was to be left alone."

"Are you done?" asked Devastator acidly.

"No," said David. "And you know it. Because I still don't have an answer to the question you've been waiting for me to ask since I showed up here." He folded his arms once more, staring his counterpart in the eyes like a judge facing down a defendant. "What happened?"

"The question I've been _waiting_ for you to ask?" asked Devastator, peering down at his counterpart like a scientist examining a microbe.

"Ever since you showed up," said David. "Ever since you found out what I've been up to for the last year." He paused, looking Devastator over once more. "And if you ask me, I think _that's_ why I'm still alive."

Devastator's dead eyes went wide, and an instant later, he raised his cane, and there was an explosion.

A small blast, all things considered, concentrated in the marble floor of the rotunda, right beneath David's feet, powerful enough to hurl him back into the wall, where he struck and fell, sliding down it onto the ground in a cloud of marble and coal dust. Devastator advanced towards him, still holding up the suddenly-burning cane, stepping over the pothole he had just blasted in the floor.

"You stupid little _shit_," said Devastator, and he sounded good and angry now. "Is _that_what you think this is?" He swept the cane through the air like he was slicing invisible stalks of wheat, marching towards David. "I've seen the same movies you have, remember? You think I'm one of those costumed idiots who monologues about how the world sold him short when he should be finishing the job? The talking killer, I think they call it?"

"I think," said David, wiping his mouth as he pulled himself back to his feet, "that I'm not the only one here that Trigon had a surprise for. I think you've been asking yourself the same question I have since this whole thing started. Because that's what we do. We second-guess, we ask questions. We can't not." He coughed, spitting grey blood mixed with coal dust down onto the mosaic-inlaid ground, as Devastator slowly lowered his cane once more, watching him in silence. "Robin kept telling me that I needed to stop that. That I had to learn to trust my instincts, instead of second guessing everything I did."

"Did he?" asked Devastator, stopping in front of David.

"Yeah," said David. "But I could never figure out how. And you may be... a _million_ times more powerful than I am..." He stood up straight, bracing himself against the wall. "... but if you really _are_me, then I bet you never figured it out either."

"So now I'm Darth Vader?" asked Devastator

"I don't know _what_ you are," said David. "But I bet you don't know what I am either."

"I know _exactly_what you are," said Devastator with a snarl.

"Do you?" asked David, and he stepped forward, off the wall, his eyes bathing Devastator in red light. "Do you really? It's not churning around in your head, the obvious question?" He opened his hands skyward, as though inviting a reply. "You're a supervillain, a contractor, whatever the hell you call it. You're the most powerful Metahuman I've ever heard of, you've got a body count in the tens of thousands. But you just found out, that with one _small_ change, Warp pushed me into the company of the people you've spent your _entire life_ trying to kill. Your arch-enemies, the people you hate more than anything in the world."

Devastator's hands clenched and unclenched around his cane, as though he were being pulled in multiple directions, but he said nothing, staring only into David's eyes with his own empty orbs.

"And you can lie to me all you want," said David, "tell me I'm stupid or I'm wrong, I don't care. But you and I both know what we were like before any of this happened. You went off, and turned into the exact thing that we were _both_ afraid of becoming. I turned into something else." He took one final step forward, to within sword range of his counterpart, his eyes unblinking. "And I _know_," he said finally, "as sure as I'm standing here, that you're thinking the same question I am." He folded his arms, planted his feet, and stared directly up at Devastator. "What happened?"

"I _know_ what happened to you," said Devastator in a voice that was a growl.

"No, you don't." said David. "And neither do I."

Devastator said nothing.

"The Talking Killer talks," said David, "because he wants the hero to understand him. You may not be the Talking Killer, but I'm not the hero. I'm something a thousand times worse. I'm proof that you could have been something else. All your lectures, all your bullshit about how you're the smart one, you made the right call, and I'm such an idiot? I don't even think _you_ believe that. You're not gonna tell me what happened because you want someone else to understand you. You're gonna tell me what happened because we're the same person. And if you can't convince _me _that you were right, then how the hell are you gonna convince yourself, now that you've seen how easy it was to step aside?"

Silence fell over the rotunda, the scarred man and the ashen boy facing one another motionlessly. Devastator's cane still burned in his hand, but he did not raise it, nor conjure more fire, watching instead the child he had once been as he stared him down in the midst of ruin.

"Now I'm gonna ask you one last time," said David, slowly and carefully. "What _happened_ to you? And if you don't answer me, then I'm gonna pull this staff, and I'm gonna _make_ you kill me. Because I can't beat you, and I know that, and so do you." He laid his hand on the broken staff at his side. "But if you kill me without answering my question, then I swear to you, for the rest of your life or whatever the hell you have now, you will _never_ be able to convince yourself that you are anything but a liar, a murderer, and a coward. Because you'll know that I died, thinking exactly that."

Devastator said nothing as David fell silent, did not move, did not even blink. The cane in his hand was as steady as a statue, his frame entirely motionless, he did not even seem to breathe. David for his part remained as still as his counterpart, and they stared at one another as year-long seconds ticked by, one after the next.

And then, all of a sudden, Devastator lunged at him.

It was like a cobra's strike, so fast that David did not even have a chance to shout. The fiery cane burned like a branding iron, but it was Devastator's other, empty hand that he led with. In a single, fluid motion, so fast that there could be no resisting it, Devastator fastened his hand around David's throat, and squeezed.

The grip was like a vice, crushing weight fueled by molten fury and God-knew what else, and David gasped, and choked, and grabbed at the hand that clenched his throat uselessly, even as he felt himself being lifted into the air. Devastator loomed over him, hoisting him up, staring into his eyes with dead orbs and an ice-cold expression that could have quenched all the fires in this burning world. For three, long, horrible seconds, Devastator regarded his younger self in stony silence, as David gurgled and squirmed uselessly. But at length, he slowly lowered his arm once again, and lightened his grip, letting David's feet find the floor and his lungs the air. And as David gasped for breath and coughed uncontrollably, Devastator leaned forward, staring the child he might have been in the eyes.

"Tell me, David," he said, his voice as raspy and as sharp as a diamond-tipped sawblade. "Have you ever heard of a place called Arkham?"

**O-O-O**

_Her lips were red, her looks were free,  
Her locks were yellow as gold :  
Her skin was as white as leprosy,  
The Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she,  
Who thicks man's blood with cold._

**O-O-O**

"So... Cyborg opens the door, and we're all standing there, and Robin says that since he left the Titans, he has to be initiated all over again. And that's when you showed him the dress."

Frankly, Raven didn't understand what Beast Boy was getting at with this story. It might have been because he seemed to assume that she could remember everything that had happened, and was racing through it without pause or hesitation. It might have been because he wasn't a very good storyteller, too prone to running off on tangents every time something he said reminded him of another "hilarious" moment. But all things being equal, it was probably because she was currently holding onto him for dear life, trying to avoid looking down at the ten thousand foot drop that yawned beneath her.

Beast Boy stopped laughing long enough to realize that Raven wasn't joining him, and shrugged as he reached for another handhold. "I guess you had to be there," he said. "Or... well I mean you _were _there, but I guess you can't remember yet. It'll be really funny once you remember, I promise."

The wind whistled across the icy wall, as Raven held onto Beast Boy's back as tightly as she could, reciting her mantra to herself in tones so low she wasn't sure if Beast Boy could hear her or not. She remembered that there had been a time when she had not been afraid of heights, but it was an academic knowledge, without context or meaning. The dark, wind-swept abyss beneath her, so vast and profound that she could no longer see the bottom, was far more real than any half-remembered moments of bravery.

Besides, heights weren't anything special. There had been a time when she wasn't afraid of anything at all, or near enough. No longer.

Beast Boy shook violently beneath her, and for the thirtieth time, Raven's breath caught, thinking that he was about to throw her off or that she was slipping. Yet for the thirtieth time, the tremor was merely him shifting into a more commodious form to tackle some particularly difficult section of climb, as mountain goat or snow leopard or giant octopus. Each shift made her feel like she was about to fall, yet with each shift, he caught her again effortlessly, positioning his body in such a way as she would wind up on his back or in his paws or gripped by sucker-laden tentacles. So it proved now.

Beast Boy wasn't afraid, or at least didn't seem to be, either of slipping and falling, or of dropping Raven, an attribute Raven assumed was tied to the fact that he could, at will, turn into an eagle or bat. Yet every time he had done just that, shifted into some gigantic flying bird or reptile and tried to bear Raven up in that manner, the howling winds had instantly gone from gale to tornado, and forced him to abort. As a result, they were forced into this much slower, much more treacherous method of climbing the ice wall, not that Beast Boy seemed to mind.

"_**Reliance on others is the mark of immaturity. It is a road that leads nowhere."**_

Raven grimaced silently and knotted her fingers tightly into Beast Boy's fur, and wished, with all her might, that the voice might stop talking. Belatedly, she realized that it might help if she had known where this particular road was leading.

Beast Boy had suggested climbing the ice, and so they had climbed, and climbed, and climbed until the frozen wasteland below was shrouded in darkness, and there was nothing in the world except the wall. Yet why he had chosen to climb was beyond her. To her, it seemed entirely possible, indeed reasonable, that this wall might prove to be infinitely high, an impossible barrier surrounding the inescapable prison to which she had been banished. She had not asked Beast Boy what had caused him to decide that this method was an escape route, precisely because she was afraid of the answer. Right now, she preferred to hold onto the hope that Beast Boy knew what he was doing, rather than risk confirming that he did not.

"So... um... what _do_ you remember?"

It took Raven a few moments to realize that he was asking her a question, and only then did she realize that she hadn't even noticed him shifting back into his human form beneath her. She opened her eyes to find that he had spotted a thin cleft in the ice that could serve, with difficulty, as a walkway, and had clearly judged it easy enough that he could afford to indulge in further conversation.

Of course, it didn't take much for Beast Boy to indulge in that...

"I..." she said nervously, "I don't remember much. Just fire... and... his voice inside me..."

"_**This secret shall be your burden to bear from this moment until the day you achieve your destiny. There can be no other way. You must guard it as you would your own life, for it is far more dangerous than any enemy could ever be."**_

"Oh..." said Beast Boy. "I um... I didn't mean from... that. I meant from before. From the Tower?"

"The... Tower?" asked Raven. Towers dominated her fragmented memory, towers of stone and slag, towers of steel and glass, towers that were prisons and havens, and towers that were actually monsters made flesh. Try as she might, she couldn't separate them all in her head.

"Yeah," said Beast Boy. "You remember the Tower, don't you? Home?"

Run her brain though she might, Raven didn't answer. Home was something that happened to other people, an abstract concept of no bearing on her life.

As always, Beast Boy saw a gap in the conversation, and immediately inserted himself into it. "You remember the time that I tried to get Cy with a water-balloon full of motor oil?" he said breathlessly, such that despite not being able to see his face, Raven could practically _hear_ the grin. "I had this whole contraption set up to shoot the balloon into him. You tried to warn me that Starfire was coming, but I didn't listen and it shot her instead." He laughed. "Star wouldn't talk to me for like a week after that, but I still think it woulda worked if I'd planned it better." He paused, seemingly thinking things over. "You know... she never actually told me what a 'wuserloop' was... I'll have to ask her when this is all over." He turned his head half-around to glance at Raven. "Do you think she ever told you?"

Raven didn't even know where to begin with that one.

Beast Boy shrugged. "I still think she makes half of that Tamaranean stuff up, anyway," he said with a grin. "I would."

As before, Raven didn't answer, but Beast Boy did not appear in the slightest put out by that, and simply began relating some new incident that had apparently happened involving Starfire mistaking a tofu sausage for some sort of alien grubworm capable of devouring whole planets. He seemed to be talking to himself as much as her, and the story made little-to-no sense in any event, involving as it did a Tamaranean purification ritual, high explosives, the Jump City fire department, and some kind of larva named Silkie. Yet he continued to relate it in his own inimitable fashion as though it were the most normal thing in the world, which for all Raven knew, it was. Yet it wasn't the content of the story that she was listening to. It was the tone, the easy familiarity of events that were weird and yet harmless, the casual manner in which he spoke of friends, of places, of things ordinary and non-threatening in the present tense, that seemed so totally removed from where they were, and what her world consisted of, now and forever. It was like opening a book in a language she didn't know, and finding pictures inside of normal, happy people doing normal happy things. It was warm, inviting, even comforting.

_**"Refusal to accept what is, instead of how we wish things were, is inexcusable cowardice."**_

"_Stop it!"_

Beast Boy stopped in mid-step as Raven let out a scream that could have woken the dead. Raven didn't even notice that he'd stopped, her eyes clenched shut, fingers tightly clasped around Beast Boy for fear that they might otherwise release him entirely and claw at her own head. By the time Raven even realized that anything had happened, and opened her eyes once again, Beast Boy had slid her off of him and knelt down to her level.

"Raven?" he asked, but she didn't answer him, too occupied in trying to calm her breathing down, trying to remember what the lesson was for that, whether she was supposed to clear her mind or focus it on a telepathic symbol. The monks disliked it when she mixed those two up.

"R... Raven?" asked Beast Boy again, shaking her gently by the shoulder. "I... what'd I do?"

She was still barely able to speak, but she was able to shake her head no. "Not you," she managed to choke out between tense breaths. "Not..." her tongue caught, and she turned away, feeling the first signs of tears beginning to well up in her eyes.

Yet when she tried to turn away, Beast Boy cupped his hand around the back of her head and gently but forcefully turned her back. "What's going on?" he asked, and there was fear in his eyes this time, worry, all the things that sat so poorly with him. "Is it Trigon? Is he trying to... do something?"

The name was enough to conjure an immense mental effort, if only to forestall Beast Boy using that name again. "No," she said, forcefully. "Not him. Not now."

"Then... then who is it?" asked Beast Boy.

_**"What you undergo here is by necessity unique. Your circumstances being what they are, there is no one else who will ever understand the need for it."**_

Her voice was a mere whisper by the time she could force the name out.

"Azar."

As with everything down here, saying the name made it all the worse.

"_**You cannot escape your destiny by wishing it away."**_

She tore away from him, gripping the sides of her head with a fevered intensity, feeling her fingernails dig into the skin of her temples as she tried to force the voice to stop by main force. But nothing she could do, no gesture, no recitation, nothing could stop the awful monotone, not harsh and violent but reasoned, patient, wise, inexorable. A voice like a judge or prophet, pronouncing wisdom that could not be gainsaid.

"_**We are not afforded the chance to choose the circumstances of our birth. But we are afforded the chance to choose what we make of them. You have the choice between life and death, Raven. If you choose death, you will never be able to blame another for the consequences."**_

"Raven!" shouted Beast Boy, and there was nothing gentle or restrained about his voice this time. He grabbed her from behind, ignoring her violent struggles, lifted her off the ground and pinned her against the ice, forced her hands down to her sides once again and held them there as she writhed and squirmed uselessly, for he was not only twice her size, but at will could become fifty times larger, should it serve his purposes. In the event, however, he did not expand and grow, but remained where he was, not even venturing to ask her what was the matter, simply holding her in place until her struggles subsided and she slumped down, exhausted and defeated, tears sliding down her face to boil away in the sub-arctic cold.

"That book of yours," said Beast Boy. "The one that tried to eat me that one time? You called it the Book of Azar. That ring Slade gave to Cyborg was the Ring of Azar. So who's Azar?"

Raven tried, unsuccessfully, to fight back the tears still spilling out of her eyes. "She... taught me," she said, not even sure herself if that was true or not. "She taught me everything."

"But... then is she here or something?" asked Beast Boy, looking puzzled but worried. "Can... you can hear her?"

Raven couldn't bring herself to answer in words, and nodded instead.

Beast Boy blinked, but did not ask any of the questions he no-doubt had, save of course one. "What's she saying?"

_**"Our destinies are not of our choosing. They are written for us by an uncaring, unfeeling universe. To curse them is pointless, to rail against them, useless. Only in understanding and accepting them is there peace. Look to Oedipus, or Sigfried, or the Aesir and their doomed stand against the darkness. In every case, the lesson is clear enough. Fighting against your destiny is the surest possible way of bringing it about."**_

Raven shook her head violently, as though to hurl whatever was clamped upon it off into the empty space beyond the ledge. "She's saying it's my fault."

He still didn't understand. "_What's_ your fault?"

"_Everything!_" she shouted. And with one final supreme effort, she tore her hands free of Beast Boy's grip. But rather than clutch at her head again, she waved them violently about, gesturing at imagined phantoms that danced before her very eyes. "All of this! Everything that happened to you, to Robin, to the others, it's all _me_!"

"No it's _not_!" answered Beast Boy, as loudly as she had. "We've all been trying to tell you since this whole thing started, it isn't your fault that Trigon did what he did."

"And you're all wrong!" shot back Raven. "You don't _understand_!"

Beast Boy held her in place, visibly searching for something to stem the torrent. "Raven, we all saw Trigon come back. We saw what he did to the world, to you. We understand it all now."

It didn't help. "No," hissed Raven through clenched teeth, squeezing her eyes shut to prevent them from leaking. "No, you don't. You _can't_." She wanted to say more, the words burned in her throat, pounding for release, but she couldn't force them out no matter what she tried.

"_**The universe has a way of ensuring that we get exactly what we deserve."**_

"Beast Boy," said Raven, opening her eyes at last, feeling boiling tears roll down her cheeks. "You can't take me out of here."

He did not understand. She could see in his eyes that he did not understand. "Why not?" he asked, only after some hesitation, testament to the conflicting replies he had considered and rejected.

"Because this is where I'm supposed to be," she said. "This is where I belong. It doesn't matter how high you climb, you can't take me out of here."

"That's _not_ true!" roared Beast Boy angrily.

"That's how this place works."

"I don't _care_ how it works, you _don't_ belong here!" shouted Beast Boy, heedless of her remonstrations. "And you're not staying down here even if you did!"

"I brought Trigon onto the Earth! I killed all of - "

"I know!" exclaimed Beast Boy. "We _all_ know, you told us all, remember?" He hesitated, just for a second. "Okay, maybe you _don't_ remember, but _I_ remember. You told us everything. You told us all the stuff you did. None of it matters."

"_**The human mind has an infinite capacity for rationalization in the pursuit of its goals. That luxury can never be yours."**_

"No, you don't understand..." she said, not angrily or violently but plaintively, a soft, weary hiss as she slumped forward in his grasp. "I killed everyone."

"_Trigon_ killed - "

"No!" shouted Raven, fire welling up within her anew. "No, no, no, no, _no_!" She clenched her fists until they turned white, breath hissing in and out from between her teeth. "I knew this was gonna happen. Azar... the monks. They told me that it was gonna happen. And I believed them. And I let it happen anyway."

Beast Boy's expression slowly softened. "Raven..." he said.

"No... you don't..." her throat closed, and she choked on the words that followed, coughing and sputtering. Beast Boy did not seek to rush her, simply holding her in place, as she carefully pieced her equilibrium back together. "I was warned," she finally said.

"So what?" asked Beast Boy. "You did everything you could to stop it once you got the warning. I don't care if you don't remember it, _I do_."

"But that's not why I got the warning!" insisted Raven. "The warning wasn't so that I could stop it, the warning was so that I could _go_."

"Go?" asked Beast Boy. "Go where?"

"_Anywhere_!" cried Raven. "Anywhere but here, where he'd come out and kill all of you! I could've... I could've gone to the other side of the universe! Even Trigon couldn't have gotten back to the Earth for billions of years. None of you would ever have heard from him again! I could have stranded him in the darkest corner of intergalactic space and left him to starve. That's what I was supposed to do!"

The last remark caught in Beast Boy's ears. "Supposed to do?" he asked. "Who said you were supposed to do anything?"

"Azar did," said Raven. "All of them did, all the monks that lived on Azarath. They... taught me everything. How to use my powers, how to watch for the signs that Trigon was coming back. They knew what was going to happen, and they told me what to do when it did. They said that I couldn't stop him from coming back, but I could make sure that he couldn't hurt anyone when he did. That was the whole reason that they took me in. That's why they taught me everything they did. So that I would know what to do when the time came."

Beast Boy said nothing this time, staring at her with his emerald eyes wide and shimmering in the ethereal twilight. His mouth hung open, not from surprise, but simply from default, as though all the things he had intended to say had melted away from him. Looking at him, Raven could practically see the understanding beginning to crystallize inside of Beast Boy, and it stabbed into her like a knife. She closed her eyes, unable to face him any longer, and turned her head aside.

"They sent me to Earth," she said, "because I had some time before it happened, and they... and _I_ wanted to try and live by myself for a while. Because every second I was in Azarath, I was reminded of what was gonna happen, and I just wanted to pretend it wasn't, just for a little while, before... before I died. They didn't want me to go, but I convinced them to let me by promising that I would do what I had to once Trigon came. I looked Azar in the eyes, and I promised her that I would leave Earth, and strand Trigon in the emptiest, blackest part of the universe. But when the time came... I didn't do it. I knew I had to, but I didn't do it. And now _everyone's _dead! And it's because of me! Not Trigon, not Warp, not Slade, _me_."

Lapsing into silence once more, Raven waited as long as she could for something to happen, anything at all, for Beast Boy to argue with her some more, or agree with her, or throw her off the cliff, or _something_. But nothing happened. He neither spoke nor moved nor otherwise made a sound, and when finally she could stand the silence no longer, she opened her eyes once more to see why. He remained where he had been, stock-still, but his expression had softened somewhat. His mouth was closed, his eyes slightly smaller than they had been before, and he appeared less tongue-tied than waiting for something, though what it was, she could not possibly determine.

"That's why you can't take me out of here," she said finally, looking him in the eyes. "That's why I can't leave." The pained, empty expression in Beast Boy's eyes was like acid burning into her soul, and she lowered her head to escape it. "I'm not supposed to be with the rest of you anymore," she said. "I'm right where I belong."

What she expected him to do at this point, she did not know. Leave her behind, perhaps, or take her and drag her further up the endless ice-wall, dismissing everything she had said as always. He had come this far for her, in the face of tremendous peril, and moreover Beast Boy was always the sort who preferred to simply pretend that facts inconvenient to his world-view did not exist. She didn't remember much of what had come before, but she remembered being driven near to madness by his obstinate refusal to take seriously anything she said, even when it was -

"Why _didn't_you leave?"

Jolted out of her recriminating thoughts, Raven blinked as she looked back up at Beast Boy. "What?" she asked.

"Why didn't you leave Earth?" he asked, calmly, as though it were the most normal question in the world. "Why didn't you do what Azar told you to?"

She hung for a moment, tongue-tied by this unexpected question, but there was no place to hide here, not from the truth, unvarnished. And so she answered him.

"I was... afraid."

Of all things, Beast Boy smiled, not his usual ear-to-ear grin, but something more subtle, a warm, inviting smile. "The Raven I knew wasn't afraid of anything," he said.

"That's not true," said Raven.

"Maybe not," said Beast Boy, "but she sure looked like it. And she never, _ever_ did something or didn't do something because she was afraid of doing it. I know that, even if you don't remember. So how come you didn't leave Earth?"

"Because..." she hesitated, still shifting in place as she tried to evade Beast Boy's absurdly calm gaze. "Because I... I was afraid. I was afraid of dying."

Beast Boy blinked, as though puzzled by a strange question. "So... you came all the way to Earth and became a hero, fought villains and monsters, all because you were afraid of dying?"

"That was different."

"Maybe," said Beast Boy, "but you wanna know what I think? I think you didn't leave Earth because you knew that we wouldn't have let you."

Confused now, to the point where it overcame her reluctance to look Beast Boy in the eye, Raven raised her head once more, arcing an eyebrow as she stared at him in puzzlement. "What... what do you mean?"

"Raven," said Beast Boy, in the tone of one stating the obvious, "do you honestly think we'd just let you run off to the end of the universe and die alone somewhere?"

Raven, to be honest, was fairly certain she had never even considered the matter. "You... you couldn't have stopped me," she said, her tone no longer remorseful, just a simple, neutral fact."

Beast Boy's smile broadened. "Oh yeah?" he said. "Just like we couldn't stop Slade or Brother Blood? Just like we couldn't stop Star from getting married to a pile of slime?"

"This is different, and you know it," said Raven. "Any time I wanted, I could have just disappeared."

"Yeah," said Beast Boy, "and we would've found you. _I_ would have found you. No matter where you went, or what hole you hid in. Between the T-ship, and Robin being Mr. Detective, and Starfire knowing half the galaxy already, there's nowhere you could have gone that we wouldn't have found you."

Raven shook her head, half in disbelief and half in simple frustration. "You don't know what you're talking about."

"Yeah I do," he said. "I know that I would have found you anywhere you went. Even if the others couldn't do it, I could. It doesn't matter if you hid in another dimension or a hundred billion light years away from Earth. I'd have found you there, and I'd have brought you home. And there's nothing you or Trigon or anyone else could have done to stop me."

So certain, so flippant was this declaration, that Raven didn't know what to think. "You..." she stammered, "you don't... I could've..."

"Dude, Raven," said Beast Boy, his smile exploding into an ear-to-ear grin that seemed to light up the very air around him. "I just found you in _Hell_. Were you gonna hide somewhere worse than _this_?"

Try as she might, Raven had no answer to that.

"It doesn't matter," said Beast Boy. "I'd never let you just disappear off into the middle of nowhere and die alone. Not ever. And if Azar or those monks who raised you had a problem with that, well that's tough."

"But..." stammered Raven, "But Beast Boy... _why_?"

If the question caught Beast Boy without an answer, it only did so for a few moments. "Because," he said, his tone indicating it was both obvious and all the answer needed. "It's _you_."

Raven felt something jolt inside her, like an electrical circuit that was suddenly completed.

And then Beast Boy was grinning again. "So, you see, it really wasn't _your_ fault that all this happened, because even if you'd done whatever Azar or the monks wanted, it wouldn't have helped, because I'd have gone out and dragged you back anyway." He smiled, his face exuding confidence, in a way Raven managed to belatedly recognize that she had seen before, somewhere. "So, I guess... really... this is all _my_ fault, not yours," he said. "And if it's my fault, then you can't belong here at all."

Raven might have said anything at that particular juncture, anything at all. But before her tired, wrenched mind could settle on any one thing to say, someone else answered in her stead.

"Well," came a voice, as sharp and hollow as death itself, "if you _insist_..."

Raven jumped, and Beast Boy jumped right along with her, but the source of the voice did not take long to identify itself. The driving wind, which had been blowing snow and shards of ice at them since they first began to scale this endless wall, parted as they turned, to reveal a massive, looming shadow that quickly resolved itself into an enormous slab of slate-grey stone. The size of a moving van at least, it was topped with a thin figure with grey skin and red eyes, sheathed in gold.

"We made this place for her," said Terra, gesturing at Raven. "But there's plenty of room."

The front half of the rock disintegrated, flying apart like birdshot into blocks the size of mailboxes. Wrapped in a golden halo, they hung in the air, just for a moment, before Terra extended her hand and hurled them at Beast Boy and Raven like a meteor swarm. Raven threw up her hands in a paltry, automatic defense, but before the rocks could impact, there was a guttural roar mixed with the sound of exploding debris, and suddenly a massive, green, leathery tail, swept her off her feet and slammed her back against a cleft in the ice ledge, hard enough to knock the wind from her lungs. Yet in moment, she recovered her equilibrium sufficiently to peer out around the enormous tail, only to see that Beast Boy had become a giant, armored dinosaur, horned and plated with thick ridges of bone, against which the stones were shattering like glass ornaments hurled against a brick wall. And when the stones were spent, the last ones sliding down Beast Boy's face and flanks and tumbling off into nothingness, he remained in place, immovable and implacable, facing down the doppelganger with narrow eyes and a horned beak that was somehow twisted into a scowl.

Still perched atop the other half of her stone slab, Terra simply folded her arms and smirked. "Bad idea, Beast Boy," was all she said, and Raven was still trying to figure out what she meant when the entire ledge that she and Beast Boy were standing upon collapsed.

No sound or sign preceded the collapse. The ledge simply sheered off as though severed by a bolt-cutter, propelled no doubt by the unsupportable weight of a twelve-ton dinosaur. Instantly, Raven found herself tumbling end-over-end in freefall, colliding with chunks of ice as large as refrigerators and scraping against and bouncing off of the wall at her side. So abrupt, so complete was the disorientation of her sudden drop that she could not have reacted to it, not even if she had managed somehow to think of what to do, and all she could do was fall.

"_**We are all vessels of life, pouring ourselves out over the longer or shorter term. Yet ultimately, we all wind up empty, spent, and finally forgotten."**_

She landed on something soft.

At full speed, she should have dashed her brains out, no matter what the object she had hit was, but the object was falling right alongside her, and the speed of impact was small enough to be borne. Landing like a beached fish on her stomach, she gasped for the air that had, for the second time in as many moment, been knocked out of her, and it was only a few seconds later that she belatedly realized that the strange objects she could feel rustling between her fingers were feathers.

Raven opened her eyes to find that she was laying atop a giant bird, larger than anything that could have ever conceivably existed on the Earth, a roc or thunderbird, or some other primordial monster derived from nothing more than the nightmares of bards and fantasy authors. Thirty feet in wingspan, the giant bird nonetheless bucked and fought through winds of hurricane force that had materialized from nothing, blowing drifts of snow into her face so fast that she could no longer even see the enormous wall of ice that could not have been more than fifty feet away. Second by second, the wind built, howling and shrieking like a chorus of the damned, gusts slamming her against Beast Boy's feathered back one moment, and threatening to rip her free of him the next. Before long, it was plain that Beast Boy could no longer fight the wind off, and he spun, flailing with his enormous wings, as Raven held on for dear life.

Ahead, the snow parted, and the wall of ice loomed before them, not smooth as it had been, but jagged, encrusted with spires and blades of razor-sharp ice. Inexorably, the wind shoved Beast Boy and Raven towards the wall, despite everything Beast Boy could do to try and force them away from it, as from somewhere upwind, they heard the mocking, uproarious laughter of a voice that sounded like Terra's tinged liberally with monomania and madness.

Collision seemed inevitable, but as the wind swept them towards the wall, Beast Boy suddenly shrank in size. Raven's hands grasped in vain as she slipped off of him, falling and spinning in all three directions, but only for a second. In less time than it took to process, she felt something soft wrapping itself around her wrist, and looked up to see a giant squid, larger than a gasoline tanker, looming above her, the wind puffing it out like a para-sail. A tentacle the size of her entire body was lashed around her arm, and as Raven watched, the dozen or so others that extended from the squid's body lashed out and snatched at the wall that sped past them. There was the sound of flesh tearing, of ice shattering, of a low, awful moan, as the tentacles grasped at the wall, slicing themselves open on blades of ice as sharp as razors, yet the suckers connected, and contrived to hold, if only for a few moments, swinging the squid, and Raven with it, around and towards the wall. Before Raven could even gauge whether she was about to be smashed or sliced to pieces on impact, the tentacle that grasped her twisted, pivoted, and brought her up hard enough to nearly dislocate her arm, seconds before she was bodily shoved into a tiny crevasse in the frozen ice, barely large enough for her to stand.

The impact was hard, but not crippling, and little though she wanted to, Raven forced herself to turn around, to see what had become of Beast Boy and Terra. For a moment, she saw only empty air, and no sign of Beast Boy at all, whether in the form of a giant squid or anything else. Desperately she searched the air, squinting and shielding her eyes from the arctic gale. But then she heard a soft whimper from, of all places, _below _her, and found him once again.

Beast Boy was hanging from a tiny corner of the ledge by one gloved hand, having resumed his human form somehow in the midst of all the aerobatics and gyrations. His other hand, and for that matter the rest of his body, dangled helplessly from the ledge, there being no room for him to so much as use his other hand to hang on. The wind whipped at him mercilessly, threatening to blow him completely off his tenuous perch, yet he did not change form again, did not turn into a gecko or grasshopper or something else that might have been able to either cling to the wall or fit easily alongside Raven on the tiny ledge, but hung there instead, his eyes closed, face contorted, and moans of pain escaping him loud enough to be heard over the howling wind.

"_Beast Boy_!" shouted Raven, though her voice was instantly blown away by the storm, and despite the risk of falling, she crouched in place and grabbed his arm with both hands. She could not pull him up, for small as Beast Boy's human form was, he was still too heavy for her nine-year-old body to lift, and there was no room for him anyway. She grabbed him nonetheless, it was all she could think to do, and from where she crouched, she saw that Beast Boy was covered in gashes, some deep and some less so. Across his face, his torso, all four limbs, the slashes seemed almost randomly distributed, despite the fact that moments ago his tentacles had been the recipients of the actual blows. But then, for a shape-shifter, who could tell how a concept like locational injury might translate?

Unable to either succor or lift Beast Boy, Raven could only hold onto him as tightly as she could while she tried to think of something. She had no idea how badly Beast Boy was hurt, if he could still morph at all, or what her plan was to be if either of those questions had bad answers to them. Yet before she could consider these issues in anything but the most cursory sense, she saw a shadow forming up far below Beast Boy, which swelled and deepened until it resolved itself once more into Terra, standing implacably upon her levitated block of stone, the wind that howled around them not sufficing to even disturb her hair.

A louder-than-average groan refocused Raven's attention on Beast Boy, who opened his eyes with apparent difficulty, looking up at Raven, and then fearlessly down at the rising form of Terra. Terra had torn another slew of stones free from her block, this time smaller ones, fist and pineapple-sized chunks of rock that orbited around her extended hands like satellites. Wedged in place as she was, Raven had no defense against such projectiles, whether Terra merely shot them at her, or commanded them to dance over and beat her brains out. Beast Boy, hanging helplessly by one hand, had even less defense. And yet, when Beast Boy, seeing what was coming, turned his head back to look up at Raven, there was, of all things, a smile, nervous and forced perhaps, but a smile nonetheless, plastered onto a face that would have, Raven realized, looked incomplete without it.

"I won't let you disappear," said Beast Boy. "No matter what."

And then he let go of the ledge.

Instantly, Raven's grip on Beast Boy's wrist melted away, and he fell in what seemed to Raven like slow motion. But before he had fallen more than twenty feet, he shimmered, and rippled and suddenly vanished right before her eyes, shrinking down to nothing in the space of a heartbeat. For a second or two, she searched for him with her eyes in vain, certain that he had simply adopted some tiny, half-invisible form for reasons unknown. The wind was still howling at hurricane force, and any creature that small would have mere seconds before being smashed to pulp against the iron-hard wall of remorseless ice.

What followed, Raven had to piece together from inference.

All of a sudden, Beast Boy re-appeared, not as a human but as, of all things, a fish. No mere trout or guppy was this, however, but a twelve-hundred pound swordfish, which materialized from nothingness, flying perpendicularly away from the ice wall towards Terra like a green streak, as fast as a speeding automobile. Only belatedly did Raven realize that he must have taken on the form of a flea, or grasshopper, let the wind blow him against the wall of ice, and sprung off of it towards Terra at hundreds of miles an hour, shortly before increasing his own mass by a factor of seven hundred thousand.

For just a brief instant, Raven saw Terra, who like her, had not been expecting anything like this to transpire, rear back in reflexive shock as a half-ton of angry, sword-wielding broadbill fish shot towards her like a guided missile. The loose stones, still wrapped around her wrists like bracelets, formed up into a shield of rock, which Beast Boy crashed into headfirst, thrashing left and right with his head to scatter the stones, slashing at Terra, who fell back to the edge of her block of stone. And then the curtain of snow and wind slammed closed, and Raven lost sight of them entirely.

But only for a moment.

A great, booming clap of thunder jolted Raven so badly that she nearly slipped from her precarious perch, and a bolt of forked lightning flash-illuminated the area for a billionth of a second. It was just long enough for Raven to catch a glimpse of the stone block in profile, and of writhing forms, human and bestial, lunging and slashing at one another with claws and horns and blades of obsidian glass. And then the darkness closed over them again, leaving only the echoes of the terrible thunder, and the distant sounds, muffled and muted by the howling gale, of screams and cries, trumpets and roars, the clash of solid rock against plates of armored scale and bone.

For what felt like an eternity, Raven simply stood wedged into the crevasse of ice, and peered into the darkness without daring to breathe, as awful, inhuman sounds filtered through the whirling air to her ears. Every so often, lightning would flash across the sky, affording her a frozen snapshot of silhouettes tearing at one another. At times it appeared that a thin, wiry human, festooned with stones and cudgels and blades of volcanic rock, stood against a roaring, leaping dinosaur. At times she ducked the slash of a raptor's claws, or the jaws of a foaming polar bear. At times she brandished her weapons before a looming, flapping beast, fel and reptilian, whose alien cries sent shivers into Raven's very soul. And at times she was frozen mid-spring, lashing forward at some hybrid shadow, a chimera of a dozen different creatures caught in freeze-frame for just an instant.

How long the battle raged, Raven could not discern. But finally, as the light from one lightning strike faded, and she prayed for another to show her what was happening, she heard a loud, brutal "crack", sharp and piercing as a gunshot, and then all the sounds of war and rage ceased abruptly.

For one, agonizing moment, she waited, willing the air to vomit forth more lightning, to confirm or deny her worst fears. But instead the stormy air parted, and the stone block appeared from within it, pitted and chipped and gouged as though by enormous scoops. Terra stood atop it, her grey skin and red eyes boring holes straight through Raven, one hand clutched at her side where a viscous, gray liquid was leeching through her fingers. But beside her, prostrate on the ground, lay Beast Boy, once more in human form, laying on his stomach, eyes closed and motionless, with red blood streaming from a terrible gash in his forehead, staining his green skin and purple and black uniform crimson.

Raven felt her heart stop beating.

Doubled over, her breathing so heavy that it could be heard above the storm, Terra, or the simulacrum of her, managed a feral, predatory grin, as she stared Raven in the eye. In one swift motion, she reached down and took Beast Boy by the collar, hoisting him into the air with one hand and letting him dangle above the stone block like a marionette. Her voice was clipped and brittle, but perfectly clear.

"You didn't seriously think _he_ could save you, did you?"

Tears welled up in Raven's eyes, and this time she made no effort to stem them or brush them aside. All fear of slipping and falling deserted her as she drew herself up, her entire body shaking in raw desperation.

"_**If you insist on dragging others into your destiny, all you will succeed in doing is sharing it with them."**_

"Let him go!" she shouted into the gathering storm. "Let him go! He doesn't belong here, I do! I'll go back with you, back down below, stay there forever if that's what you want, just don't hurt him!"

Terra's smile only broadened. "You heard him, didn't you? He'll always come after you, no matter what. And I'm afraid that we just can't have that, now can we?" She turned her head slightly, looking over Beast Boy dismissively the way a sport fisherman might examine his catch, as Raven stood uselessly on the cleft in the ice, and watched her with her heart in her throat.

"After all," said Terra as she turned back to Raven, her expression vindictive and cruel. "You don't deserve anything of the sort."

And then, with one halfhearted, almost contemptuous shove, Terra half-threw, half-pushed Beast Boy off the rock, and watched as he fell, limp and helpless, and was swallowed up in a heartbeat by the empty, yawning darkness below.

And right then, at that instant, Raven's mind collapsed.

The wind still howled, the snow still blew in drifts. But to Raven, seeing Beast Boy fall, it was as though those things had stopped by fiat or executive command. The snow ceased to be cold, the wind ceased to be deafening, and instead, a tremendous, burning, acidic sensation impaled her like a spear of incarnated pain. Like her fragmented memories of another time, long ago and yet not long, when she had been disintegrated by the radiance of a cosmic manifestation, so was this sensation, striking dead all of her previous thoughts and fears and worries and replacing them all with the sight of Beast Boy tumbling out of sight into the darkness below. It seared her insides like a raging bonfire, boiling upwards until she could contain it no longer and opened her mouth to emit a formless, wordless scream of incoherent pain, a sound neither human nor demonic, so hideous and deformed that even the evil clone of Terra drew back from it in horror. But Raven saw none of this, blinded by tears and fear and desperation, having forgotten where she was and what she was doing there, all else in the universe cast aside in one moment of supreme, absolute grief and denial, save only for one, unshakable voice, that refused, even now, to leave her be.

"_**You are death herself, Raven. Death incarnate writ large upon the universe. You play games with a destiny that could consume the very fabric of reality. And everything you touch will die with you."**_

And so it was, without any conscious thought or act, that in one, unbroken motion, the little girl who was Raven lunged forward and leaped, arms and eyes wide open, into the gaping, yawning void, plunging down into the pit after Beast Boy, leaving only a trail of frozen tears to mark that she had ever tried to climb out of Hell.

**O-O-O**

_Alone, alone, all, all alone,  
Alone on a wide wide sea !  
And never a saint took pity on  
My soul in agony._

**O-O-O**

"I didn't live in a tower," said Devastator. "I didn't live in a shining palace, with my every need catered to. I lived in Warp's future, a place where the whole world fell off the rails."

The world outside was quiet now, quieter than it had been, perhaps because David was no longer listening to it, trying to make out the sound of his nemesis approaching. His nemesis was already here, standing before him, and there was nothing else to listen for.

"What happened to it?"

Devastator shrugged. "Warp happened to it. I didn't know it at the time of course, but he changed everything through omission. Starfire's omission, to be precise."

"Warp killed her?"

"No," said Devastator. "He removed her from the world, at least for several decades, I'm not entirely sure how. The effect was the same though. Without her, the Titans fell apart. And without the Titans, all the various groups and heroes they would have inspired or helped establish either never came to pass, or gradually dissolved. Without _them_, there was nobody to replace the older generation of heroes when they retired or finally fell victim to the hazards of their profession. Within ten years... everything was going wrong."

"The bad guys won?" asked David.

"Nothing that drastic," said Devastator. "The world never _completely _lacks for self-sacrificing lunatics willing to put on a pair of tights. If they'd all disappeared, some bloody-minded psychopath with an orbital death ray would have enslaved the earth. What changed was the density. Instead of teams of heroes policing their respective cities, you had a handful of die-hards raging against the dying of the light. Every so often, someone would cross some sort of line, and one of the old guard would come out of retirement to batter them into fragments. By and large though, things didn't end with a bang, but with a whimper. Petty crime rose, then violent. Governments got more corrupt. Brushfire wars broke out everywhere. Petty dictators seized control of forgotten third-world hellholes and fought one another. Nothing cataclysmic happened, but you could feel it in the air. The world was falling apart because nobody was at the wheel. A handful of the heroes kept going. Nightwing, for instance, even Beast Boy for a while. But they were trying to bail the tide out with buckets."

"So what, you decided the best thing to do was kill the heroes that were left?"

Devastator frowned. "Don't be stupid," he said. "I had nothing to do with any of it."

"So what _were_ you doing?"

Devastator did not answer immediately, turning away and walking several paces back towards the center of the rotunda. He stopped, lifting his head and eyes to the broken skeleton of twisted metal that had once been a stained glass ceiling. And when he spoke, his voice was softer, almost plaintive.

"I was a chemical engineer."

David watched Devastator in silence, waiting for the older man to continue. And after a time, he did.

"When I left the system" he said, turning back around. "I had a GED and no real applied skills, but I _did_ have Devastator. And while I had no conception of how to use Devastator _properly_, it had a secondary use that I was very well versed in. I could, at a glance, identify the constituent materials in any object, fluid, or gas." Slowly, Devastator walked back over to David, and reaching into his pocket, he drew out a small business card. "You wouldn't think that was terribly useful," he said, extending the card to David, "but, as it turns out, you'd be wrong..."

Hesitating for a moment, David finally took the card, half-expecting it to explode in his hand. But Devastator merely slid his hand back into his pocket and stood back as David read the card.

"David Foster," read David aloud, "Senior Spectroscopic Analyst." He read the card over to himself several more times in silence. "What's... that?" he finally asked.

"Spectroscopy is essentially the study of the interaction between radiated energy and different forms of matter," said Devastator. "Essentially, we determine what things are made of. Spectroscopic analysts use lasers and other types of light emitters to analyse objects and determine what they're composed of. Except, what took them weeks of careful analysis, I could do in seconds with Devastator."

David slowly lowered the card. "And... that's a real job?"

"Oh yes," said Devastator. "I could take a core sample from an exploration dig in some god-forsaken hole in the earth, and tell in ten seconds if there were traces of gold or oil or rare earths, and at exactly what depth. I once had a construction company bring me a sample of the steel their suppliers were giving them, and spotted an impurity in the metal that would have cost them eight hundred million to fix after the fact. It's a job, David. Maybe not as thrilling as running around in a red suit and blowing up purse-snatchers, but then I didn't have a team of heroes to take me in and train me, now did I?"

"So then why did you stop?"

A hesitation, this time more noticeable, as Devastator seemed to to freeze for a few seconds. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet, almost a whisper.

"I worked for a company called Geolex," said Devastator. "A large oil and natural gas firm based in Gotham. A good company, with good people in it. Technically, I didn't have the qualifications for the job, I didn't even have a degree, but I was their best analyst, so what the hell did they care? Within two years, I was the most senior spectroscopic expert they had. After three, I was running the department. I had an apartment, friends, I made embarrassingly good money.

And I met a woman there named Stephanie..." a small tremor, barely noticeable, ran over Devastator as he spoke the name. "She was an exploratory geologist, one of the best. We were... close." He stopped again, taking a deep breath before lifting his head once more to look David in the eye.

"And then one day, I came home from Geolex, and I found the Joker waiting for me."

David froze, froze like one of the statues that surrounded him, staring at his counterpart with wide eyes and parted lips. How long he stood there, he did not know, the single name arresting in its place everything he had been disposed to say. At length, it was Devastator who, viewing David's reaction, smirked, and ventured a comment.

"I trust you've heard of him before?"

The question loosened David's brain enough to restore the connection between his brain and throat. "The... the _Joker_?" he asked, half-incredulous. "Why?"

"You're not seriously asking me to explain the Joker's motivations, are you?" said Devastator. "I was nobody. Just an analyst. I walked in the door, and there he was, along with a dozen of his goons. Turns out, he'd broken out of Arkham Asylum a few hours before. Maybe he picked my place at random. Maybe he knew about Devastator somehow and wanted to see what made me tick. I have no idea. They chloroformed me before I could even shout. And I woke up inside some demented fun-house, along with Stephanie, a madwoman in a suit of motley, a dozen criminal psychotics with automatic weapons, and the clown prince himself."

Ruined and aged though the figure might have been, to hear his own voice describe such a thing as this sent a chill that nothing else here had quite managed to engender running down David's spine. "What did he do?" he asked, certain even as he asked it that he did not want to know the answer.

"Whatever he wanted," said Devastator. "Which, given the Joker... well... I think you can imagine. And if you can't, then I'll spare you the details. Suffice to say, he was the one who did _this_."

Slowly, Devastator lifted his hand and pointed to the lifeless blanks that served him as eyes. And following his hand, David beheld for the first time up close the rough scars that radiated from the white orbs across his upper face.

"He used acid," said Devastator evenly, and David could not suppress the shudder that shot through him. "Said it was a kindness. That I wouldn't have to see what he was going to do to Stephanie. But of course, that wasn't true at all. Because I had Devastator, and Devastator let me see without my eyes." Devastator hesitated, but only for an instant. "So I got to watch," he said, "in glorious technicolor, as he beat her to death with a mallet."

David could only stare in horror as Devastator laid out what had happened simply, without hysterics. His mind dulled by everything that had happened and everything he had just been told, he asked the first question that popped into his head.

"Why didn't you stop him?"

Staring vacantly into the space above David's head, Devastator reacted to the question as though someone had just slapped him in the face. Instantly, he rounded on David in outraged anger.

"Stop him?" he asked, incredulously. "With _what_? Devastator? I had no idea how to _use_ Devastator! I was a _civilian_, a chemical engineer, not a goddamned vigilante! Could _you_ have stopped something like Joker before you met the Titans?" David recoiled before Devastator's indignation, but could not conjure up any words to meet it, and Devastator simply raged on without him. "I made a _terrible _mistake, David. I assumed that if I left the rest of the world alone, it would pay me the same complement. I was not prepared to deal with something like the Joker, not on any conceivable level. I could have armed myself with the power of Devastator, but I made a _choice_ not to, the _same_ choice you made, ever since you were old enough to suspect what _really_ happened in that car accident. And for that choice, I was tortured, and Stephanie was killed. Please do _not_ insult me by assuming that you are somehow going to find solutions that I should have thought of. I spent enough time in my own personal hell to listen to second guesses from _you_."

A thousand possible answers came to mind at once, none of them managing to force their way to the fore, and so David stood dumb in front of Devastator, and said nothing as the fire drained from his lifeless eyes, and he slowly returned to his previous, casual demeanor. Only after the transformation was once more complete did David muster the wherewithal to change the subject.

"How did _you_ survive?"

It was no more pleasant, to judge the reaction, but Devastator did not explode or shout once more. Instead he narrowed his eyes, his hand gripping the head of his cane tightly, and answered in a dead monotone that augured nothing good.

"Six days after I was taken," he said, "Batman found us. Apparently, Stephanie and I weren't the only ones Joker kidnapped. Batman broke in, just as Joker was getting ready to have more 'fun' with me. Joker had goons, weapons, death traps, but none of it mattered. In about five minutes, Batman clobbered all the thugs, beat Joker to a pulp, and... 'rescued' me. I don't remember much of the aftermath, just waking up in a hospital, with some policeman asking me questions, and promising that Joker would go away for good. That... justice would be done." He hesitated a moment. "As though that were even possible."

Slowly, Devastator lowered his head, lifting his cane casually with one hand and turning it with his fingers, looking into the silver handle as though it were a crystal ball that could summon up visions of the past.

"I was in that hospital for three months," said Devastator. "Two months into my stay, Joker broke out of Arkham again. This time he killed thirteen people with a sniper rifle before Batman caught him. Once again, he was beaten to a pulp, arrested, and dragged back to Arkham. Justice, apparently, had been done."

David said nothing, and Devastator simply sighed. "_I_ got out of the hospital eventually, returned home, but I couldn't go back to Geolex and pretend that everything was normal again. It wasn't the scars or the blindness, it was... me. People I knew, friends, colleagues, they kept telling me I had to 'let go' of what had happened. They recommended I talk to people, doctors or head shrinks that would help me 'let it go'." Devastator raised his head sharply, looking back at David with a stare that was piercing despite the lack of eyes. "None of them even considered the possibility that I didn't _want_ to 'let it go'. I didn't know what I wanted, but I wanted something. Closure perhaps, I didn't know how to describe it, but I stayed where I was, trying to find it."

David said nothing, and Devastator's eyes darted back to the cane in his hand once again. "And then, maybe six weeks after I left the hospital, Joker broke out _again_. Him and several other super-criminals. He didn't kill anyone this time, but he slashed open the faces of a couple of civilians, stitched their grins from ear to ear. A trademark I guess. His rampage only lasted a couple hours, but I listened to the entire thing on the radio, the press conference and the hourly updates, the police bulletins, and the cheers and relief after Batman swooped in to save the day, again. And as Joker was packed back off to Arkham once more, all of a sudden, I realized exactly what it was that I wanted."

"What did you want?" asked David.

Devastator looked up at him, the firelight reflecting off his scarred face and empty eyes. They stared at one another in silence, David apprehensively, Devastator coldly.

"I left Gotham," said Devastator, ignoring the question. "I went up into the mountains, into Appalachia, where nobody would look for me. Where I could prepare without being disturbed. And there, I taught myself how to use Devastator properly."

As he spoke, the cane in his hand burst once more into heatless flames in his hand, and he turned it over, as though admiring his own handiwork. "It was a long, slow process," he said. "I didn't have Robin or Raven or anyone else to teach me how to wield Devastator. I had to figure it all out for myself, practicing on rocks and trees and abandoned coal mines." He considered the matter in silence for a moment, and turned back to David with a smirk. "Then again," he said, "I also wasn't as conflicted as you were about what I was doing. I knew why I was learning to use Devastator, and what I planned to do with it once I was ready. It was an agonizing process, as I'm sure you can relate to. But after a little more than a year, I decided it was time to do what I wanted to do."

Lowering the cane back to the ground, Devastator let it burn as he held it with his fingertips, and he straightened himself up to full height before facing David and answering the question he hadn't asked.

"I returned to Gotham," said Devastator. "I told no one that I was back, I simply rented a hotel room and waited for what I knew would come. And sure enough, about a month later, Joker broke out of Arkham again. This time he tried to nerve gas a kindergarden. Batman managed to stop him before he could go through with it, and he dragged Joker back to Arkham once again. And the night after he returned Joker to the asylum, I left my hotel room, caught a ferry to Arkham Island, and once there..." a hesitation, but only a small one, "... I indulged in a bit of reciprocity."

A cold feeling seeped into David's gut as he finished Devastator's thought for him with what he assumed he was about to hear.

"You killed the Joker," he said, "didn't you?"

Devastator simply smiled.

"No," he said. "I killed _everyone_."

**O-O-O**

_I closed my lids, and kept them close,  
And the balls like pulses beat ;  
For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky  
Lay like a load on my weary eye,  
And the dead were at my feet._

**O-O-O**

"Star?"

Starfire lifted her eyes, lowering the magazine to the counter as she did so. "I am... sorry," she said as she tried to recollect the conversation from a moment ago. "What was the question you wished for me to answer?"

Robin smiled, not that anyone besides those in the room would have described it as such. The mask made it hard for most people to tell if he was happy or preparing to throw explosives at their heads. "Did you want anything besides mustard?"

"Oh! No, thank you," exclaimed Starfire. "Unless... are there any more of those wonderful spices that went so well with Cyborg's chili?"

"Um... you mean the breath mints?" asked Robin.

"Are there any remaining?" she asked.

"I'll er... check," said Robin, stooping and opening the cabinets beneath him.

A fresh chorus of beeps and bangs emerged from the television as Beast Boy's digital avatar defeated another wave of multicolored ninjas. He sat hunched forward on the couch, his tongue sticking out of one side of his mouth, glaring at the screen as he punched a fresh series of commands into the game-station controller.

"You better do better than that if you wanna take down my best time," said Cyborg, sitting next to Beast Boy with his arms crossed. "I'd have been halfway to the boss by now."

"Dude, watch and learn," said Beast Boy without glancing away from the screen for even a second. "I'm just getting warmed up."

"Sure," said Cyborg. "Look, nobody's gonna think any less of you if you just admit that you ain't got a chance of beating the reigning king of - "

There was a loud, swirling explosion of light and sound, as red flames emerged from Beast Boy's digital avatar, and every enemy ninja on screen vanished, replaced a second later by a series of large numbers. Beast Boy laughed as the figure advanced once again, and Cyborg's boast died in his throat. He fell silent, content to watch and see what Beast Boy might be able to do.

"So... how does this thing work again?"

Sitting in one of the chairs along the side of the room, David held an indigo jewel the size of a chicken's egg in one hand, turning it over as though it were some strange machine of unknown function. Across from him, Raven sat cross-legged on another chair, a similar jewel cupped in her hands.

"You're supposed to focus on the soul-stone. It'll change color as you concentrate on it, and the colors represent different states of mind. You can use those to... what?"

David was looking nervously down at the gem in his hand, glancing back up at Raven evasively.

"I er... it's just when I concentrate, I don't really see colors..."

Raven let out a low groan. "You're not supposed to destroy it," she said. "It's a meditation aid. Don't use your powers, just concentrate on it normally."

Judging from David's expression, Raven's instructions were not helping overmuch. "Um... okay..." he said, lowering his eyes to the bauble and staring into it as though expecting a picture to appear within.

"All set," said Robin, and Starfire turned back to see him sliding a plate of the worm-like substance humans called "spaghetti" over to her. She knew of course what most of the others thought of Tamaranean cooking, but the first time she'd seen spaghetti, she had nearly lost the contents of all seven stomachs. Since forcing herself to try some, she had discovered that it didn't taste anything like the Eridanian slime tendrils she had initially assumed it was related to. Nevertheless, the resemblance was so strong that she normally avoided it. This time however, the plate Robin slid across the counter to her was covered liberally with delightful yellow mustard, and sprinkled with the spices she had discovered only recently.

She dug in with gusto, even as Robin prepared a number of other portions, eschewing the mustard and mints. "So, Star... did you still want to do that patrol?"

Hesitating only for a second, Starfire quickly gulped down the mouthful of mustard-slathered spaghetti, and turned back to Robin. "Oh, yes," she said. "I should enjoy that very much."

"Great," said Robin with a smile. "Petty crime's up 20% around the park, and the police are overstretched, so these patrols should really help clean things up."

"Of... course," said Starfire. "When may we begin?"

"Well, I was thinking we'd start tomorrow. Today we'll be doing a double-training session."

A buzzer sounded on Beast Boy's video game system, simultaneous with a loud, muffled thud, as David dropped the crystal he was holding on the carpeted floor. Cyborg turned his head around with an expression of disbelief, and even Raven cracked an eye open at the news.

"Are you _serious_?" asked Cyborg. "Doubles again?"

"It's a light day," said Robin. "We might not get too many more of those. And there's some new routines I'd like to practice."

"Dude," wailed Beast Boy, "that'll be three double sessions in four days. Are you _trying _to kill us?"

"A little effort never killed anybody, Beast Boy," said Robin.

"Couldn't we have gotten a little warning?" asked Raven. "I've got some books I wanted to finish this afternoon"

"Criminals don't give warning," said Robin, a small smirk appearing on his face. "Neither do I."

David didn't say anything, but sagged his head and wearily picked the crystal up off the floor, rubbing his eyes with his free hand as he quite obviously tried to figure out how he was going to get through _this_ one. Elsewhere, the grumblings continued, but only briefly, as everyone, even Cyborg and Beast Boy, knew that talking Robin into lightening the training schedule was somewhere between an impossibility and an absurdity.

Starfire remained quiet as well, mechanically eating bites of her food as she thought things over for a little while. It wasn't until Cyborg and Beast Boy had returned their attention to their game, Raven and David to their respective crystals, and Robin to the dishwasher, that she ventured a question.

"Cyborg," she asked casually. "Did you... encounter any difficulties on Tuesday when you and David were on patrol in the park?"

"Huh?" asked Cyborg, still watching the screen. "No, nothin' really. Just a cat up a tree and a couple of lost tourists. Why?"

"Cyborg?" repeated Starfire, adding a little more force to her voice. This time Cyborg turned around, to find Starfire staring intently at him. "Did... perhaps the local law enforcement authorities _mention_ anything happening?"

She _saw_ the understanding crystallize in Cyborg's one human eye. "Oh," he said. "Um... yeah. Yeah one of the park cops said that there's been a bunch of uh... purse-snatchings?" He raised his eyebrow at Starfire, who nodded slightly. "Yeah... yeah it was purse-snatching. Said they didn't know how they were gonna stop it."

Robin turned around, his mask shifted to show that he was raising an eyebrow. "Why didn't you tell me about this?"

"I... uh..." stammered Cyborg. "Well... you see... uh."

"I... forgot to," interrupted David. "I... er... I told Cy that I'd tell you, Robin, but..."

"But," added Starfire, coming to the rescue, "he told me instead, and that is why I wanted to ask Cyborg what he discovered. I only recalled it moments ago."

Robin looked from face to face to face, his mask effectively hiding whatever he might have thought of all this. "Did the police say anything about suspects?" he asked at length, not directing the question towards anyone in particular.

"Uh... no," said Cyborg. "They um... said they didn't know if it was all the same guy or whatever. But they said that if we could step our patrols up around that area a little bit - ."

" - Then perhaps we could defeat or deter the resumption of container-theft perpetrated against the citizens of the city!" exclaimed Starfire. "Perhaps we should commence immediately so as to properly deter these acts of larceny!"

Robin said nothing, looking back and forth from Cyborg to Starfire, his mask hiding all signs of what he might be thinking, as usual. "I'm... not sure that - "

"Robin," said Starfire, straightening up and looking him in the eyes. "Surely we cannot allow such crimes to go unchallenged, can we?"

She knew she had him even before he did.

"I... guess we can start the patrols today," said Robin at last. And it was fortunate that he did so while looking at Starfire, for he could thereby not see David's sigh of relief, Raven's smirk, or Cyborg mouthing the words 'thank you'.

"Excellent!" said Starfire, judging it prudent to ignore all of the above gestures. "I have no doubt we shall extirpate this scourge from the recreational spaces of the city." Robin didn't look terribly convinced in her opinion, but he didn't object or seem inclined to change his mind, and Starfire supposed it didn't really matter _why_ he agreed in the end.

Robin sat back down at the counter, looking rather like he had just had his own handbag stolen and was trying to figure out how it had happened. Starfire suppressed the urge to smile. It would not be the first time or the last that Robin would decide to simply accept that he had agreed to this sort of thing for legitimate reasons. And if the others felt they owed her for getting out of a double training session, so much the better...

A loud burst of static-like noise came from the television, accompanied by a deep rumble that set the windows to rattling. Robin grimaced and turned his head to where Beast Boy was still cutting a swatch through the multicolored ninjas.

"Beast Boy, turn that thing down," said Robin. "You'll short out the electrical - "

There was a thunderous crash, and the entire tower shook as though an earthquake had just jolted the island it sat upon. Both Raven and David dropped their respective crystals, and Beast Boy his controller. The television, shaken from its moorings on the wall, fell silent as the cords connecting it to the speakers came loose, yet the rumble did not cease, growing louder and louder, like an approaching herd of stampeding buffalo.

"Dude!" exclaimed Beast Boy as everyone scrambled to their feet. "What gives?"

"I don't know." said Cyborg, consulting a display built into his arm. "Some kind of weird energy signal coming from outside the tower. I can't tell what it... _incoming_!"

There was a momentary flash, followed by a deafening explosion, and a shockwave so intense that it threw everyone to the floor. The shriek of rending metal mixed with the clash of shattering glass and ceramic, and the air was suddenly choked with smoke, dust, and fine debris. Starfire landed on her side, the stool she had been sitting on crashing to the ground atop her, and she shoved it off and pushed herself back up, waving the smoke out of her face as she tried to determine what had just -

She froze.

The entire front wall of the common room was gone, as though peeled off by a giant can opener and cast into the sea. And looming in the newly-made entrance were a phalanx of enormous, flying, reptilian beings, green-scaled and red-eyed, bearing polished, golden armor and a slew of various weapons, each one nastier-looking than the next. But Starfire's eyes were locked, not on the front rank of alien warriors, but on the one who loomed behind them. A hulking behemoth fully two feet taller than all of the rest, whose armor bore intricate carvings and symbols to testify to his exalted rank, and whose right eye was narrowed to a squint by an ugly, jagged scar running up the side of his face.

"Princess Koriand'r," said the scarred alien with a raspy hiss. "How I've missed you..."

Whatever words Starfire had intended to speak turned to stone in her throat, and she stumbled backwards without even realizing that she was moving. Desperately, she tried to speak, shout a warning, even just scream, but all she could manage was a feeble cry, formless and lost in the tumult that exploded to life moments later.

Before Robin could command the Titans to go, before everyone could even stand up, the common room was suddenly filled with aliens, slashing and shooting and roaring as they tore into everything within claw's reach. Starfire could see nothing but a swirling mass of dark green, punctuated by the shrieks of metal and the cold zap of magic, as flashes of color revealed where her friends were being swarmed over.

A green, scaly claw seized her shoulder, closing around it like a vice, and a leering, reptilian face filled her vision, jagged teeth slavering as the other claw reached for her face. She screamed, and felt her eyes burning as she vented her rage and horror through them, and a second later the face was gone, as her optical starbolt smashed the alien into the ceiling and threw him out the window from whence he had come.

More aliens loomed before her, grim-faced and armed with poleaxes and vibro-swords, and she leaped up into the air, trying to find her friends, to see what she could do to help them. It was hopeless. A dozen aliens leaped after her, grabbing her feet and arms, dragging her back to the ground, so many that she could not throw them all off, nor lay them all out with starbolts and eyebeams. She heard gunfire, the impact of waspish projectiles on counter-tops and walls, and even screams, all too human but otherwise unrecognizable, yet none of the aliens employed such weapons on her, no matter how many of them she struck, or threw, or shot.

She was still struggling when a shadow fell over her, so profound that she thought the power had been cut. She looked up to find a dark form looming over her, red eyes like slits their only feature. And then she felt another claw on her shoulder, just as cold and scaly as the last, and yet the tiny details of shape and feel and pressure were such that instantly, she knew who it was, and every muscle in her body locked up at once.

"You didn't seriously think you could escape me forever," came the silken, wraith-like voice, "did you, Koriand'r?"

Blind panic took her, and she screamed and fought, writhing like a live wire, but his time the claw would not release her, no matter how she struggled or where she shot. Her eyebeams and starbolts seemed to melt right into the shadowy figure, displacing it only for moments before it snapped back into being. She felt herself being lifted, felt the other aliens fall away as the large shadow held her pinned, raising her up until she was staring directly into its eyes, one intact, one a twisted ruin, both leering.

"Have you missed me?"

The smell of his breath, the timbre of his voice, the feel of his claws, all came rushing back to her like behaviors long left fallow, and she felt frenzied terror welling up within her like a hot liquid. Unable to turn away, to speak, or even to scream, she marshaled what willpower she had while she still had it, and packing every last ounce of emotion into her clenched fists, she conjured fire and let it loose.

There was a terrible rending sound, the screech of protesting metal, and the crash as its protests were overcome by gravity and heat, and a second later she was in freefall, as the floor beneath her and her captor sublimated to vapor. She heard him snarl, felt his grip falter, saw him fall away as he plunged into the darkness below. An instant later, and she landed in the middle of a corridor on her side, seconds before half a ton of steel, wiring, and burning insulation crashed down atop her, and she lost track of the alien entirely.

Clawing like a frightened animal, Starfire tore through the debris that covered her, pulling herself free, heedless of what she might break in the process. What injury the debris might have inflicted did not even cross her mind, as she turned this way and that, seeking her enemy and not finding him. From the hole overhead, she heard more cries, cries of pain and panic, so many and so muffled by the roars of the other aliens that she could not determine whose they were, and she leaped up to fly back to the common room and help her friends, only to find that she could not fly, her emotions refusing to manifest the boundless joy that customarily accompanied taking to the air. Again and again she jumped, unable to even brush the broken ceiling with her fingertips, and with each jump, and each unanswered scream from above, she felt the joy of flight receding further and further.

And then she saw him.

The corridor was dark, the power was apparently out, but from one side she saw him appear, a vague, formless shape on the edge of her ability to detect, save for the eyes that seemed to grow out of the darkness itself. From where she stood, she could only barely trace the outlines of his body with her eyes, in which conditions he seemed to swell and recede; an amorphous presence carved from her very nightmares. Stepping back, she fired starbolt after starbolt into him, yet he did not recoil or fall, the flashes of bright green serving only to illuminate his terrible form for thousandths of a second before he vanished once more into the gloom.

Suddenly, he lunged forward, and before her mind could process what he was doing, Starfire's body had already leaped backwards and her throat emitted another cry of alarm. The eyes narrowed just enough to show that he was grinning, and then they advanced anew, heedless of what she might throw at him, his whiplike tail snapping divots in the steel walls as he advanced.

Feeble cries, growing steadily feebler, still emerged from the common room above, but Starfire could not tear her eyes away from the alien advancing on her. She fell back, pace for pace, desperately seeking for something else to throw in his path, finding nothing. He quickened his pace, broke into a run, his arms extended forward, claws grasping at the air, and her nerve broke, and she turned, and ran, racing as quickly as she could down the maze-like passages, her thoughts bare save for escape and succor.

Down dark corridors and around blind corners she ran, relying on muscle memory and instinct to avoid dead ends, as the artillery-like footfalls of her pursuer pounded in her ears. Unable to calculate what the nearest room of any use was, all she could do was run, hurling starbolts over her shoulder, and try to come up with a plan that —

A bolt of energy the size of a dinner plate screamed past her head and exploded thirty yards up the hallway, collapsing the ceiling in a hail of debris. With bare inches to spare, Starfire slid to a stop, turning back to see the enormous alien charging towards her at full speed. Another energy bolt was already forming in his hands as Starfire blindly slammed her hand into one of the door control panels beside her, and raced through the sliding door that opened...

… only to stop.

So worked up that she had not been paying attention to where she was running, she now found herself standing inside the cavernous reaches of the tower's training room, a vast, formless expanse, bare of all equipment when not in use. But what came to her mind above all else, was that not only was the training room's walls, ceiling, and floor all armored against the powers the Titans wielded, but it was entirely devoid of exits, save for the one she had just entered by.

She heard the door slide open a second time, followed by the low, staccato chuckle she knew so well.

"All this time, I've looked for you, Princess," came the voice of the alien leader as Starfire turned around slowly, only to find him standing in the doorway, leaning on the frame, his claws drumming against the steel.

"Tell me, what _shall_ we talk about?"

**O-O-O**

_An orphan's curse would drag to hell  
A spirit from on high ;  
But oh ! more horrible than that  
Is the curse in a dead man's eye !  
Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse,  
And yet I could not die._

**O-O-O**

"Arkham Asylum housed the worst criminals in the world. The ones Batman drew to Gotham like a flame drawing moths. Psychopaths, Serial killers, carnivorous metahuman monsters of various types. I'd never paid any of them any attention until the Joker came for me, but after that, I became a regular criminologist. Case file after case file, each one as thick as your arm. Murder, arson, kidnapping, torture, terrorism, cannibalism, the worst perversions that men can inflict on one another. It was all there. And nobody would lift a finger to stop them."

"That's... that's not true!" exclaimed David. "You _know _that's not true! Batman - "

"_Batman_," hissed Devastator, "was a placebo. He'd fight them every time they broke out of jail, but only so that he could drag them all back to jail once again, where they would inevitably break out all over again. Joker had been imprisoned so many times, the case files couldn't even keep track. There were _two dozen_ others just as bad. And every time they broke out, _more people died._ More people were maimed or brutalized or kidnapped. People like Stephanie. People like me. How long was it supposed to go on before someone did something about it? Something _real_?"

David's head swam. "But... all of them?" he asked. "How did you even _do_ that?"

"The most direct way possible," said Devastator. "I laid waste to the entire asylum. I consumed it in fire like the pest-house it was. Cell by cell, building by building, I gave them no chance to run, take up weapons, or fight back. I hit them while they were locked away, helpless and alone. It was only fitting. In less than an hour, I destroyed dozens of the worst monsters to ever walk the earth. Crane, Dent, Falcone, Zsasz... criminals responsible collectively for over six _thousand_ counts of murder. But the crowning jewel was Joker himself."

Devastator raised his head slightly, staring up sightlessly into the cavernous void above. "I suppose I should have used a mallet," he said. "But I wasn't fool enough to put myself in arm's reach. So instead I let him burn. I _watched_ him burn. And then I crushed his cell like an egg, buried it in twenty thousand tons of debris, and pulverized the entire building into rubble." A bitter smirk crossed his face. "And what do you know?" he said almost whimsically. "He stopped laughing."

"But - " stammered David, trying to keep himself focused, "but what about the guards... the wardens, the doctors? There must have been hundreds of civilians in Arkham"

"I concentrated on the cellblocks," said Devastator. "Most of the civilians just ran away or hid on remote parts of the island. But some of the guards... well... they tried to stop me."

It took David a second to make the obvious leap. "So... you _killed _them?"

"I had no choice," said the older man. "They were using lethal force, and you may have noticed that Devastator doesn't have a stun setting. It was them or me."

Horrified, David spoke before he could decide if it was a good idea or not. "What gave you the right to kill innocent people?"

It was not a good idea. Devastator's head shot back down, the cane in his hand flaring up like a bonfire. "What gave me the _right_?" he asked, sounding incredulous. "You want to talk to me about _rights_?" He strode towards David, even as David fell back towards the wall.

"Let me ask you a different question, David," said Devastator as he advanced. "Where did I get the _rest_ of my rights? Because I had the right to be _beaten_. I had the right to be _maimed_. To have acid poured into my eyes. I had the right to be crippled, and broken, and to have things taken from me. Nobody seemed to object to _those_ rights. But when I finally decided to hit back, then suddenly_ everyone wanted to talk about rights_! Well you know what? Maybe I don't _give a damn_ about who had the _right _to do what to who! I killed the Joker like the _dog he was_! I don't regret it for an instant! And if people died trying to stop me from ending the Joker, who had shown time and again that he would kill, and kill, and kill, and _kill_, until someone put him down, then _to hell with them_!"

David didn't know what to say to any of that, and so said nothing, as Devastator loomed overhead. For a second, David thought that the older man might blow him up, or strike him with his cane, but slowly he seemed to cool down, withdrawing a pace or two as he did so.

"Not everyone's content to be a victim forever just to assuage the conscience of those who have no understanding of what it feels like to be helpless," said Devastator. "I refused to allow myself to be a statistic. If Joker could hurt me, then I could hurt him right back. Him and everyone like him. And a _pox _on anyone who tried to stop me. You don't place yourself between the devil and the deep blue sea, and then get to act surprised when you wind up in Hell."

For a time, David and Devastator simply watched one another, staring in silence, as though neither one were willing to break it. At length though, Devastator continued.

"Batman found me in the ruins of the asylum," said Devastator, the fire subdued, his voice quiet, "working over the remnants of the Joker's cellblock." A soft smile. "I think he expected me to fight, but I'd already done what I had come to do, and Batman had no part of that. He made his appearance, and I surrendered. Quietly. And I permitted him to take me to jail."

David watched Devastator with an inscrutable expression. "Jail?" he asked.

"Well he couldn't very well take me to Arkham Asylum, now could he?" asked Devastator, the smile broadening. "Besides, I wasn't insane."

David waited just a moment longer than usual before responding. "You obliterated an entire asylum and killed hundreds of people," he said. "All to take revenge against someone who hurt you."

"No, David," said Devastator, leaning in close, his voice calm like the lull before a hurricane. "I obliterated an entire asylum, and killed hundreds of people, because no one else would. If I hadn't killed the Joker, if I hadn't destroyed Arkham, and slaughtered its inmates, then hundreds of other people, maybe thousands, people who had done nothing but live their lives, would have died. Brutally. That day, a week later, a month, a year, at some point those maniacs were all going to escape again. And neither the police, nor Batman, nor anyone else seemed to be capable or willing to ensure that they did not." He stood back up straight, staring down at David like a headmaster. "Every one of them deserved what they got. No thinking being on Earth would have questioned that. And I do not, for an instant, regret giving it to them."

Fighting to keep his voice calm and his nerves under control, David looked up at his scarred counterpart. "Is that what you told the police?"

"More or less," said Devastator. "They made me speak to doctors and psychologists, who concluded that I was suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder." Another smile. "I guess I can't really argue that one. There was, apparently, a great deal of debate as to whether I was fit to stand trial for my actions, something about whether or not I knew what I was doing was wrong." He sighed. "It was all window-dressing, really. I hadn't done all this just to hide behind the same defence my victims had used."

"So what happened?"

"My case was a sensation. Wiping out half of Gotham's endemic maniacs in one swoop generated attention. Dozens of lawyers lined up to defend me at no charge, just to make their reputations. I got death threats, marriage proposals, requests for interviews from every media personality I'd ever heard of. My case was debated on television and the internet in every permutation." A pause. "To be honest, I was fairly indifferent to it all. Nobody in jail bothered me, they knew what I could do, and I was left alone to think things over. I'd never really planned ahead beyond killing the Joker. I didn't know what I wanted to do." He stopped, this time for longer, but David waited in silence for him to resume.

"Then one day," said Devastator, averting his gaze. "I received a message from someone I'd never heard of. His name was something Arabic-sounding... 'Ras Al Ghul' I think it was, and he claimed to speak for some group called the 'League of Shadows'. He said that he admired my... 'fortitude' he called it. And that he wanted to know if I was willing to assist him. There were, he claimed, a great many people who just as deserving of death as the Joker. People who were in the process of ruining everything they touched. Politicians, industrialists, metahumans, all sorts. His organization was apparently dedicated to the elimination of these individuals, and he was therefore inquiring if I would participate. He claimed that if I agreed, I could look forward to rewards beyond my wildest imaginings."

"And did you?"

Devastator raised his eyes back to meet David's. "No," he said. "Ras Al Ghul was a lunatic. An eco-terrorist who thought mass genocide was the solution to global warming. But his message did make me start to think, because he wasn't _entirely _wrong. The Joker had hurt me. Two-face, Scarecrow, and the rest of Arkham's inmates had not, at least not directly, and yet I'd killed them, and found after the fact that I felt better having done so. And the reason I felt better, ultimately, was because they were _scum_. Brutal, thuggish, violent scum, whose very existence upon the Earth brought nothing but misery and death to those unfortunate enough to cross their paths. And while this League of Shadows may have thought everyone was just as awful, there _were _others who did meet those criteria. I had always known on some level that, even if I managed to evade the charges against me, I was never going to be able to go back to Geolex and stare at soil samples again. I had... declared myself. Crossed the line. I was committed, for better or worse. So one night, thinking these things over, I simply decided to leave."

David blinked. "Leave?" he asked. "What do you mean leave?"

Devastator smiled. "Come, David, you _must_ know that there's no prison in existence that could hold us. Bars and walls and security fences? Even you could punch through any of those without breaking a sweat. My biggest challenge was not accidentally destroying any load-bearing walls. The guards who tried to stop me found that their tasers and guns all mysteriously broke, and anyone brave enough to accost me physically had their truncheons transformed into rocket engines and were pitched through the nearest window. By the time Batman or anyone else could arrive to stop me, I was long gone. They hunted for a while of course, but I hadn't escaped for the purpose of going on a crime spree. I kept my head down, disappeared into the crowd, and they never found a trace."

Devastator stepped back again, this time drawing the packet of cigarettes from his pocket, drawing one out and placing it in his mouth. He produced neither lighter nor matches, yet a second later the tip of the cigarette flared orange of its own accord. As he replaced the pack in his pocket, Devastator drew a deep breath and the burning ember changing to a deep red, before he removed the cigarette from his teeth and blew a stream of smoke into the still air.

"Nine months after Arkham," he said, the burning cigarette tracing a red slash through the air as he gestured with his hand, "a man by the name of Felix Faust surfaced in central Africa. Faust was a sorcerer of some sort, wanted by every national and international police force on the planet, mundane or meta-human. He was in Africa in search of some sort of mystical artifacts he needed to perform a ritual that would, of course, have granted him omnipotent power." He smiled, as though remembering something amusing. "They're _always_ after omnipotent power."

David said nothing, and Devastator continued. "Faust fueled his magical talents by, I'm not making this up, sacrificing the souls of children to dark gods." Devastator's face twisted into a sneer as he spoke on, using the cigarette like a laser pointer as he gestured around him. "The area he appeared in was remote and lawless and filled with people too poor and too unimportant for the world at large to care about. The heroes, or what was left of them, didn't find out about his plan until it was nearly too late, as usual." The sneer became a cruel smile. "But I'd been watching Faust for some time. Following in his footsteps, locating his allies and suppliers. When he finally turned up, the heroes went after him. They claimed they wanted to capture him, put him on trial, imprison him in some kind of corrective facility, because that had worked _so well_ the previous eight times. Unfortunately for them, I got there first."

"What did you do?" asked David, in the voice of one who wasn't certain they wanted the answer.

Devastator's eyes narrowed and his smile vanished. "I did what any reasonable person would," he said. "I slaughtered his minions. I shattered his magical implements. I brought his improvised fortress crashing down around him. And then I dragged him into the center of the nearest town of note and spent the better part of a day running a tractor over his head."

David tried, and failed, to suppress the shudder that ran through him at that clinical description. Devastator merely shook his head.

"If you think that's excessive, David, please bear in mind that you didn't see what I found in that fortress of his."

There was nothing in the world right now that David wanted to know less, than what Devastator had found in the fortress of Felix Faust.

"What does any of this have to do with the Titans?" asked David.

At the question, Devastator did not answer immediately, but smiled and took a half-step back, letting the smoke from his cigarette curl up towards the open ceiling.

"The world of Metahumans is incredibly incestuous," said Devastator. "Everyone is related to everyone else, by blood, by adoption, by kinship, by long association. People change sides, they change affiliations, they connect, they fall apart. Everyone has a connection to everyone else. And not infrequently, the tightest, closest connection is between enemies. The Joker and Batman, Luthor and Superman. Faust was only the beginning. I went after others, hardened murderers, predators, warlords, human smugglers, serial killers, anyone who thought that the rest of the world existed to feed their depraved fantasies. I took down generals and presidents and board chairmen, but my specialty was always Metahumans, and if I made a mistake, it was in underestimating the interconnectivity of their world. Every one of them I killed, every monster I destroyed, every demon I exorcised from the Earth, every one knew someone. They were tied to someone. They had connections with someone, no matter how depraved. And that someone tended to take what I did poorly."

"So who did you kill?" asked David. "Who did you kill that crossed the line? Who brought the Titans down on you?"

Devastator didn't answer, concentrating instead on his cigarette. Slowly, David stood up from the wall, and began to approach him.

"I know the Titans came back," said David, his movements careful but precise. "I watched you fighting them. They got back together and started working as a team again. By then, you were already... what did you call it? A contractor? A killer? But something happened to drive you into the Titans. Something specific. Something that made you hate them. What was it?"

Devastator fell back, slowly, watching the teenager like he was trying to decide between slicing his head off and retreating entirely. David did not let himself think beyond pressing the point.

"Who was it?" he asked. And when he got no response, he repeated the question, loud and commanding.

"Who _was_ it?"

"Who the hell do you _think_ it was?" snapped Devastator at last. "You were a Titan. You know who it was, the only one it could have been! Who was the cancer that ate away at the city that the Titans claimed to protect? The one they refused to dispense with, even when they finally had the opportunity to do so? Who else, David, could it _possibly _have been?"

David hesitated before the barrage of questions, a thousand names flickering through his head like a rolodex. But one name, one name in particular flared up in his consciousness, one name that seemed always to be at the center of anything debased and diseased. And as David were considering whether or not that were even possible, Devastator answered his own question and removed all doubt.

"It was Slade," said Devastator, staring into David's eyes with the intensity of the mad. "Jump City's prince of darkness. I went after Slade, and for that presumption, everyone died."

**O-O-O**

_Her beams bemocked the sultry main,  
Like April hoar-frost spread ;  
But where the ship's huge shadow lay,  
The charméd water burnt alway  
A still and awful red._

**O-O-O**

Wind tore through Raven's hair and cloak, so much wind that it forced her eyes to slits, blinding her with driven snow and her own freezing tears. It roared in her ears like a savage beast, a steady, unending howl, rising and falling in pitch as she was buffeted and spun by the mad gusts. It drowned out everything, buried it in a mountain of indiscriminate noise, such that she could hear nothing, not even her own voice.

"_**There is no void deep enough for you to hide from what you have done."**_

Nothing, save of course for the one thing she would have given everything to drown out.

Free falling, spinning in three dimensions like a leaf in a hurricane, Raven struggled to even find some way of determining what direction was what. Beast Boy, Terra, even the infinite wall of ice that she had leaped from, all had been instantly swallowed up by the storm, leaving her to fall alone in a world comprised entirely of wind and snow. She could not even tell which way was down, so violent were the winds that hurled her this way and that. She could not tell if she was falling or being blown in some other direction.

Which left her alone with her own thoughts, to await whatever might be coming.

"_**Do you imagine yourself noble?"**_

Raven closed her eyes. They weren't doing her any good now anyway, and held her hands over her ears. It cut the roar of the wind, albeit only partly, but it did nothing to cut Azar's voice, still as clear as though they were sitting together in a still room.

"_**Is that what this was? Nobility? Expiation? Did you do it out of pique? To spite me? Poor little girl, beset by unfeeling taskmasters, who had the temerity to demand of her the same things they demanded of everyone else?"**_

"Stop it," moaned Raven, so soft that she couldn't barely hear herself.

"_**You were always so eager to have things stop. Didn't I teach you what time really was? Or did you forget that part too?"**_

"I didn't... forget," said Raven, curling herself into a ball as best she could as the wind carried her about.

"_**Of course not. You were always too smart for that. So there's another excuse denied you."**_

"_Stop!_" shouted Raven. "Just... Stop it, _please_! I know what I did!"

"_**Do you? Because you still haven't accepted it. And I wonder if you ever will."**_

She forced her eyes open, if only to have something to look at, something to experience that wasn't the incessant droning in her head. She was plunging... down? Up? Plunging _somewhere_ with hail driving into her face from every direction like bullets. There was no sense of distance or depth, no timing to it. She did not know if she was going to smash into the ground in ten seconds or two or an hour or fall forever into a bottomless void. And no matter where she turned or spun or looked, she couldn't see anything else.

"_**Why are you persisting with this infantile tantrum? What, exactly are you looking for at this late hour?"**_

"Where did you hide him?" she demanded aloud, of the wind perhaps, or the phantasms that haunted her mind.

"_**Nobody could ever hide anything from you, Raven. You were far too smart for that. Even as a little girl, the only way to deceive you was to convince you to deceive yourself."**_

"I didn't!"

_**"Yes, you did. You deceived yourself in the most masterful way possible. And you used your friends to do it."**_

The winds died all of a sudden, draining away like a tide, and Raven was left to fall, spinning lazily in three dimensions as she grasped with her fingertips for the solid objects she imagined lay just out of reach.

"_**I told you that Trigon would return. I told you what needed to be done to prevent his ascendancy. You swore to my face that you would do what was necessary when the time came. But when it did come, instead of fulfilling your promise to me, and to the universe at large, you destroyed everything. And you won't even admit to yourself why."**_

Through the snow-flecked darkness, a soft, blue glow slowly began to build at the dimmest reaches of Raven's vision, like an apparition fading into view, though what it portended, she could not know for certain.

"I know why I did it," she whispered.

"_**Do you?"**_

The glow slowly began to brighten, like a fluorescent bulb gradually approaching full power. It might have been some fresh monster, conjured up by Trigon to torture her further, or perhaps the first signs of the infinite field of ice towards which she was supposedly plunging. At this point, she wasn't certain that it mattered any more.

"_**You were afraid. You were afraid of death. Afraid of pain. Afraid of what might befall you. But instead of facing down your fear as you were taught, you permitted it to consume you, and to deflect you from the task you were given from birth. And for that presumption, all life in the universe will shortly - "**_

"That's _not _why!"

The wind picked up again, gusting out of some ill-defined place below and before her, spinning her like a gyroscope over and about.

"**_That is why. You were a coward_,_ Raven, and that is why you are here."_**

Squeezing her eyes shut, as tears leaked from their corners, Raven felt the wind buffeting her this way and that. She pulled her arms in, curling up into a ball, barely daring to whisper further.

"I couldn't leave them," she said. "I couldn't..."

"_**Did you even try?"**_

"Yes!" she shouted in anguish, her eyes flying open once again, as though she expected some stern accuser to be present before her.

"_**You don't even believe that. You used their optimism as an excuse, absolving yourself of the need to make hard decisions by fobbing the responsibility for stopping Trigon the Terrible onto a handful of unprepared teenagers. You knew, in your heart of hearts, that they had no prayer of stopping your father. But you acted as though they could do it, because it let you make easy choices."**_

The bluish glow below her continued to gain in strength, but suddenly the snow stopped entirely, vanishing back into the gloom from whence it had come. And far below her, off to one side, Raven saw a distant object, plummeting down as she was with all the grace of a collapsing lawn chair. Yet as far away as it was, Raven could still make out the colors that cloaked it: purple, and black, and a fine, emerald green.

"_**And now look what you have wrought upon them."**_

For the first time tonight, Raven didn't hear what was said, for as soon as her eyes caught a glimpse of green, she turned and dove.

Mid-air gymnastics were not now, nor had they ever been her specialty, but the object was falling uncontrolled, and she had at least rudimentary ability to control her own motion. Gluing her arms to her sides and pointing her head down, she dove into the shimmering gloom, her cloak streaming out behind her as she plunged towards the glimpse of green she had seen. Again and again it vanished, as the fickle light that governed this place played tricks on her. Yet each time it re-appeared again, a little bit closer, a little bit bigger, a little bit removed from where it had been.

"_**You can never atone for what you have done."**_

Closer and closer she drew, gaining on the tumbling figure at a maddeningly slow pace. Bursts of wind, conjured up from nowhere, knocked her about over and over, sending her spinning like a top and pushing her away, but every time she righted herself, using her target as a landmark to sight herself in. Her progress was so slight that she felt she might never arrive, yet at the last, another burst of wind flipped them both, sending him spinning towards her. Barely, she managed to presence of mind to stretch out her hands, and grab his arm, before they were both blown away.

Weightless and motionless, Beast Boy lay insensate, spinning and twisting like a rag doll with every puff of wind. Streams of red blood droplets marked his progress down, leaking from dozens of abrasions, cuts and scrapes, some minor, some not. His eyes were closed, and he did not react when Raven grabbed his arm, nor when she pulled herself in to take hold of his belt and shirt. Clinging on for dear life, she shut her eyes against the suddenly angry wind as it threw them about, trying to rip her away from Beast Boy moments before slamming her into him again with tremendous force.

"Stop it!" she shouted, the wind so loud that she couldn't hear her own voice, even at a scream. Yet the person she was talking to heard her just fine.

"_**Stop it yourself. This is your doing, no one else's."**_

"I never wanted to hurt him!" she yelled back at the empty wind. "I never wanted _any of this_!"

_**"Whatever you wanted, you hurt him worse than you ever could know. To the point where, to retrieve you, he willingly plunged into Hell itself. That too, was your doing."**_

"No!" she shouted. "I told him there was nothing he could do! I warned them all!"

"_**And you expected that they would believe you? That he would? How is it possible, Raven, for you to have lived among them for so long and not known what he would do?"**_

"Yes, I knew! But I tried to - "

"_**Your disingenuous tries are not in question. You did not do the thing you knew would be effective. You did not leave."**_

Clinging tightly to Beast Boy's waist, lest the howling gale tear them apart, she could feel, _hear_, Beast Boy's heart, beating erratically within him, as it pumped more blood out of the thousand tiny breaches in his emerald skin. She could see his eyes moving under his eyelids, feel his muscles twitching uncontrollably, hear his breath, labored and congested, as his lungs fought to keep pumping. All of these things she could feel, see, hear, touch, and yet worse than all of them was the certain knowledge that there had once been a time when she could have fixed everything here with a wave of her hand.

"No," she said, her voice hollow even to her own ears. "I didn't leave."

_**"And in failing to do so, rendered all of your other excuses null and void. You had the opportunity to save him from this, and you chose not to act. That is why you are here, Raven. That is why you will always be here."**_

She felt a stinging sensation in her eyes, squeeze them shut though she might, and knotted her fingers into Beast Boy's shirt, holding onto him with the desperation of the damned.

"Then let him go," she said.

"_**I'm not keeping him here. You are."**_

Her head shot up, her eyes opening wide. "What?" she shouted into the storm.

"_**You heard him yourself. He came because of you. He refused his chance to leave because of you. He chose willingly to share your fate. There is nothing more that can be done for him."**_

"_No!"_

The last word was not a shout, but a scream, loud enough that she could hear it. Loud enough to echo, despite there being nothing physical to reflect the sound from. Loud enough that the wind died before it, and the snow ceased to blow. Loud enough that, for the first time tonight, she heard no reply at all.

"He came here to save me!" she shouted at nothing. "You don't get to keep him!"

"_**This is not a slave market. He is here because he chose to be."**_

"He chose to come after me! Even after all this!"

_**"He chose to attempt the impossible. He chose to attempt to absolve you."**_

Still falling freely, her arms locked around Beast Boy's waist, Raven stared off into the abyss as though something there could stare back at her. "Why is that impossible?" she demanded.

"_**Because the victory you gave to Trigon was decisive and complete. Because there is no hope of redressing the balance."**_

"No hope," said Raven, still staring emptily into the darkness. The rush of air past her face was quieter than it had been, enabling her to hear Beast Boy's labored breathing much clearer.

"_**None. The promise of your birth was absolute. It has been achieved. There is no hope."**_

Slowly, Raven turned her head back to Beast Boy, still twitching as though in the throes of a nightmare. Disjointed thoughts ran through her mind, swirling about her like satellites.

"Then why did he come here?"

_**"He told you that. He came here because you made him."**_

"I never made him do anything."

"_**You bound yourself into his life. Into all their lives. Instead of driving him away, as you were supposed to, you instead allowed him to affix himself to you. You did so with callous disregard for the consequences he would suffer. Is it any surprise that he would chase you into Hell?"**_

"Maybe not," said Raven, still looking down into Beast Boy's blood-spattered face and shivering features. "But nobody ever _made _Beast Boy do anything."

"_**You forged bonds of attachment with him, in full knowledge of what would transpire. The result was easily predictable. Don't pretend otherwise."**_

"He's _not an animal_!" she shouted all at once, another roar of defiance echoing off the walls of wind that enclosed her. "He's not some machine who does what he's told! He doesn't just do things because I make him!"

_**"No, he's not an animal. He's an addict."**_

"An... addict? Addicted to what?"

"_**To you. To what little validation you gave him. To the moments of empathy you afforded him. Their rarity only served to make them more precious in his eyes. His addiction, his dependency is what led him here, an addiction you fed, enabled, and shared in. Stop trying to shift the responsibility onto him. You're the only reason any of this happened."**_

Beast Boy's hands were balled into fists, tight enough to strain the seams of his gloves. His face twitched back and forth, as though he were jerking to escape some terrible pain, which for all Raven knew, was exactly what was happening. A mass of contradictory impulses flooded through her as she watched him, none of which she acted upon. None of which she knew how to act upon.

"If it's all my fault," she said. "If I addicted him to me, and all he's doing is what I made him do, then how come he's _here_? If I'm responsible, then he didn't do anything wrong. It can't be his fault if it's all mine. He shouldn't be here!"

"_**And what made you think the universe had to be fair? Surely you know better by now."**_

The words were contemptuous, mocking, an adult amused by the pretenses of a little child. Yet Raven did not scream or curse or try and command everything to stop. Instead she paused, as something, deep inside the recesses of what had once been her mind, cast a weak, flickering light that she tried, as best she could, to grasp.

"It isn't fair," she said, not a complaint but a statement. "But... you taught me something. Something about this."

_**"It doesn't matter what I or anyone else said. Nothing matters now except your own culpability."**_

It was on the tip of her brain, she could feel it trying to burst out. Without thinking, she removed one hand from Beast Boy's shirt and held it to her head, clutching it, trying to force herself to remember the things she wasn't supposed to remember.

"You said..." she stammered, ignoring the winds that suddenly picked back up, roaring in her ears like an engine. "You said that... 'the universe is rarely fair... but always consistent.'"

"_**And what if I did?"**_

"It's... it's not..." Her brain was lathered in molasses, requiring herculean efforts just to get from moment to moment, yet she soldiered on regardless. "It's not... _consistent_, for him to be down here with me. He shouldn't be here. He didn't earn a ticket to Hell. He never did anything to deserve it."

_**"This is your hell, Raven. Has it occurred to you that he might just be here to torture you further?"**_

The thought floated around in her mind, and the images that came with it. Nightmares conjured up from her past of Beast Boy roasted alive, mutilated, tortured as an object lesson for her. Images so strong that they seemed to twist into her stomach like live vipers, threatening to drown everything out in a flood of pain and anguish. Yet the flickering light refused to be dowsed, shone on as the tides of fear washed around it, even managing to brighten.

"No," she said. "No... that... that can't be right."

"_**And why is that?"**_

"Because... he's here. With me. Before he came here, before he found me, when I was alone and nobody was ever going to come for me, _that _was Hell. But this... this is something else."

The light inside her grew, in perfect unison with the blue glow still looming up from somewhere far beneath them. Radiating outwards like a crystal in a solution of sugars, it seemed to be enveloping the entire world, faint tendrils spiraling off in random directions. She could not tell if it was growing, or if they were getting closer to smashing into it, but stared down into it as she addressed the phantoms that encircled her.

"He can't just be here to torture me," she said as she shifted around Beast Boy, no longer clinging to him in desperation, but holding onto him securely as though to protect him from something in the darkness that might snatch him away at any moment. "Having him here isn't torture."

_**"Then he must have earned his way in honestly."**_

"_No_!" she shouted, no scream of terror and impotence, but a barked shout, full of anger and refusal. "He couldn't have!"

_**"How would you know? You can barely remember who you are"**_

"It doesn't matter who I am! He came here to get me out! He said so."

"_**And what does that have to do with anything? Perverting the course of justice is a sin in and of itself."**_

"But only if he knew he was doing it! Only if it was his idea! And you said that he's only down here because I addicted him, and _made_ him come down! It wasn't his fault!"

"_**Then no doubt he did something else to merit his inclusion. It could be anything at all."**_

"No it _can't_!" she shouted again. "He's not like me. He didn't deserve to - "

"_**You have no idea what he did and didn't deserve! It is not physically possible for you to know. Half-remembered synopses of the brief time you knew him do not suffice to pass judgment! This is Hell. Beast Boy is present. Ergo - "**_

"Someone made a mistake."

"_**Only a child as willfully obtuse as you, Raven, could possibly conclude that."**_

"And only someone as arrogant as _you _could conclude anything else."

"_**Arrogance? You would speak of arrogance? You, who conclude that the entire workings of the universe are out of order, because they do not conform to the impressions you half-remember from another life concerning the moral integrity of someone you despised?"**_

The bluish light from below was enormous now, gnawing at the very fabric of reality, a glow so intense it hurt to look into, yet one that illuminated nothing at all, as though they were plunging towards the heart of some mystic vortex, there to be disintegrated, annihilated, or cast into the endless void of outer space. Raven regarded the notion with equanimity, her thoughts far from this frozen, dessicated place.

"I never despised him," she said.

"_**But you did not know him. Not well enough to be certain that he didn't belong here."**_

"I didn't have to."

_**"How convenient that you alone in the universe are absolved of the need for facts. When did you become God?"**_

"I'm not God," said Raven, turning back to face Beast Boy's unconscious form. "And maybe I didn't know him as well as I could have. But I know he didn't belong here. _Everyone_ knew that."

"_**I taught you better than that. Appeal to the Majority? You cannot speak for everyone who ever knew Beast Boy, nor would it matter if you could. He does not become less deserving just because lots of people say he is."**_

It sounded so final. So clean and logical and tidy, and yet she could _feel_ the brittleness in the voice, the quiver in the logic that governed this pronouncement from on high. And once more she came back to another light, the one inside her, the one that refused to flicker. The one that refused to die.

"Is he?"

"_**He sits before you, does he not?"**_

"But what if he's not in Hell at all?"

_**"Have you lost your sense of sight? Is he or is he not in front of - "**_

"What if _I'm_ not in Hell?"

For a second, though she might have been imagining things, Raven thought she heard the wind itself hesitate.

"Maybe I did deserve to be punished," she said, feeling something inside her starting to roll, like stones on a mountain slope. "Maybe I deserved to be stranded in Hell. And maybe even he did too." She looked around, at the bright blue glow that now encircled them, growing more and more intense by the second. "But who says that's where we are?"

"_**Where else could you possibly be?"**_

"I don't know," she said. "But if this was Hell, how could he have gotten into it? Even if I addicted him? Even if he wanted to? You said it was created to punish me. Since he got here, it hasn't been punishment. Hell wouldn't have even let him in!"

"_**You're awfully certain of the rules of Hell."**_

She ignored the remark. "Who could have put him in Hell?" she asked. "Who could have put either of us in Hell?"

_**"Did you forget that your father is the Devil?"  
**_

"And what if he is? He can't judge who deserves to be in Hell, he's evil incarnate! He doesn't understand anything else. He can't judge us."

_**"Says who?"**_

"Says _you_! _You _said we deserve to be down here. _You _said I'm here because I deserve to be. How could Trigon ever tell that? He doesn't understand guilt or innocence or justice or punishment! He doesn't _care_ about those things, all he understands is pain and evil!"

"_**Didn't I teach you not to make assumptions? If Trigon could not put you here, then perhaps it was someone else."**_

"You taught me more than that," said Raven, feeling the strength of the gathering avalanche within her. "You taught me Occam's Razor."

This time the hesitation was obvious and prolonged, as though the wind had been stunned to silence, and needed time to recover.

_**"You are clutching at straws, trying to convince yourself that - "**_

"The simplest explanation is usually right!" shouted Raven, drowning out the voice. "You taught me that! What's simpler? That Trigon put me here to suffer just because he's Trigon, or that someone else decided I deserved to go to Hell, created one just for me, and then for some reason let Beast Boy into it?"

_**"Why do you **__**care**__**? You are in this place. Does it matter what the reasons are?"**_

"It matters," she said. "It matters to me. It matters because if I'm not here for what I did, then this isn't Hell."

"_**This is Hell. And you are both where you belong."**_

It was like the pronouncement of a judge or an angelic arbiter, thunderous and bombastic, a pronouncement riven with authority and malice that could damn entire nations to the flames. Yet as the glow around her reached a blinding intensity, and the avalanche within raged out of all control, she felt a blissful certainty passing over her, and held to Beast Boy as tightly as she could as she spoke words she knew to be anathema.

"He doesn't belong here," she said.

"_**You cannot know that! It is not your place to - "**_

"_We_ don't belong here."

"_**IT IS NOT YOURS TO DECIDE WHO BELONGS WHERE!"**_

Unable to keep her eyes open any longer, Raven slid them shut, holding Beast Boy around his waist and laying her head against him as she whispered, at last, the words she had not even dared before to think.

"I don't belong here."

And then there was silence.

The silence was almost deafening, nerve-draining. As though nothing in the world existed any longer, save for the feel of Beast Boy on her arms and cheek. She could not hear the wind, nor her own breathing, nor Beast Boy's, nor feel any sensation of movement any longer. Yet she did not open her eyes, and did not release her hold on Beast Boy, until at length, bit by bit, she began to become aware of a new sensation, worming its way in from the very edge of her consciousness.

Heat.

Nervously, reluctantly, Raven opened her eyes, and saw red.

The entire world was red. Red and grey and black where the fires had scorched something to cinder. Red glows filled the sky from horizon to horizon. Red flames licked at ruins and burnt-out cars. Red seas of bubbling magma loomed large in the distance, lapping hungrily at the shore and radiating the tremendous heat that now swirled around her.

Beast Boy lay on his back, motionless save for his breathing, slow and quiet. He showed no signs of waking. Raven was kneeling on the bare ground beside him, rough asphalt under her knees, with no wind but a soft, leaden breeze that barely sufficed to shift her cloak. All about lay the incinerated remnants of cars, houses, streetlights and telephone poles, silent and unjudging. And aside from a low, ambient roar from fires burning in some distant place, she could, at least briefly, hear neither wind nor voices.

"You know, you're absolutely right."

A shadow fell over the immediate area, the ambient red light snatched away almost as soon as it had arrived. Raven turned her head in time to see an enormous block of cracked stone descending from the scorched skies like a chariot of the gods. Wrapped in a field of golden light, the stone held perfectly level, and the thin girl standing upon it, gray of skin and red of eye, grinned as she stared down at Raven and Beast Boy, one hand lifted and closed as though grasping invisible reins.

"You didn't belong there," said Terra. "You belong here. In the middle of the city you destroyed, along with all the people you killed."

Terra swept her arm broadly across the area, and moments later, an entire army of statues, men, women, children, all carved from the same black volcanic rock, emerged from the ruins of buildings and cars, each one cloaked in golden light and dragged towards Raven and Beast Boy as though by magnetism. The statues advanced to within thirty feet and there they stopped, rank upon rank of figures so lifelike as to defy the art of sculpture, each one's face contorted in expressions of terror, pain, and panic. Terra waited patiently until the last row was in place, before turning back once more to the unconscious shape-shifter and the little girl crouched beside him.

"I think it's only fitting that they should get to watch, don't you?"

**O-O-O**

_Beyond the shadow of the ship,  
I watched the water-snakes :  
They moved in tracks of shining white,  
And when they reared, the elfish light  
Fell off in hoary flakes._

**O-O-O**

"Slade was a monster. Even death didn't stop him the first time. If anything, it made him worse. He was so evil that Hell wouldn't keep him. You are one of the few in a position to _know _that I'm telling the truth."

"I never knew Slade," said David. "Not before all this."

"But your friends did. You trust them, right? What did _they_ have to say about him? What did you see him do with your own two eyes? Under Trigon's orders or not, you looked him in the eye and saw him enjoying it. Cities laid waste, civilians burned to death, you _know_ what Slade was. And the Titans wouldn't stop him."

"Bullshit," said David. "The Titans never stopped trying to stop him!"

"Oh they'd _fight_ him, sure!" snapped Devastator dismissively. "Every time he showed his head, they'd run out and raise seventeen kinds of hell trying to push him back down into the hole he'd crawled from. But he'd always come out to play again. No matter what they locked him inside, no matter how badly they dismantled his robot army or undid his so-called brilliant plan, he _always_ came back. And every time he did, more people died."

"So you decided to kill him?"

"Of course I did. When the Titans first returned, I was glad to see them. I thought, whatever their opinions on me and my business, they might help suppress some of the lower level criminal activity that was infesting most of the world. Lord knew that Jump City needed help, and I couldn't be everywhere. But they always refused to put Slade down for good, and finally I couldn't ignore him anymore. I tracked him for months, followed every lead, investigated every sighting. I dealt with half a dozen traps and ambushes that he laid for me, from Greenland to the Atacama Desert, and finally, _finally_, I managed to corner him inside a secret base he had built in a remote part of India." Devastator stopped, clenching his hand around his cane's handle, squeezing his eyes shut as he fought to keep his temper in check from whatever his memory was dredging up. "And it would have gone perfectly well," he said at last, "if I had been the only one tracking him."

David said nothing.

"I..." said Devastator, no longer confident, no longer cold, his voice coming in fits and starts through his teeth. "I'd had very little interaction with any heroes before that. Once in a while some third-tier costume-wearer would decide to make his reputation by bringing down the 'Devastator', and I'd just leave him stew under a pile of rubble or some such. I knew who the Titans were, of course, but I hadn't ever even considered I might encounter them like this. They arrived just as I was finishing my work. Slade was beaten, his fortress was in ruins, and I was preparing to administer the coup-de-grace."

"What happened?"

Devastator's head slumped forward, as his knuckles went white around the handle of his cane. "I'd never met them before," he said, "but they knew me, by reputation if nothing else. And they knew what I was here to do. Nightwing told me in no uncertain terms that I was not going to be allowed to kill Slade." Devastator lifted his head again, and this time, violent anger was written all over his maimed features. "I tried to talk sense into them. Slade had attacked a cruise liner with his robots, killed seventy people and kidnapped half a dozen others. But age only made Nightwing _more _stubborn. Not only was I to be denied my just reward for having broken Slade, but he brought up the international warrants I had on me for the murder of various murderers. Nothing I said made a dent on any of them. They insisted that Slade be allowed to live. I insisted that he not. So we fought." The blank eyes seemed to darken. "And I lost."

David rasied an eyebrow. "I thought you never lost."

The sarcasm took effect instantly, as Devastator turned his glowering face on David. "Does this look like the face of someone who never lost a battle?" he asked, gesturing to his scarred visage. "Is _your _victory percentage something to brag about? You, who lost to Cinderblock, lost to Terra, lost to Slade, _and _lost to Trigon?"

"But you said - "

"There were _four_ of them!" shouted Devastator angrily, drowning out David's question. "Four trained, expert heroes, four people I had never in my life expected to encounter at blade's end! How do you think I beat Faust, or Slade, or all the others I killed? I did my goddamn homework. I knew exactly what I was getting into in every instance, powers, vulnerabilities, angles of potential attack. But then the Titans blindsided me. I had no idea what they were capable of, let alone how to fight them off. All I had was blind, blunt force trauma, against an entire team of A-listers who specialized in bringing down metahumans." He shivered, as though the world around had just turned cold. "And I was no metahuman."

"Yes you are," said David

"No I am _not_," snapped Devastator back, "and neither are you! I was a normal person with a powerful weapon, not some damned juggernaut made of steel! They came at me like they were trying to tear down a skyscraper. Magic, claws, missiles, they hit me with everything. Reduced me to ruins. It didn't take them thirty seconds."

David let Devastator wait for a moment before commenting. "But they didn't kill you," he said.

"No," said Devastator with a cold glare. "Of course not. They were _bette r_than me, weren't they? They didn't kill me, just mashed me into a pulp. Broke my arms, shattered my ribs, fractured my skull, pulverized me with soundwaves and rocket-bombs and every other thing until I was a mangled, broken wreck, then scraped me off the ground and dragged me back to the Hague to stand trial for a hundred and eight counts of premeditated murder. And while they slapped me into a hospital so that I could be patched back together enough to face the court, they locked Slade away in some specialty prison for metahumans. The same one I was destined for once they got the formality of my trial out of the way. For the crime of having stopped Slade's master plan and destroyed his army, my reward was to be treated exactly as he was, worse even. Slade didn't need six months before he could walk again."

"That's crap," said David. "You said they charged you with murder, not assault. It wasn't about Slade. It was for Joker, wasn't it? And Faust and Two-Face and everyone else you killed."

"Yes," said Devastator. "That was nominally the charge. But the _real _crime was showing them up. What were they? Vigilantes all, no backing in law, no official position, just meta-humans who chose to act. And they somehow thought that they had the right to condemn me because I had done the exact same thing, but hadn't conformed to _their _rules? Because I wasn't sanctioned by the Justice League or Batman or whoever had declared themselves the ultimate arbiters of our world?"

"That's _not_ why they came down on you," said David. "And you know it! They charged you because you were _killing_ people. And not just murderers and killers. You admitted that you killed the guards who tried to stop you at Arkham. How many others were there that didn't do anything?"

"Dozens," thundered Devastator, "but how did that make me different than the rest of the heroes? How many people did they kill by omission? Every recidivist psychopath they _permitted_ to walk on among the rest of us, every murderer they slapped on the wrist and tossed into a holding cell for a few days, every massacre they allowed to occur because some thrill-killer claimed that he'd _reformed_, whose fault were those? Three months after India, Slade broke loose from that prison of theirs, and killed fifty-seven people before he was stopped, _every one of whom_ would have been alive if I'd been permitted to finish Slade off! Who stood up and took responsibility for that? Who was dragged before the docket and made to answer in a court of law to the deaths of fifty-seven civilians? Nobody! Because _nobody_, _least _of all the Titans, gave a _damn _about the law when it came time to answer for their _own_ actions! When they confronted me in that base in India, did they try and argue the matter? Did they sit down and try to _convince _me they were right? Of course not. They used powers and weapons and raw strength to _force_ me to comply with them. Because brute force was the only mandate they ever had."

"Really?" asked David. "And what mandate did _you_ have?"

"None at all," said Devastator. "Save the mandate of self-defence."

"You hunted people down and assassinated them in _self-defence_?" demanded David, his voice making it clear what he thought of the notion.

"A man's home is his castle," said Devastator. "And he has the right to defend it. The whole world was my castle. I had as much right as the Titans to fight in its defence, as I saw fit. The heroes hadn't stopped me from being victimized. They hadn't stopped thousands of others. Whether they couldn't do it or wouldn't do it was irrelevant. Unlike the other victims, I had the means to step up and hit back, and I did so. And for having dared as much, they beat me within an inch of my life, and let my intended target walk free to commit more evil. You can dress that up in any rhetoric you like, David, lecture me about rights and rehabilitation and collateral damage until you're blue in the face. Those fifty-seven people still died. And they died because I wasn't allowed to prevent it."

David said nothing, and after a moment's pause, Devastator offered one more statement.

"And in case you're wondering, _that _was when I decided to kill the Titans."

A soft wind, colder than the surrounding air, whistled through the ruined shopping mall as Devastator and David faced one another. Devastator seemed to be waiting for David to offer a comment, but David did not do so until some time had passed.

"You're full of crap," said David.

Devastator didn't even blink. "Really?" he asked.

"Completely," said David. "And you know it, too. This isn't about death by omission or the ethics of murder. That's all a bunch of justifications you came up with after the fact. This is about you and the Titans. They hurt you, and you wanted to hurt them back. That's all it ever was. All this... this _bullshit _about necessary measures and hypocrisy, that's just you and your head inventing ways for everything to not be your fault."

David rather expected another angry tirade, but what he got instead was nothing at all, no reaction, not a twitch of an eye, Devastator seemed to hang in place. And then slowly, he lowered his hands to his sides, letting the cane tap down on the ground softly.

"Is that so?" asked Devastator.

David paused in turn, but only for an instant. "Yeah," he said.

Devastator took a slow breath, holding it in for several moments, the cigarette forgotten in his hand. "Well then," he said, "let me demonstrate something."

The words were ominous enough, but rather than unleash mass destruction, Devastator turned away from David and began to walk towards the edge of the rotunda.

"Did you know that these people are all still alive?" asked Devastator.

The question was so incongruous that David didn't immediately understand what Devastator was saying. "What?" he asked.

"These people," said Devastator, and he gestured with the end of his cane towards the silent statues that ringed the rotunda, men and women and children clutching one another in the last throes of abject terror. "These statues. They're not dead."

"What are you talking about?" asked David, chancing a step forward, as a chill ran down his spine, cause indeterminate.

"Trigon's the physical embodiment of evil," said Devastator. "Evil. Not death. Death is no picnic, don't get me wrong, but there are far worse things in the universe. An eternity of torment and pain, for instance. Trigon could break this planet in half if he wanted to, but that would leave him with nobody to torture except for a handful of bull-headed teenagers. So instead, he decided to lock every living soul on the planet up in a prison of stone, where they could be tortured for all time."

His fear temporarily forgotten, David stepped forward, his head beginning to spin. "They're... they're still alive?" he asked.

"They're watching us right now," said Devastator, as he approached a small clump of the statues. A woman stood huddled against the wall, holding a little girl protectively in her arms, shielding her as best she could against some unfathomable horror lurking just behind. Both figures' faces were contorted in terror, unblinking and frozen for all time. "They can hear us, see us, everything we do or say. They've been watching this whole escapade."

David's eyes were drawn inexorably to the perfectly preserved faces of the statues before Devastator, to their expressions of terror and pain, their mouths open to scream inaudible cries. "Why are you telling me this?" he asked.

"So that you understand my full meaning," said Devastator. And then he raised his cane.

A thunderous, terrible explosion tore through the empty shopping mall, as loud and as unexpected as a bolt of lightning on a cloudless day. There had been louder blasts today, fuel tankers raining from the sky and frozen gasses transformed into sub-nuclear detonations, but this one was all the louder for its sheer unexpectedness. And in the split second it took David's nerves to transmit the signal to flinch at the sound of the blast, he saw the stone statue of the little girl in the woman's arms fly to pieces in a flash of fire and smoke.

He lurched forward, unconsciously, his body having realized what had just happened before his brain did, his eyes wide, his hand fumbling for the broken staff at his side. Yet before he could so much as conjure a noisemaker, Devastator pivoted back and threw out his open hand towards him, fingers splayed like an archwizard's. The ground burst at David's feet like an overripe fruit, hurling him back into the wall and down onto the broken floor beneath it. His head spinning, David tried to scramble back to his feet, but he had managed to rise only to his hands and knees before Devastator's voice arrested him.

"_Stop right there_," bellowed Devastator, not a request but a command, and David raised his head to see Devastator's burning cane pointed at him like a rifle. "Stop," repeated Devastator, "and think a moment. Think about what just happened."

It was impossible not to, and despite the injunction, David clambered back to his feet. The silent stone fragments of the little girl lay scattered all over the floor of the rotunda. Just looking at them brought bile to David's throat.

"I'm gonna _kill_ you," he said, largely before he could even think about it.

"No, you're not," said Devastator in a voice of absolute certainty. "You _can't_ kill me, and that's the entire reason we're standing here." He swung his cane back towards the smashed statue. "How did that come about?"

David blinked at Devastator like he was watching the ravings of a madman. "What the hell is _wrong_ with you?" he shouted.

"_How did that happen_?" demanded Devastator, the cane's flames flaring up between his fingers.

"How did - " stammered David, "you _killed_ her!"

"Yes!" shouted Devastator. "And how is it that I was able to _do _that?"

Whatever lingering sense David had of what was going on here deserted him. He stood with his mouth half-open, unable to conjure up the necessary words. Devastator did not wait for them to appear.

"A six year old girl," thundered Devastator. "Innocent of any wrongdoing. Petrified and tortured and then murdered in cold blood. How the _hell _did that happen? Six thousand years of civilization, all of it built specifically to ensure that something like _that_ could not possibly happen, ever. And yet here we stand!" He drove the cane down back into the ground like a railroad spike. "Where _was _everyone? Where were her protectors? The ones we painstakingly created and appointed to watch over her? Where were the police? Where was the army? Where were the heroes? Where was _God_? Every defence created by generations of men, and all I had to do was walk over here and _blast her to ribbons_!"

David didn't answer vocally. In a single, swift move, he tore the staff fragment from his side and blasted a section of the wall free with it, hurling it at Devastator like a cannonball. But Devastator thrust out his cane like a crucifix before a vampire, and the masonry fragment exploded into a thousand pieces, the blast channeled back towards David, knocking him against the wall once more, this time hard enough to empty his lungs and send him crashing to the ground, doubled over and struggling to breathe.

"Awful, isn't it?" said Devastator, approaching slowly with the cane aimed directly at David's head. "That terrible chill that settles into your stomach and won't go away no matter what you do? All you can see when you close your eyes is the sight of the atrocity right in front of you, and not even Devastator can blast it out of your head."

His throat and chest still burning, David swung his staff fragment upwards, tossing fist-sized pieces of rubble at Devastator like cannonballs. But Devastator batted them aside almost contemptuously, and then flicked the tip of his cane down. An instant later, the floor bucked like a living thing, bouncing David three feet into the air and dropping him flat on his face and stomach like a boned fish.

"What's the matter?" asked Devastator, letting just a hint of mockery into his voice. "Are you upset? Did I just offend you?"

"You sick, _twisted_- "

"I've got twists to me you can't even fathom," said Devastator. He crouched down, leaning on his cane for support, staring David in the face as the younger teen managed to push himself to his hands and knees. "Consider what's running through you right now," he said. "The rage, the injustice, the frustration at having borne witness to something that shouldn't by rights have been possible in the first place. _Dwell_ on that, and then multiply it by thousands and _tens of thousands_. Do all that, and maybe, _maybe_, you'll start to understand."

"Understand what?"

"_Piles_ of bodies" spat Devastator. "_Literal_ piles. The lucky ones with their throats slashed, the unlucky ones burnt, or mutilated, or subjected to a quaint custom called 'necklacing'. All kinds of course, but the children were the hardest to live with. Eight-year-olds with their skulls split open, whipped to death with barbed wire, starved intentionally, hacked to pieces on a black altar." He gestured back towards the shattered statue with his free hand. "I spent the better part of a _decade _seeing children like that. Children nobody gave a damn about. Because they were poor. Or brown. Or had been taught to worship the wrong god."

"That's _not true_," insisted David, as he got back to his feet. "I know the Titans, they wouldn't ever just let people die like that, whoever they were. They _kill_themselves just to keep kids safe."

"Then why were those kids dead?" asked Devastator, standing up and spreading his arms wide. "And the Titans still alive?" He stood before David like a prosecuting attorney, his blank eyes wide and fierce, as though expecting an answer. "Why is _this _one dead, when heroes like yourself still draw breath to defend her? Explain it to me, David, and I'll run this sword through my own chest, right here in front of you."

David stared back up at his counterpart, not daring even to blink.

"I can't," he choked.

"No," said Devastator, "you can't. Nobody could." He stepped forward, looming over David like an animate shadow, his voice shaking with emotion. "So don't tell me about what it was I _really_ wanted from the Titans, or who I was trying to fool. You think I just wanted to get back at the people who hurt _me_? What they did to me was a _traffic violation_ compared to what else I was getting back at them for. I killed the Titans for the _thousands_, and the _tens of thousands _of kids they _let die_ because they were too busy punishing me for trying to stop their murderers the only way I knew how. I killed them for their hypocrisy. I killed them for all the sins of omission they committed in a career supposedly dedicated to protecting the innocent. For _all those reasons_, I slaughtered them all."

He stood directly before David now, close enough to see the scars on his face, illuminated in great detail by the ambient light of David's blood-red eyes. "And if you still think I'm overstating the matter," he said, "or trying to cover my own selfishness, then, I've only got one question for you."

Carefully, almost regally, he bent down towards David, a tower of unassailable power and anger, his white formless eyes glowing like diamonds in the preternatural twilight.

"I held the Titans responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of children," he said. "What were your first words to me, when I killed _one_?"

For a heartbeat, for an endless heartbeat, David remained where he was, his head bowed, unwilling or unable to meet the gaze or the question of his towering alter ego. But when he finally did raise his head, his expression was empty and dark, his eyes dead as they poured a cold light onto the scarred man who loomed above him.

"You tell me," he said. And then he raised his hand.

Devastator was plainly expecting an attack, or its facsimile, some last-ditch gesture of defiance from a child finally pushed to his breaking point. It was what he had seen from David all night long. It was what he was no doubt anticipating once again, a rock thrown, a bomb hurled his way, some flash of Devastator's handiwork projected at him in a burst of anger.

What he received was nothing of the sort.

Behind Devastator, there came the sound of explosives, but not the titanic, weapons-grade blasts that he and David had been conjuring against one another. These were mere firecrackers, loud pops like the sound of a car backfiring heard at some distance remove, several dozen of them in quick succession, like kernels of popcorn all bursting at once.

Devastator seemed to pause, waiting for the punch line as it were, but the sounds were followed by nothing but the soft scurry of pebbles skittering over the broken floor. Slowly, his expression turned to puzzlement, he raised himself back up, and turned his head to see what childish foolery David could possibly have gotten to this time. But one look, one momentary glance was all it took to freeze him in place like a sculpture writ of ice.

The statues behind Devastator were gone. Every one of them. And in their place, there was nothing left but crushed, pulverized rubble.

Devastator did not move. He did not even seem to breathe. He stood, motionless, as though David's very existence had just been blotted from his memory, staring like the living dead at an empty rotunda where moments before there had stood the inanimate shapes of over fifty men, women, and children. The flames that danced about his cane withered and died, as he stared uncomprehendingly, his only motion a slow pan as he swept his crippled vision across the broken scene. Only at length did he finally remember that David was there, and slowly turn his head back towards him, his expression one of bewilderment, shock, and something that might even have been horror.

Standing now against the wall, David's voice was cold and clinical as he locked his blood-red eyes on Devastator's blind ones.

"Your move."

**O-O-O**

_And the coming wind did roar more loud,  
And the sails did sigh like sedge ;  
And the rain poured down from one black cloud ;  
The Moon was at its edge._

**O-O-O**

"I told you that I would find you."

There was nowhere to go. The walls were armored with two and a half feet of solid steel, designed to take as much abuse as all six of the Titans were capable of dishing out collectively. And the only way out was blocked by —

"Trogarr..." she said, the name falling off her tongue like a fifty-pound barbell. "You... cannot be here."

"I can be anywhere, Princess," said the alien in the doorway. "Anywhere in all the universe. Including this place."

"But you... you _died_," said Starfire. "You... I _watched _you die."

"Be fair, Princess," said the alien, with a reserved smile. "I did not die. I was murdered."

He stepped into the room, the door sliding shut behind him with barely a whisper, yet it sounded like the slamming of prison bars.

"I didn't expect to find you here," he said. "I thought you'd have run for somewhere less obvious."

"This is my home," said Starfire. "I would not leave it."

"Your home is the Citadel. I have a treaty signed in royal ink to prove it."

"You have a bill of sale!" she shouted, "signed in desperation under threat of genocide! You have —"

"I have the signed word of the King and Queen of Tamaran," he said. "Your opinions on the politics that led to it do not interest me. It says you belong with us. With me."

"I will _not_ go with you!"

"You are _already_ with me," he said, stepping towards her with a leering grin. "Or did you think your coterie of playmates would keep you safe from my reach?"

He advanced towards her, step by easy step, and slowly she backed away from him, drawing them both towards the center of the enormous room.

"Do you remember the fun times we used to have?" asked Trogarr, and when she could not answer him, he continued alone. "I remember them well. You were the reason I enjoyed my work so much. I can't possibly tell you how dreary the Citadel is without you there."

Something cold and slimy knotted itself around her insides, and she shot him almost without thinking, her starbolt burning three times brighter than any she had contrived to launch before. Yet it melted into him like rain being absorbed by a sponge, and he did not even slow his pace.

"Those won't be of much help, Princess," he said. "Remember, I know all your little tricks. I taught you most of them."

"Leave me _be_!" she yelled as he closed in, scrambling to her feet and withdrawing before him. "I will not be your... _subject_ again!"

He smiled. "Oh yes you will," he said. "That's all you'll ever be, Koriand'r." He reached behind himself, and drew forth a thin, steel wand, covered in a dense network of circuitry and topped by a pair of glowing electrodes. And Starfire had only enough time to take in those elemental facts about the object before she realized what it was she was looking at, and then her conscious mind imploded.

Trogarr grinned, reading the recognition in her eyes. "And I have such marvelous things to show you," he said. And then he thumbed a switch.

And Starfire screamed.

She screamed like she had not screamed in years. Screamed so loudly that the walls shook from the force of it, and staggered back into the wall, clutching her hands to the sides of her head with the intensity of a madman. The sheer noise reflecting off the walls was deafening, but the alien did not relent, extending the wand with his arm and slowly sliding the switch up with one finger.

"We shared so much, Princess," said Trogarr as Starfire fell screaming to her knees, pitching forward onto the ground and ripping furrows in it with her fingertips. "So much pain, disappointment, frustration, and yet it made our triumphs all the sweeter, didn't it?" He stood over her, sliding the switch up, up, up, even as Starfire writhed on the ground like a serpent, beams of coherent light emitting from her eyes and burning random patterns in the ceiling and walls. "We cast aside the boundaries of the universe and produced something unique. I could never have accomplished all that I did without you, and you..." a cruel smile crossed his face, "... you would not even _exist_ without me."

The switch reached its zenith, the electrodes on the tip of the wand sparking with lightning, and Starfire's screams graduated from abject to incoherent. She arched her back, her body twisting into impossible contortions as she beat her hands against the ground so hard that one of her bracers shattered. Trogarr stood and watched, lowering the wand to one side, closing his eyes and drinking up the sound of Starfire screaming in agony, before at long last, his finger slid the switch back down to the base, and the screaming stopped.

As the echoes died out, Starfire lay prostrate on her side, half-curled about herself, her body trembling like a leaf on the wind. Tears ran down her face and pooled beneath her head as her breath came in choked sobs. She made no effort to rise, escape, or even to acknowledge the enormous alien that stood over her, not even when Trogarr crouched down over her and lightly laid his clawed hand on her shoulder.

"My little Koriand'r," said Trogarr, running his claws up and down her arm. "My fountain of miracles. This little rebellion of yours was never going to last forever. You knew that."

"No..." she sobbed.

"Hush," whispered Trogarr, his voice almost soothing. "You knew. Deep inside, you knew these humans could never shelter you. This... adolescent fantasy of yours was nothing more than a season's intoxication. I don't even blame you for it. But it's time to return to where you belong."

"N... no..." repeated Starfire, her voice barely loud enough to hear. "I w... I will not..."

"Oh... you will," said Trogarr. "Not because of this device. Not even because of the politics. Ultimately, you're going to come back with me because the Citadel is everything you know. You see, you can tell people that Tamaran was your home. You can recite the language, play-act at the customs, it doesn't matter. When you first came to me, you were nothing but a little girl, and the only Tamaran you know is the one you cobbled together from imagination and a few dim memories. The one you used to tell me about because you thought it would delay our sessions. The one that you know never even existed."

Curled tightly into a ball on the floor, Starfire clenched her teeth and fists and tried, weakly, to throw off the Trogarr's hand, to no avail. She was beyond words, beyond denials, beyond anything but memory and pain, the two blending to form a barrier that nothing but Trogarr's voice could penetrate.

"The Citadel is your home, Koriand'r," said Trogarr. "And I am your only family. Not these pathetic humans, not the royals who gave you away to suit themselves. I am the only one who cares at all about you, who wants you to become everything you could be, the only one who can make you into everything you could be."

His touch was like acid on her skin, making her flesh crawl with the very sensation, but she could not throw him off, could not fight back, and no matter how much she gritted her teeth and tried to will her away, his touch remained very real, and his scent, and his quiet, horrible voice.

"Now," he said. "You will come with me. Or I will make up for three years of lost time right here, and then reduce this planet to ash. You may have chosen to pretend that I would never come back, but I _know_ you remember the consequences of — "

She did not sense the door to the training room opening. She did not see Trogarr turning to see who it was. She did not even feel him withdrawing his claw to reach for some new tool of devilry. But she did hear a single word, in a voice she would have known from the other side of death itself, and hearing it told her everything she needed to know about what was going to happen in the next five seconds.

"_Starfire!_" came the voice of Robin. And no sooner had Starfire heard it than she became someone else altogether.

She opened her mouth, but what emerged from it was neither scream nor shout nor war cry nor any other thing for which there existed discrete words. What emerged from Starfire's mouth and lungs was a guttural, loathsome howl of pain and fear and formless, pitiless rage that tore through her like electricity. She could not see, for the tears blinded her, and could not hear, for her own roar deafened her. Yet she knew where Trogarr was, and where Robin had to be, and what he would to do to him and to her, and knowing these things broke open a dam of memory so painful that it could not be contained, but exploded from her like a volcano. And without discrete intent or calculation, she sprang up from the floor at Trogarr, who turned back to her just in time to see her leap, and struck him full in the face with such force that they were both hurled through the air a dozen yards.

Trogarr landed on his back, Starfire crouched atop him, and he snarled, his teeth bared, and reached up to seize Starfire by the throat. But before he could do anything of the sort, utter a threat or strike a blow, Starfire grabbed at his other hand, the one that had fallen within reach, and snatched from it the ultrasonic pain inducer, the one she remembered from so many years' worth of punishment and that he had painstakingly calibrated on her for months. His favorite toy. Lifting it high into the air with one hand, she reversed her grip, and before Trogarr could so much as cry out, Starfire plunged all eighteen inches of the slender metal wand straight into the alien's throat.

There was a squishing noise, and then a hollow thunk as the electrodes struck the ground beneath them, and Starfire saw Trogarr's eyes shoot open wide. He opened his mouth, but no sound emerged, as he pawed helplessly at his throat with both hands. Starfire however, did not stop to relish these things, ripping the inducer free before driving it into him again and again and again, screaming as she did so loud enough to shake the room, even as starbolts poured from her other hand and beams of coherent energy from her eyes. Ten, twenty, fifty times she drove the makeshift dagger down, until it was nothing but a sparking, twisted piece of metal, and Trogarr's body a lifeless mass of sizzling pulp, yet still she could not stop, pounding the wet floorplates with her fists until they buckled, beating her own hands bloody as her cries progressively melted into sobs. Only when she could no longer lift her arms did she finally stop, falling to her hands and knees and shaking, weeping, barely able to prevent her seven stomachs from voiding their contents all over the floor.

It was a long, long time before Starfire realized that someone was shouting her name.

She lifted her head, sat up, turned, and saw Robin. He was standing at the doorway, his uniform singed and torn, his skin bruised and cut, but intact, and alive, and utterly, _utterly_ dumbstruck. A birdarang was in his hand, wings extended and primed for throwing, but he seemed to have forgotten it. He seemed to have forgotten everything, his eyes, wide even behind his mask, fixed like nails on the sight of Starfire sitting amidst the gore of the alien she had just brutally murdered.

"... Starfire?" he managed to say.

Tears still fogging her eyes, her hands shaking like the rest of her body, Starfire could not think of what to say or do. Sobs still sought to claw their way out of her throat, leaking past her broken defenses every so often as she sat in the midst of her own handiwork. At length, all she could say was the only thing she could think of.

"R... Robin..."

Saying his name seemed to break some kind of spell, and Robin carefully entered the room, keeping his distance as he plainly tried to process what he was seeing, and failed to. "Star... are... what did you — "

"I... I did not..." What could she say? What could anyone say? She looked down and saw her clothes and skin covered in blood, her own mixed with her victim's. Back to Robin she turned, her mouth working silently as she tried to find something, anything she could use to explain away what had just happened. "I..."

"Oh my god..." Now Robin sounded afraid. He'd had enough time to process what he was seeing, and was beginning to consider what it meant. What was running through his head right now, she could not guess but did not have to. Never before, not even in the depths of the worst crises to haunt the Titans, had any of them ever taken the life of another being. It was a rule so pervasive as to go unwritten and unspoken, so obviously beyond the pale of everything the Titans stood for. And now here she was, and there Robin was, and what they were to do now she did not know, and plainly neither did he.

"He was my jailer," she said, still shaking so badly that her voice quivered too, coughing the words out between sobs. "He was the one the Gordanians set to experiment upon me. He... tortured me... for years... and told me that he... he was the only one who... would ever... would ever... love — "

"Star," said Robin, and he stepped closer to her, his surprise slowly fading. "Star... please..."

Her coherence deserted her. "I did... I did not mean to... I did not... I... he was going to... to..."

"_Star!_" said Robin, kneeling down in front of her, heedless of the blood that soaked his pants. He reached out gently with his free hand and took her by the shoulder, standing up and pulling her with him to her feet. Blood dripped from her hair and ran down her neck as she stood, looking into Robin's half-obscured face, trying to read anything from it, and trying even harder not to collapse entirely.

"It's..." said Robin, "it's... all right Star. It's all right. I..." a hesitant look at the mutilated body behind them, "I... it's all right."

"Robin..." she said, and she half-stepped, half-fell forward, wrapping one arm around him and holding onto him like a life preserver, the other dangling at her side, still clutching the broken inducer, the murder weapon from a moment ago.

She felt the hesitation in Robin, felt his fear, his reservation, his doubt. Yet he held her too, wrapping both arms around her and simply holding her as she cried into his shoulder. "It'll be all right, Starfire," he said. "I... I understand. And I won't... I won't tell the others. I won't tell anyone. It'll all be all right."

The sobs melted away, and with them the shivering and the fog that clouded her senses. She stood where she was, holding onto Robin and staring emptily into the blank space beyond, for what seemed like an eternity. But when finally she did respond to him, her voice was quiet, subdued, and contained only a hint of the terrible, fathomless sorrow that was soaked into every corner of her being.

"No," said Starfire. "It will not."

There was a soft, almost inaudible, tearing sound, muffled and over in less than a second. And then Starfire released Robin and took a step back.

Robin's eyes were wide once more, but they were no longer focused on her. Instead, Robin was looking down at his own uniform, and at the eighteen-inch piece of jagged, sparking metal that protruded from his shirt, in the center of a slowly expanding circle of red. His mouth open in shock he touched the edge of the broken inducer gingerly, as though he could not believe that it was real. And then, as the reality of what had just happened struck him like a physical blow, Robin lifted his frightened masked eyes to Starfire, who was standing motionless, her expression hollow, mournful, and empty.

"It will never be all right again."

**O-O-O**

_Like one, that on a lonesome road  
Doth walk in fear and dread,  
And having once turned round walks on,  
And turns no more his head ;  
Because he knows, a frightful fiend  
Doth close behind him tread._

**O-O-O**

Devastator said nothing, his empty eyes running over the empty mall. He seemed, temporarily, to have forgotten that anyone else was in the area. His cane was held limply at one side, the tip trailing on the ground, forgotten along with his counterpart. A carpet of broken igneous rock stretched before him, uniformly grey, distributed across the marble floors as though at random. He lowered his gaze to one such piece the size of a hen's egg, which lay beside his foot, so badly scored by fire and worn by abrasion that there was no longer any discernible sign of what it had once been.

"What have you done?" he asked at length, his voice hoarse. He did not turn around.

Standing behind Devastator, up against the wall, David did not vary his position by an inch, nor allow his voice to stray from a cold, steel monotone. "What I was meant to do."

"Meant by who?" asked Devastator, still frozen like a statue himself.

David let the echo of Devastator's voice fade before responding, each word slow and precise, like a machine's words. "By Devastator," he said. "By you. By nature."

"Nature?" There was a slight warble to this one, like a violin string not properly tightened.

"Of course," said David, and now, at last, he stepped off the wall. "What, exactly, did you think I _was_?"

With infinite care, Devastator drew himself up, turning around to face David. The twilight outside cast him deeply into shadow, a black form in the shape of a man who pivoted with care as David slowly circled him. He did not speak.

"You see, here's what doesn't make sense," said David. "You're willing to kill anyone who gets in your way. Cops, soldiers, heroes, civilians, it just doesn't seem to matter to you."

"You think it doesn't matter?" asked Devastator, breath short and words clipped.

"No, that's just it, I think it does. I think it matters enormously. Because you didn't kill those people because you wanted their money or because they hurt you, you killed them because they got in the way of you killing _someone else_. Someone you thought needed to die. And why did they need to die? Because they _killed people_." He stalked around Devastator, like a wolf circling a wounded elk. "Are you seeing the problem here?"

"So I'm a hypocrite?" asked Devastator, his words deathly cold, his hands beginning to shake with anger.

David smiled. "You can't hide from me like that," he said. "We're the same person, underneath the scars and the costumes. You're not a hypocrite. You're not that shallow." He slid inwards, still out of range, his eyes glistening in the darkness like those of some lower demon. "You're _damned_," he said, "and you know it."

Warily, Devastator followed David with his own eyes. "I work for the Devil," he said.

"That has nothing to do with it," said David. He continued to circle, slowly, gently kicking the rocks out of his path as he went. "Why the double standard? Why it is all right for you to murder, but not for others? Pure hypocrisy?" He shook his head. "No. You're not stupid enough for that. It's too obvious to ignore. You know you're doing exactly what you condemned Slade and Faust and Joker and everyone else for, but you found a way to square that with yourself, and there's no way that I'm the first person to try and explain it to you."

He continued to circle, slowly, a planet of red and grey orbiting a dark shadow of a central star.

"Maybe you thought you were a superman?" he asked bitingly. "Maybe you thought you were better than other people, and had the right to decide who lived and died because of it?" He let the question sit for just a moment, before shooting it down again. "No. You know you're not that. Because Superman doesn't have scars. He doesn't hide like a normal person with a coat and a gun. He doesn't disappear into the shadows and materialize to kill someone before sliding back again. Because he's Superman, and everyone knows it." David ran his eyes over Devastator, the red beams of light narrowing as he grimaced dismissively. "You didn't do anything like that, did you? Even when you had the chance."

Step by step, David continued to circle his alter ego, as the cane in Devastator's hand began to smolder once more, soft, barely visible flames of red licking up its length from steel tip to silver handle.

"You were an assassin," said David. "A 'contractor', you called it. One that could bring down Metahumans. I can't even imagine what that would be worth. You had to be _swimming _in money." He paused, just for a second, a knowing smile slowly spreading across his face. "So what did you do with it all?" He gestured towards Devastator with his hand, palm open and upward, as though inviting a comment he knew would not be coming. "What did you buy?" he asked. "Private islands? Castles? Fancy cars? Women?" His arm returned to his side, his smile faded, and he regarded Devastator once, who stood in silence before him like a statue carved from obsidian glass.

"Did you..." ventured David, "... did you get _anything_?"

Fitfully, carefully, as though he had to force his own muscles into behaving themselves, Devastator opened his mouth and choked out an answer.

"That wasn't the point," he said.

"I know," said David. "You didn't do it for money. You didn't do it for fun. You didn't do it for revenge, and you didn't do it from some sense of higher justice. You didn't even do it because you felt that you had to." He stopped walking, holding his hands behind his back. "You did it because you were already damned. Not because of Joker. Not even because of Devastator. Because of who you are. Because of who we are."

"Don't speak of things you don't understand."

"You think I don't understand?" asked David. "You think I don't know what it's like?" His eyes narrowed, and his grin widened, the shadows of his brow darkening his entire face save for the red orbs that now served as eyes. "Look around you, Devastator. What do you think this is?"

"Have you lost your _mind_?" snarled Devastator, his hands tightening around his cane as the flames cloaking it surged around his fingers.

"Why?" asked David. "Because I killed somebody?" He laughed, spreading his arms wide. "Because I killed those people? _Look_ at me, Devastator. What do you see?"

"I _told_ you they were alive!"

"So?" David shrugged. "You killed one yourself. You killed _thousands _yourself. Bystanders and cops, people who didn't do anything. That was all right?"

"What I did has _nothing _to do with - "

"Of course it doesn't," interrupted David. "That's how you justify it. That one thing has nothing to do with the other. Nobody but you gets to slaughter indiscriminately. Because you're already damned. So it doesn't matter what you do anymore, and that makes you free to do anything you want."

Slowly, Devastator began to advance, face stony, cane burning like a branding iron in his hands. He said nothing at all, staring like a zombie at David, who withdrew before him, but not with any sign of either fear or apprehension.

"That's what it was, isn't it?" he asked. "That's why you were able to stomach it. Because after Arkham, you _knew_ you'd crossed the line. You'd _burned_ the line behind you, and it no longer mattered what you did, because you were damned anyway. So you went after monsters. Because you could do whatever you wanted to them, and it couldn't be worse than what you'd already done. You weren't some exalted superman who got to do whatever he wanted. You were going after people just like _you_. Because you could. Because nobody else could. Because the strongest heroes in the world were still heroes, and couldn't let themselves do what you could let yourself do. They couldn't end things once and for all the way a _monster_ like you could."

The cracked ground beneath Devastator's feet began to emit soft creaking noises, as rivulets of frost started to wind their way over the broken marble, like the webs of a spider. "Be quiet," said Devastator, his voice as dark as a thundercloud.

David laughed, raising his hands to the heavens as though to ask them to bear witness to the absurdity of it all. "Why?" he asked. "What are you gonna do? Kill me? Take revenge? Punish me? Go right ahead!" He reached to his side and drew the broken staff that rested there, but rather than ignite it, he aimed it at Devastator like a sword. "It doesn't change anything. All this time, you've been on me because of the wrong reasons. You thought I was a hero. _Everyone _keeps saying that I'm a hero. But for some reason, when I tell people that I'm not one, nobody believes me. Everyone else, I can understand. But you," he smiled, "you _really_ should know better."

"That's _enough_." Devastator raised his cane, and the flames sheathing it exploded into incandescent firelight. Moments later a rock the size of a refrigerator burst from the ground behind him and arced overhead before descending upon David like a meteor. But David raised his own broken staff, which caught the same fire as Devastator's, and the rock exploded into a trillion pieces before it could strike home.

"You know what changed, between the two of us?" asked David, still matching Devastator's pace "What actually changed? I fell in with the Titans. I didn't mean to, Cinderblock and Trigon made it happen. But it doesn't matter why it happened, it matters that it happened. I fell in with them, and they were heroes, and I did what they wanted. Because I would have done _anything_ they wanted. If they had been the HIVE, I'd have committed crimes, if they had been Slade, I'd have killed people, but they weren't. They were heroes. And so I got a costume and a codename and my picture in the newspaper. _That's _what the change was. That's _all_ that it was."

Stepping forward and pivoting in a semicircle, Devastator swept the base of his cane around, propelling a stream of stones and chunks of debris with it towards David. But David was ready for such things, and swinging his broken staff down like a club, he detonated the first rock like a bomb, the explosion big enough to scatter the rest of the incoming projectiles.

"You see, I _know _what I am," said David, not bothering to counterattack. "It took a long time for me to come to terms with it, but I did. Thing is, I don't think _you_ ever did. Because you didn't have to. You had someone to blame. Joker, Robin, the Titans, whoever crossed you most recently. You never had to stop and look at yourself in the mirror. Whatever you did was _their _fault, because _they _pushed you across the line, and that made everything that followed _their _responsibility, didn't it?"

No further assault was produced, but neither did Devastator say a word. His pace began to accelerate, footsteps like hollow impacts on the broken marble. The cane in his hand burned ever brighter, as delicate patterns of frozen condensation spiderwebbed across the floor. Yet far from shrinking back in fear, David's grin seemed to deepen with each step, as he paced Devastator's advance with his own retreat, slinging no weapons in reply but his own stinging words.

"I don't think you're angry with me because I fell in with the Titans. You might be angry at _them_, because of what they turned me into, but that's just because you don't know what that is. You think they turned me into a hero, took a blank slate and painted their own picture on it. But you only think that because you can't see that the only thing I ever was, was _you_."

The floor began to fly apart.

Raising his hands like a high priest trying to conjure forth the spirits of the dead, Devastator called for destruction and received it, as entire sections of the broken ground burst into the air at his command. Dozens of blocks, each the size of a wall safe, leaped up, only to hurl themselves at David. David stepped backwards, swinging his broken staff back and forth as fast as he could, and the most threatening blocks exploded into steam before they could strike, the rest sailing around him in every direction and smashing great holes through the wall behind. Yet Devastator did not stop, ripping stones from the ground with burst of flame, his empty eyes wide with incandescent rage, until a broad chasm loomed between them.

"I'm _you_," shouted David as soon as he had a chance, loud enough to be heard over the exploding boulders. "I'm everything you were when you were my age. I was never mutilated by the Joker, I was never beaten into a pulp by the Titans and left to rot in some hospital. Nothing ever happened to me that made me do these sorts of things. No abuse, no torture, no madness." The echoes of the clashing stones died away as David stopped retreating, bracing himself with both hands on his truncated staff. "I just killed sixty-seven people I've never met in cold blood. I have absolutely no excuse for doing it. And we're the same person." His smile became a leer, the sneering jagged stare of a jack-o-lantern dancing in his preternaturally bloodshot eyes.

"So what does that say about you, and your grand crusade?"

Devastator didn't respond in words.

In a single, swift move, Devastator drove the end of his cane into the broken floor. The instant he did so, fire blossomed around it, hurling him into the air, not the violent uncoordinated shove of your average explosion, but a perfectly modulated rocket-propelled leap that launched Devastator in a parabolic arc up through the air and down again on wings of living flame. He landed with scarcely a tremor bare inches from David, looming over him with an expression of pure, savage indignation.

"_This,_" he said, as he raised his hand.

Before David could react, before he could even blink, Devastator conjured an explosive fireball out of what appeared to be thin air, so quick and seamless that his eyes did not have time to take in what was happening. In a heartbeat, David felt a blow like a wrecking ball, and he was thrown back twenty, fifty, a hundred feet to crash headlong into the far wall.

Six months ago, such a blow would have knocked him unconscious. Three months ago he would have needed five minutes on his hands and knees to recover. Two days ago he would have taken a moment or two to catch his breath. Tonight he bounced off the wall, spun back around, and slashed at the air with his broken staff, tearing a piece of marble siding the size of a tow truck out of the very wall he had just collided with, and shooting it at Devastator like a cannon.

It blew up like a firework twenty feet away, and before the smoke could clear, Devastator threw a wall of fire at him.

It wasn't actually made of fire, but it might as well have been. It was a series of cataclysmic, shaped blasts that filled the entire mall from broken floor to shattered ceiling, so many and in such rapid succession that they appeared to be a continuous stream. What Devastator was actually using as ammunition, David could not tell. All he could do was quite literally fight fire with fire. Sweeping his staff back, he tossed pieces of debris into the air with one hand and flung them like artillery shells in the general direction of Devastator with the other. He did not bother to aim, for his goal was not attack but defense, to simply throw enough high explosive out in front of him to frustrate the barrage of frenetic death that Devastator was hurling his way. Backed against the wall, he did not dare try and consider how long he might be able to hold off such an assault.

For no more than five seconds, David threw literally everything he had to try and hold Devastator back, yet it was all in vain. All of a sudden, the curtain of fire and smoke was violently torn aside by a thunderclap so potent that David felt it as a punch to the chest. In its place stood Devastator, and it was impossible to determine where the cold flames of his cane ended and the hot ones he was conjuring forth began. Fire danced from his hands and feet and reflected in his eyes and ran over the intricate patterns of frost on the floor, and as he stared at David, the very air about him seemed to warp. He drew his hand back, twisting it into a grotesque claw, as the wall behind David began to crack and lean inwards. And then, brandishing his cane like the flaming sword of an avenging angel, Devastator lunged forward with murder in his eyes and destruction at his fingertips, his free hand splayed forward, as though conjuring all the fires of hell for one, cataclysmic blow.

But it never landed.

Mid-lunge, Devastator gave a rending cry, pitched forward and collapsed to the ground with all the grace of a puppet whose strings had just been cut. As he fell, the flames around him vanished or receded, and the frost that traced patterns in the floor evaporated like so much morning mist. His cane clattered to the ground at his side, quenched and dead, nothing more than a useless prop. David did not venture to move, not one muscle, staring emptily down as Devastator landed on his hands and knees, face contorted in pain, one hand gripping his temple as though trying to dig his fingers through his own skull. His other hand balled into a fist, and he clawed at the broken ground with it, as groans of pain tore themselves from between his clenched teeth.

Yet as Devastator fell, David did not lunge forward to capitalize on whatever had happened. He did not brandish his own staff and call for more destruction, nor hurl debris and fire, nor spring forward to strike Devastator physically. He did not counterattack in any way, letting Devastator writhe, letting him clench his teeth and force back the pain and stabilize himself. David did nothing except step back, tensing himself like a spring, and when Devastator finally lifted his head to see what he was doing, he saw David standing back, his eyes and arm raised to the heavens, one finger extended skywards. His expression puzzled, Devastator lifted his own gaze up towards the smoke-shrouded ceiling, and froze like a deer in headlights.

Floating near where the ceiling of the enormous mall had been was the equivalent mass of an entire _mountain_. And it was sheathed in gold.

The arched roof, whatever it had been, was invisible now, blocked by a layer of boulders and stones and loose clods of earth, so many and so densely packed that they formed a vaulted ceiling of their own, stitched together from wall to wall like a flowing tapestry. And in the center of it all, floated Terra, supported by a handful of stones, crouched as though in a loft, staring down at the wielders of Devastator who had spoken and shouted and fought with one another to the utmost extent, so consumed in their reciprocal fight that they had not bothered to look up.

Or at least one of them hadn't. The other had contrived not to.

And then the whole world collapsed.

Terra did not merely release her collection of stone and dirt, she _threw_ it down at Devastator like a meteor the size of an apartment building, and instantly the world vanished behind a pall of dust and smoke thick enough to be physical. Coughing and staggering backwards, David waved his hand in front of his face, trying to clear the air, only to be greeted by the sight of an immense mountain of stone and dirt, heaped fifty feet tall, that now sat where Devastator had been crouching a moment before.

He didn't even hesitate.

In a heartbeat, his staff was in his hand and burning like a torch, and he swung it down as though he were trying to hammer a railroad tie into the ground. Deep inside the mound of loose earth, a gigantic rock froze momentarily before detonating at his command with the power of a mortar shell, sending shockwaves coursing through the interior of the caern and causing its surface to rumble and shake. Again he raised his staff, and again he brought it down, detonating another stone, and another, and another, until he could find no more rocks of sufficient size, and began detonating clumps of earth, bits of debris, everything and anything he could wrap his mind around. Still he continued, working the mountain over and over, until an entire facing of it came shaken loose and avalanched down upon him. Clawing his way free, he refused to stop even then, climbing part-way up the loose heap on his hands and knees and beating it with his staff, like a destroyer raining depth charges down on an invisible submarine.

He carried on like this for an indeterminate amount of time, until his arm would no longer lift the titanium staff, nor his pounding head countenance another stroke, and then he collapsed, spent, slowly sliding down the side of the ruined heap of dirt and stone chips to the ground. A moment later, and there was a soft thump from somewhere nearby, and he opened his eyes to see Terra kneeling before him, looking as exhausted as he was, staring at him without a word, her expression a mixture of shock and knife-edged fear.

For a few seconds, David didn't say a word, his attention occupied with trying to force air into and out of his lungs. But when Terra's expression didn't change, he ventured a question, lifting himself up on one arm as he did so.

"Are you okay?" he asked.

"How did you know what I would do with the statues?" she asked right back.

Something caught in his throat. "Did you... did you get them out?"

"They're fine," said Terra. "There's a garage underneath the mall. I moved them all down there and replaced them with pieces of shale. But how did you know that I was going to do that?"

"I didn't," said David. "But I knew you were watching us."

"So?" she asked. "You told me not to interfere until you signalled. You said you had some kind of plan."

"I did," said David. "I just... hadn't figured it all out yet."

Terra's shell-shocked look didn't change. "But what if I hadn't moved them?"

David thought about it for a moment, his exhausted brain running only on the most basic levels. At length he managed a half-smile and looked back up at Terra with a shrug.

"I guess I just sort of assumed you would."

He didn't really mean anything special by it. He was far too far gone for any sort of double or hidden meaning now. But Terra visibly stopped short when he said it, blinking in silence at him as though she couldn't think of what to say. He waited in turn for her to recover her voice, but she finally just reached a hand out to him, her expression shaken. "Come on," she said. "We should go."

He took her hand, and she helped him up, but as she turned to go, he held on gently and stopped her.

"Terra, wait a minute."

She stopped, turning back, obviously expecting him to do something else, or pick something up. But instead he took a few seconds to catch his breath, and collect his scattered wits.

"I just... before anything else happens, I wanted to say - "

She shook her head. "Don't worry," she said. "I won't tell anyone what you two were talking about." Once more she turned away, but once more he did not release her, and she turned back.

"No," he said. "It's not that. I wanted..." words deserted him, thought deserted him, and he shook his head to brush the cobwebs clear and just said it outright.

"Thank you."

She seemed to hesitate again. "What?" she asked.

"Thank you," he repeated. "For..." he looked around at the ruined mall and the scene of destruction that surrounded them. "For everything," he finally said. "For... I can't even start to..."

He was, as usual, making hash of this, but as he looked back up at Terra, she did something he had not seen her do since when he had known her as 'Carrie'. She smiled. And seeing her smile brought one to his own face, and he laughed, at the absurdity of it all as much as anything else. And then a moment later, Terra stepped towards him and put her arms around his shoulders. Another moment, and he did the same.

They stood there for a little while, leaning against one another, for it was all that kept either of them standing, and David closed his eyes and bit-by-bit, forced his taut nerves to slowly relax. His head swam, his feet shifting unsteadily beneath him, but Terra held him up regardless, and he her. Every breath he took and released seemed to empty the fire from his lungs, and a calming, almost apathetic numbness spread over him. "Thank you," he repeated at length, and she did not answer him, but stood there, motionless but for the occasional shudder that seemed to well up from somewhere deep within. Her head rested on his shoulder, and he felt something wet on the back of his neck, but did not reach back to feel what it might be, sure that he already knew.

"I'm sorry," she whispered, though what she meant she did not say, and he did not ask. The only reply he could muster was to simply stand in the midst of ruin and death, holding the girl who twice before had sought, with all her considerable might, to be the instrument of his own death.

It was no longer even remarkable.

At long, endless length, Terra gently pulled away, and he released her as she did so. Her face was streaked red beneath the mud and grime that they were both coated with, and her eyes glistened in the firelight with tears, but she brushed them away with the back of her hand, and smiled. "Come on," she said, patting him on the shoulder again. "Let's go find the - "

A crackling, rustling sound at their feet distracted both Terra and David at the same time, and they both lowered their heads to see what might be causing it. When they saw what it was, Terra paused, blinking, not understanding what it was that she saw, but David did not. Below them, the broken rocks and loose debris that covered the floor of the ruined mall were being covered in frost, rivulets of ice materializing over them and running in intricate patterns about their feet. And as he beheld this happening, in that precise instant, David felt his heart stop.

And then fire.

There had been louder blasts today, and larger ones, but none so cutting, none so depraved as this one, this explosion of fire that ripped the mountain of stone and earth apart and blasted it into the air. Standing as they were on the edge of the mountain, David and Terra were cast aside like toy soldiers, hurled bodily into and through the weakened wall of the shopping mall. They fell, bounced once, and crashed headlong into a parked car in the ruined parking lot outside, fetching up against it like rag dolls thrown to the side by the mad rage of a whirlwind, broken, sundered figures of no further consequence to anyone.

David wound up on his side, the smoking ruin of the car looming over him, and beside him lay Terra. She gave a lurch, and wheezed horribly, reaching blindly up with one trembling hand to try and pull herself upright. Seeing her move served to remind him that movement was possible at all, and he rolled over onto his stomach and with an effort undreamed of, pushed himself up to his hands and knees. His lungs on fire and his head spinning, he contrived to lift his head, and look back at the broken wall he had just traversed.

The wall was gone, already damaged by previous explosions and now simply obliterated by this last one. And beyond it, the mound of dirt and stone that had been Devastator's resting place was gone as well, atomized by the blast that had just evicted them both from the building. The crater that now stood in its place vented smoke too thick to see through, but as David watched, he saw a bloodied, clawlike hand emerge from its depths, and clutch the lip of the crater with an iron grasp, moments before its owner heaved itself into view.

"_No,_" whispered Terra beside him. David did not retain enough capacity to echo her.

Slowly, like a primordial beast, Devastator crawled his way out of the smoldering crater. His face was horribly gashed, one eye enucleated, blood streaming from a hideous slash across his forehead and running down his arm. One hand was clutched tightly over his abdomen, where his coat and shirt was stained black. The other held his battered cane, which he planted in the broken ground like an ice axe and used to leverage himself to his feet. Blood ran from the corners of his mouth, and he spat on the ground to empty it, his remaining eye staring daggers at the two teenagers who lay broken before him.

"Clever boy," he snarled horribly. And then he raised his hand.

"_NO!_"

It was no shout that emerged Terra's mouth but a roar, some kind of deep, primal refusal, and though David could not possibly see how she mustered the wherewithal to, Terra reached up and grabbed the empty window of the car, using it to pull herself up to a seated position before slashing her other hand through the air. Instantly, a dozen football-sized stones raised from the ground at her command, and threw themselves at Devastator, but Terra's kinetic commands no longer had the force they once had, and the stones merely rolled to a stop at Devastator's feet. He kicked them aside contemptuously as he stepped forward, hobbling on his cane, leaving behind a trail of blood, yet obstinately refusing to die.

Somewhere deep inside David, the near-extinct flames of self-preservation gasped to life once more, and with an effort of will he did not think he had left within him, he managed to rise up onto his knees and extend forward the broken, battered staff he still clutched in one hand. From near to Devastator, a piece of metal junk, a carburetor perhaps or some other loose thing, was lofted into the air on a pulse of fire, flying in Devastator's general direction before exploding near him like an air-bursting shell. But the explosion's teeth were drawn, and the blast barely buffeted Devastator, who retaliated by shooting a bicycle-sized piece of masonry from the shattered wall at David and Terra, missing them both by inches.

On came Devastator, launching shots at them with each step. Neither Terra nor David tried to evade them, every ounce of concentration maintained on returning Devastator's fire, on bringing him down before he could advance further. Yet neither accuracy nor power was left to them, despite all their efforts, and while Devastator was in scarcely better shape, what force remained to him was sufficient, ultimately, for one last strike.

Now emerged fully into the parking lot, Devastator stopped in place, knocking one of Terra's rocks aside with his staff, and pivoted back towards the ruined mall. He reached his hand back, palm up, as though grasping some unholy idol. All of a sudden he clenched his fist, and from deep within the ruined building, there came fresh bursts of fire. An instant later, a barrage of steel rebars, sheered to points by the violence inflicted on the shopping mall, flew out of the ruined building like javelins, hurtling past Devastator and straight towards David and Terra. At his peak, David might have tried to blast them from the air, but he was so far from his peak as to be unable to even remember what it felt like, and he had only enough time to duck his head and turn away before he heard the rending crash of steel on steel as the rebars drove into the car behind him like a quiverful of arrows. For an endless instant, horrid screeching sounds buffeted his ears, as he felt the wind and the grazes of half-a-dozen near misses. But then the sounds died, and he opened his eyes once more, his staff still clutched like a religious icon, and turned to deliver what return fire he could.

But as he did, he heard Terra gasp. And when he turned to see why, he froze.

Terra sat against the ruined car, her eyes wide and blinking in surprise, as she stared down at a grotesque shard of jagged metal three quarters of an inch in diameter that emerged from her stomach as though conjured there by magic.

For several seconds, David forgot how to move. Terra, it appeared, had done the same. She neither screamed nor writhed but only stared down at the metal bar driven through her as though she could not comprehend its existence, and the existence of such a thing were an unfathomable absurdity, one expected to disappear presently when the world chose to right itself. Gingerly, she touched the rebar with trembling fingers, as though she could somehow command it to vanish, or her stomach to repair itself, but it remained, cold and unfeeling, and only then did she raise her frightened, desperate eyes to meet David's, her expression asking a question that her mouth could not form.

But David could only crouch there helplessly, unable to push his mind past the fact before him, that Devastator had, with a wave of his hand, stapled Terra to the ruined car,and the abstract theory of his and Terra's impending deaths became, all at once, cold reality.

From his side, he heard Devastator cough, and turned.

Devastator stood unmoving now, swaying gently and leaning upon his cane, now finally reduced to the purpose it had been originally intended for. His face a mass of hideous tissue damage, his clothes soaked through with dark blood and stained by dirt and ash, he stood nonetheless alive, watching his victims with a cold gaze. And as both Terra, pinned to the car behind her by a rod of solid steel, and David, ambulatory but devoid of further resources, turned to watch him, Devastator spat the blood from his mouth, and spoke in a voice that might have been summoned from a tomb.

"Tell me, David," he said. "Do you know why it came to this?"

**O-O-O**

Robin staggered back, his hands clutching uselessly at the spar of metal embedded within his chest. His mouth worked open and shut, but he could not speak. But as he turned back towards the perpetrator of all this, Starfire stepped forward, and spoke in his stead.

"Did you think I would not know?"

He slipped, and fell backwards, collapsing in a heap, crawling backwards away from her, getting tangled in his cape as he went. "S... Star..." he coughed out. "Star! Ple - "

"_No!"_ she roared, and the walls shook from the force of her command. "You cannot lie to me any longer! Did you think you could deceive me here? In this way? You, who would not understand this if I granted you a thousand lifetimes to reflect upon it? You?" She stepped forward, her eyes full of tears, her fists balled at her sides, and spat her words at Robin like poison.

"You understand _nothing_. And you no longer have the power to deceive."

The walls began to shimmer, receding back into darkness, the metal lining of the training room vanishing, only to be replaced by volcanic stone or open air. Down the walls and across the floor, the transformation swept, until Robin was left alone on the parapets of a vast, black fortress. And then he too shimmered, his appearance receding before her eyes. And moments later, in Robin's place there lay a man, armored with gold, covered in blood, who grasped uselessly at a shorn-off staff that was jammed like a harpoon straight into his chest.

"We Tamaraneans may sometimes resemble you, Warp," said Starfire as she advanced slowly towards the fallen man, "but we are not you. We do not _think_ as you do, we do not _perceive_as you do, and we do not lie to ourselves as you would have us do. You witnessed me murdering someone in hot rage."

She took a long, slow breath, and when she breathed it out, her voice was as even as a pane of glass.

"Robin would _never_ have accepted that."

**O-O-O**

"It wasn't about power,"

At David's side, Terra still did not emit a sound. Likely she could not. No longer able to move, stapled as she was to the car behind, she could only sit where she was and watch, her eyes oscillating between David and his counterpart. Devastator, having finally beaten Terra into irrelevance, now ignored her, his one remaining eye focused on David alone. And try as he might, David could not tear his eyes away.

"Your problem wasn't stupidity," said Devastator. "It wasn't some moral failing, and it wasn't even cowardice. It wasn't your association with the Titans." Devastator raised his free hand slowly, looking down at it, turning it over as the smoke from the ambient fires flowed through his fingers like a living thing. "Whatever anyone may say, we're not standing here because you were a fool. Your problem, David, was far more fundamental."

Slowly, Devastator drew a deep breath, holding it for some time as the air danced about his hands. At length though, he raised his remaining eye to meet David.

"Your problem," he said, "was will."

And then the wind began.

**O-O-O**

"It was all because of you."

There was nowhere to run. Beast Boy and Raven were hemmed in on all sides by an army of statues a hundred ranks thick, thousands and tens of thousands of frozen witnesses to the endgame.

"Can you even imagine seven billion people? I can't. So many people that they just merge into one faceless crowd... maybe that's how you lived with the decision. I helped a super-villain take over a city, and tried to wipe you and your friends out. But I have to admit, Raven, I never even considered something like this."

Beast Boy lay unconscious on the ground, dead to the world, unable to save himself, let alone anyone else. Raven could not even back away from Terra without leaving his side, abandoning him to whatever tender mercies Terra had in store for them both.

"You can't hide from something like what you did," said Terra as her stone block lowered to the ground. "You can't cloak yourself in innocence and pretend it's all right. You willfully annihilated the entire planet you swore to protect. Killed literally everyone you ever knew. Did you really think that you would get away with it? That anyone could absolve you? Are you actually that naive?"

The block touched down, so softly as to be almost silent, and Terra stepped off it onto the burnt earth. Her hands glowed gold as she stepped forward towards Raven, shaking her head as though from deep, bitter disappointment.

"You don't get away that easily, I'm afraid."

**O-O-O**

"Will is everything," said Devastator. "Will is life itself. Will is the fundamental force of the universe. Greater than gravity, greater than magnetism, greater than any nuclear absurdity dreamed up by physics. Will alone commands the cosmos at large."

Wind swirled around the car, smoke and dust and ash blowing in eddies like living things. David staggered, searched for purchase with his hand, and found it in the form of Terra's, grasping at the empty air against the pain and the fear that visibly welled up in her like a fountain. Steadying himself, David saw the currents of air twisting inwards to a fixed point of whiteness that gradually took form in Devastator's outstretched hand. A speck of ice the size of a paint chip, then a ball bearing, then a marble...

The sudden tightening of Terra's grip told David that she had realized what was going to happen, roughly at the same moment that he had.

"Will, is all that matters," said Devastator. "And will, David, is what you've never had."

**O-O-O**

"Robin was an absolute," said Starfire. "His convictions were impenetrable, his commitment total. He would never, _ever_ have condoned what I did. He would not have understood it. He would not have told me that it was all right. I know this, because I knew Robin. It is why I never told him. It is why I never told _anyone_ what I did to Trogarr back before I came to Earth."

His breath coming in a ghastly wheeze, Warp crawled back, away from Starfire, who followed at a slow, relentless pace, even as Warp reached the edge of the parapet, and found himself forced to stop.

"I knew this," she said, her voice holding steady, albeit with a tremble of suppressed emotion. "I have always known this. Just as I knew that Robin would not lie to me. Not about this. Had he entered a room to see me murdering another person, he would have obeyed his convictions. He would have fought me. He could not do otherwise. It was not in his nature to do otherwise." She paused, standing now directly above Warp, looking down at him like a statue. "Did you imagine that I could have felt as I did for Robin without knowing this? Did you think I was so broken that I would fail to recognize Robin when I saw him? Or were you so debased that you actually believed I would prefer Robin as I would have made him be over the Robin he actually was?"

Laying prostrate on the ground, his eyes wide with fear as he stared up at Starfire, Warp did not answer.

"Such was my belief," she said.

**O-O-O**

"You can fight it all you like," said Terra. "Pretend it isn't true, or that it's not fair, or that you never meant for anything to happen. But you'll never convince anyone, not even yourself."

She was less than ten feet away now, stones the size of mailboxes floating casually around her, and her red eyes bathed Raven and Beast Boy in their crimson glow. Terra's gait was unhurried and her manner calm, and from the corners of her eyes, Raven could see openings in the wall of statues that surrounded them, crevasses and corridors she might run and hide in afresh. But Beast Boy lay behind her, and so she could not run. Not now. Not here, at the ending of all things.

"The truth is, Raven, you _are_ the end of the world. You've always known that, even before anyone else here had heard of Trigon. It's why you left the monastery, why you tried so hard to avoid making friends. It's why you've always heard that little voice inside reminding you of what you are. And no matter how many times you deny it, no matter how many people you tried to help, ultimately, you were born to consume everything in fire. And that is exactly what you did."

Terra was right in front of her now, and Raven felt the urge to cower. To cry. To scream and hide and wrap herself in her cloak. But she looked up at the the ghastly simulacrum of Terra, and steeled herself to stand where she was, at least for the few seconds that remained.

And perhaps Terra saw that small resolution in her eyes, for she smiled, and raised her hand slowly, as the enormous stones carefully positioned themselves above Raven and Beast Boy.

"We all get exactly what we deserve, Raven," said Terra. "Even you."

**O-O-O**

The wind was a howl now, a violent shriek of distorted air, and the swelling, crystalline jewel in Devastator's hand grew ever larger, until it was the size of a softball, the sparkling center of a swirling vortex. Yet somehow, despite the wind, Devastator's voice was as clear as a bell.

"You had Devastator," he said. "But Devastator is commanded by will, and you never had the will to make use of it. Not in the centers, not with the Titans, not ever. You sat back, and let the world do what it wanted to you, because it was easier than thinking for yourself. You're a bystander, David, an intruder who let himself get dragged into events that by rights should not ever have concerned you. When the DCS told you to move, you moved. When Robin told you to fight, you fought. When I told you to run, you ran. And now we're all here, in the middle of this burning hell, because fundamentally, you couldn't answer the most simple question that all of us are ever asked."

The wind cut all at once, leaving behind a deafening silence, as David stood beside Terra, watching his counterpart with unblinking eyes.

"On a basic level, David, you have simply never known what it is you want."

And with that, Devastator lightly tossed the ball of nuclear ice into the air, and struck it with his silver-handled cane, sending it rocketing towards David like a shooting star.

**O-O-O**

_But soon there breathed a wind on me,  
Nor sound nor motion made :  
Its path was not upon the sea,  
In ripple or in shade._

_It raised my hair, it fanned my cheek  
Like a meadow-gale of spring-  
It mingled strangely with my fears,  
Yet it felt like a welcoming._

_Swiftly, swiftly flew the ship,  
Yet she sailed softly too :  
Sweetly, sweetly blew the breeze-  
On me alone it blew._

**O-O-O**

There was a wet slap. And then absolute silence.

It was as though the fires themselves had stopped their ambient roar. David did not move, did not even breathe, standing as still as the statue he had been before Terra awoke him into the world of flames and damnation. If anything else transpired, he did not know it, his universe reduced to nothing but immediate reality. For an indeterminate time, he stood there. And then he opened his eyes, and looked down on the object he had just caught with both hands.

It was beautiful.

Cupped in David's hands sat a perfect sphere of white crystal, so cold that the air around it seemed to shimmer, and yet his bare fingers felt nothing but a faint electrical sensation. Deep within it, he could discern a tremble, soft but forceful, the slightest hint of what awesome forces lurked within. Yet he felt no fear as he stared into the sphere of frozen nitrogen, his eyes bathing it in red light which blended with the soft glow emanating from its churning core. For an eternity, he watched the ball of crystalline ice, until at length he drew in a long, slow breath.

And then he lifted his head.

The man still stood before him, his cane still held in one hand, dripping with the red flames of wrath. But he was no longer Devastator, Lord of Destruction, slayer of multitudes and servant of Trigon. Instead, David saw a twisted and broken man standing dumbstruck in the street as he beheld that which should not, per his thinking, have been possible. His one remaining eye flickered between David's eyes and the crystal, as though expecting at any particular moment for the world to return to the way he was accustomed to it behaving, and finding at each consecutive moment, that it did not.

As his counterpart slowly settled his gaze back on his face, David tightened his fingers around the crystal sphere, and said the only thing that he could.

"I want my family back, you sonofabitch."

And then, with one, fluid motion, David Foster lifted the ball of shining ice into the air, and willed, with every fiber of his being, for light.

And there was light.

**O-O-O**

The flash was like nothing she had ever seen.

It came from somewhere far away and off to her right, oblique to her and Terra, but even if it had happened behind her, she still would have seen it, for its intensity was dazzling beyond all imagination. The sky, the fires of Hell, the ruins that stretched on into eternity, it obliterated them all in a heartbeat, subsuming them in soundless, formless light, as though a star had sprung into life before her very eyes. It cast no shadows, illuminated nothing, drowning all other objects in its infinite luminescence, and though it lasted only an instant, it seemed to penetrate straight through to Raven's soul, searing her heart with a brand of light, even as she felt its heat waft against her skin.

And then the flash abated, and in its place she saw a mountain of fire.

No ambient hellfire was this, no twisted manifestation of Trigon's volcanic hate. This was _living_ fire. A towering inferno of unfathomable proportions, looming upwards from a distant spot like some vengeful demon arising from Hell. It boiled upwards, yellow and orange and red by turns, parting the clouds of ash before it as it drew itself up to stratospheric heights. Its crown swelled as it rose, expanding in every direction, taking on the shape of an enormous mushroom. And as Raven watched this transpire, she heard a low rumble, like an endless landslide heard from a great distance, which shook the very ground she stood upon.

"What in the _Hell_...?"

Raven did not turn her head at Terra's question, her eyes riveted on the pillar of flame looming before her, her hands frozen at her side. What this new development was, where it had come from and who had caused it to be, she could not even begin to determine. But none of those questions were important now, for all of them were sidelined by one, singular fact.

Someone _else_ was alive.

Not since laying eyes upon the charred wasteland that had once been her home, not since waking up in a frozen Hell, not _once_ had Raven even considered that someone besides her, Trigon, and Beast Boy might still exist upon the Earth. Not once had she given thought to that possibility, for it was a plain, obvious absurdity. Her torment, her guilt, the very reason she was in Hell in the first place, all of it was predicated on the assumption that she had, by her own failure to act, exterminated the entire human race. She had fought with herself for hours, days, maybe decades, over the question of whether or not she was truly culpable in this enormous, unfathomable crime.

She had never once imagined that the crime itself might not yet be fully comitted.

She did not know if the fireball was the doing of one of her friends, or a complete stranger, or even Trigon himself. It did not occur to her to ask. The recognition that not everyone had perished, that somewhere out in the wider world, there remained someone other than Trigon and his tools, was like a magic wand passing over her head. Even if the fireball was Trigon's doing, and its target now dead, the mere fact that he was still resorting to such crude tactics meant that his victory was not yet complete, for he was still, visibly, in the process of trying to win it.

And if it _wasn't _Trigon's doing...

Dimly, she heard the sound of Terra's footsteps as the simulacrum turned back to her to finish what she had started. From the corner of her eye, she saw the geokinetic raising her hands to the rocks that still floated overhead, saw her bring her hands down, commanding the stones to fall upon Raven like meteors, and yet she could not bring herself to turn, or scream, or cower. All she could do was stare wide-eyed at the fireball, her mind spinning like a top, until at last, the great stones came crashing down upon her head.

But she did not fall.

There was a great crack of splintering stone overhead, and the hollow rattle of pebbles being scattered across an even surface, loud enough to shake Raven from her trance. And when she lifted her head to see what had produced such a noise, she saw a great barrier of white light shimmering directly above, enclosing her and Beast Boy together in a hollow shell. Above the barrier lay the smashed remnants of Terra's rocks, dashed to pieces against it like crockery thrown into a brick wall. And as she turned in shock and wonder, to locate the source of this unexplained miracle, she caught a glimpse of her own hand, and saw that it was glowing white.

"No..."

She lifted her head once more and saw the Anti-Terra standing in undisguised shock before her, mouth agape and arms limp at her sides. Blinking in astonishment, Terra's eyes traced the edges of Raven's shield as though expecting it to vanish, and finding with horror that it did not.

"I won't... let you hurt him," said Raven.

"_NO!"_ Bellowed Terra, and she threw her hands out, uprooting stones the size of cars and busses and hurling them at Raven like cannonballs. Yet Raven did not flinch, or cry, or feel the touch of fear, for somehow she knew that she did not need to. The stones struck the shield with the power of cannonballs, yet each one shattered in turn like glass thrown against concrete. And with each successive stone that failed to breach the shield, Raven felt something alien and yet familiar stirring within her, the first flickering of a sensation she had not felt in so long that she had begun to regard it as fable.

Hope.

"I won't let you hurt _anyone_," she said, and opening her arms wide, Raven felt a warm embrace, alien and yet familiar, as light stretched forth from within her to swallow everything nearby. And the last thing she saw was Terra's expression of surprise and fear, as the light reached forth towards her in the shape of a raven's claw.

And then she saw no more. Nor did she need to.

**O-O-O**

"So has it come to this then?" coughed Warp, spitting blood over his golden armor. "I thought you came here to rescue Robin."

"Robin is not here," said Starfire. "He is beyond my capacity to rescue now. You saw to that. He was but an excuse to bring this about."

Despite the pain, Warp managed a hollow laugh. "I offered you no excuses," he managed to say. "You came of your own free will."

"No," said Starfire. "Not yours. He was an excuse _I_used, to bring myself here without complication from anyone other."

The laugh faded as quickly as it had arisen, and Warp's face froze back into a spiteful sneer. "In life as in death," he said. "All he was to you was - "

"Stop it," she said, her voice still even. "You cannot hurt me any longer. Do not even pretend to try."

"I have no need to try any longer," he said. "I _have_hurt you."

"Yes you have," she said, stooping down and lifting Warp up by his collar. "And now you shall receive your wages."

Despite the blood still choking him, Warp laughed at this, long and hard. "I have already received my wages," he said. "You need only look around you to see them. I exterminated your friends, annihilated your charges, and Trigon will see to Tamaran in due course, make no mistake of that. So run, if you want, or stay here with the cinders of your loved ones. It doesn't matter. I've done what I came here to do, Princess. I've given you the gift you gave to me. However long you manage to evade Trigon for, you'll always be nothing more than a scavenger and a fugitive. You'll be just as I was: broken, helpless, and all alone."

Starfire opened her mouth to answer Warp, but something else answered first.

There was a flash, impossibly distant, yet distinct despite it, bright enough to penetrate the ash clouds that surrounded the fortress. She lifted her head as her eyes caught the light, in time to see the flash fade from white to orange, the livid orange of fire. Yet even as the fireball attained full height, as if in response, a second flash of light appeared to challenge it. White as the first one had been, this one did not fade to another color, but exploded outward like a living thing, and though it took less than a second to resolve to its mature shape, Starfire needed several more seconds before she realized that it had taken on the form of an enormous bird. Backlit by the distant fireball, it rose into the sky like a phoenix, spreading its wings as it ascended, head held high. And then, just at the edge of her perception, Starfire heard a low, soft rumble, muted by extreme distance, mixed with a sound she might well have imagined, but that she thought resembled a bird's call

Neither Starfire nor Warp said a word, both watching the searing fireball and the brilliant white bird as they soared towards the heavens, only gradually fading from sight. Neither one said a word, until, at length, Warp rounded back on Starfire with a flash of anger.

"You think it matters?" he spat at her. "Let them shuffle the deck chairs if they want. Trigon's only playing with them. If there's any justice in the world, he's just saving them so that he can kill them all in front of you. Just like Robin."

Starfire's eyes narrowed, her grip on Warp's collar tightening as they did so, as the churning energies that boiled inside her began to shine through them. Warp recognized the sign for what it was. He could hardly fail to.

"That's how it is then?" asked Warp. "Fine then. Go ahead and kill me. It won't bring Robin back. And you'll always know that your last act in Robin's name was to destroy every principle he ever lived by. However long Trigon lets you live, you'll spend every second of it remembering how you betrayed him."

He might well have said more, but at that moment, Starfire pulled Warp in until his face was inches away from hers, his eyes floating right in front of her own, as hers filled once more with fire.

"Then that, Warp" she said, "is how it shall be."

And then, as she released the pent-up energies that boiled within, the last thing Starfire saw before the fluorescent glow of her own incarnated rage blinded her, was the sight of Warp as he opened his mouth to scream.

**O-O-O**

_Stunned by that loud and dreadful sound,  
Which sky and ocean smote,  
Like one that hath been seven days drowned  
My body lay afloat ;  
But swift as dreams, myself I found  
Within the Pilot's boat._

**O-O-O**

The echoes of the thunder died in the far distance before David opened his eyes once more.

The air was still now, and clean, the smoke and ash that had choked it gone, swept away as though by a broom. In its wake, the sky was stained only by thin wisps of fresh smoke that marked fires, small and few in number, wherever some tiny bit of flammable matter still remained amidst the general emptiness. Save for the patch he stood upon, the street itself was gone as well, the asphalt boiled away to nothingness, leaving only scorched bedrock behind. Here and there, pieces of irregular black glass lay scattered about, from where sand or some other silicate had been subjected to unfathomable heat and pressure, the only objects dotting the sterile landscape that had once been choked with debris and materials.

And of Devastator himself, there was no sign at all.

He felt a wetness on his cheek, and reached up to touch it, his fingers coming back stained with a dark grey fluid he realized only belatedly was his own discolored blood, seeping from the corners of his eyes like tears. More blood ran from his nose and ears, and he could taste the salt of it in his mouth, yet he felt no pain. Indeed he felt a strange numbness that seemed to spread from his extremities in towards his core, pins and needles gently pricking him all over his body until he could no longer feel the ground beneath his feet nor the wind gently wafting across his bloody fingertips.

He wondered, almost casually, if he was dying, and could not for the life of him discern what, if anything, he thought of that possibility.

At his side, a ragged gasp, finally taken by unwilling lungs which could hold their breath no longer, woke him back up, and he turned and crouched down unsteadily. Terra remained as she had been, pinned to the door of a burnt-out car by a three-quarter-inch steel rebar which protruded jaggedly from her stomach, ringed by a small trickle of blood, red, unlike his own. Unable to think of what else to do, he reached out and touched her shoulder, and in response, she opened her eyes, taking in at last the scene before her, the pain, along with everything else, draining from her face as she replaced it all with sheer, undisguised shock.

And more than shock. Awe.

David didn't know what to do. He couldn't even begin to catalogue the possibilities. And so he stayed where he was, crouched in the dirt, his face and hands smeared with greyish blood which mixed with the coal and dirt and ash and everything else that he and Terra were covered with, and simply waited. Terra's eyes grew wider and wider as she swept them across the scene of annihilation that lay before her, the glass-strewn rock and fire-scorched ruins that had not been present when moments ago, David had tossed a snowball into the air.

At length, Terra finally pulled herself away from the empty scene before her, and back to David, who remained crouched beside her. For a few moments, she seemed as lost for reply as David himself, her mouth opening and closing without forming any sounds. Yet before David could ask her what they ought to do now, or even if she was all right, relatively speaking, her eyes darted past him to where Devastator had been standing, held there a moment, and then returned to him, her eyes narrowing as she clenched her teeth, either against the pain of having been impaled, or as a symbol of what needed to happen.

The message was obvious enough.

Still unsure how to speak, David settled for squeezing Terra's shoulder for a second, before slowly hauling himself to his feet. The mangled, broken staff that had stood with him through this entire endless night still hung at his side, and he drew it once more, turning back towards the ruins of the shopping mall, and slowly walking towards it, his steps tentative and uneven as he descended onto the broken, sterilized ground, obsidian glass crunching under his shoes as he closed in.

The shopping mall was gone, crushed into a formless heap of rubble and then violently blasted across half the city. All that remained was a shapeless pile of indiscriminate debris, too heavy or too well-anchored to be lofted away, dotted periodically with gouting flames burning from some underground source. David approached it slowly, his weapon held outstretched like a wizard's wand, the numbness that had pervaded him before giving way to a tense fear that somehow his counterpart would leap forth once more at any given moment to wreak further ruin and death. He reached the base of the eclectic ruins, began to climb up onto them, traversing the uneven surface of mangled concrete and twisted metal on his hands and knees looking for any signs of life. He was halfway up when he found them.

A long, loud wheeze, like air being siphoned through a broken steam whistle, spun him halfway round and sent him scrambling over the pile of debris, stumbling and falling and righting himself all in one motion, rubbing the blood from his eyes and spitting it from his mouth as he made his way towards where he thought the sound had emerged from. His exhausted mind, like an automaton's, was already calculating the distances and angles of nearby stones and pipes and bits of debris, a reaction by now nearly automatic.

He crested a small ridge of the ruin, and stopped, straddling the mound of debris as he stared down into the crevasse before him. For several seconds he stood there, motionless. And then slowly, the fire around his broken staff dwindled to nothing, and he lowered it to his side.

It was plain, even to him, that there was no more purpose to it.

Devastator lay at the base of a small crevasse gouged into the piled ruin by some gyration of force. Crumpled and motionless, half buried beneath heaps of rubble and destruction, his good eye shut, he lay surrounded by the shattered fragments of his cane and sword, red blood slowly pooling beneath him. More blood trickled from the corners of his mouth, from his nose and ears and ruined eye. One arm lay buried beneath the rubble, the other lay palm-up and empty, the broken, silver handle of his once vibrant cane laying uselessly some inches away.

A hideous, slow, wheezing sound, coupled with the slow trickle of blood, was all that indicated that the body was alive at all. Yet armed with this knowledge, David could only stand where he was, watching his own broken body as the life slowly leached out of it. The wheezing continued, gurgling sounds from within Devastator's shattered body speaking to the blood filling his lungs. Yet slowly, the battered head began to twitch, and the one remaining eye slid half-open, to see David, standing framed against the eternal twilight.

Carefully, slowly, a thin, feeble smile turned the corners of Devastator's mouth. He opened his mouth, the words seeming to catch in his throat, requiring extra efforts just to push them over the threshold. When finally he spoke, it was in a harsh, almost ghoulish whisper.

"David..." said Devastator, his words slurred and trailing off like a man in the last stages of sleep deprivation. "My my... what _have _you done... ?"

Any lingering sense David had of what he ought to say or do deserted him, and so he stood there, balanced uneasily on the edge of the shallow crevasse, looking down at his own broken body. "It's over," he finally said. "This is the end."

Devastator chuckled weakly, pink froth coming to his lips as he did so. "Nothing ever ends," he whispered back. He might have added more, but the froth overcame his capacity to clear it, and his words of wisdom dissolved into a weak cough, and then nothing at all.

Carefully, David slid down into the crevasse, coming to a stop next to Devastator, yet when he arrived at the bottom, he had no better idea of what he should do, or even could do. "Can... can you hear me?" he ventured, not even certain what he wanted the answer to be, and knowing it was useless in any case.

Yet though his eye slid shut once more, the smile on Devastator's face broadened. "I'm not sure... I ever could..." he whispered. "You... learn to turn deaf ears... to that part of yourself..." Devastator's body slowly became limp, sliding from David's grasp back down onto his pillow of rubble, leaving David to crouch helplessly in the ruins. He didn't know what to say. He didn't know if he should speak, but Devastator waited for no reply, his eye sliding open again as he beheld his younger self.

"David... " he said, his voice beginning to weaken. "You must... you must... forgive me." The voice seemed poised on the edge of consciousness, yet Devastator continued, as though what he had to say were the most important thing in the world. "I... I had no idea... all this time..."

His own mind a whirlwind of contradictory impulses, David could only ask the obvious question.

"About what?"

The smile spread wide, even as Devastator's head slid slowly down to his chest, his voice trailing off into nothingness.

"That maybe... there was hope for you... after... all..."

**O-O-O**

_'O shrieve me, shrieve me, holy man !'  
The Hermit crossed his brow.  
'Say quick,' quoth he, 'I bid thee say-  
What manner of man art thou ?'_

_Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched  
With a woful agony,  
Which forced me to begin my tale ;  
And then it left me free..._

- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"

* * *

**Author's Note:** I do not know what the future will bring. I do not know what further disruptions lay in store. But rest assured, dearest readers. I will _never_ abandon this story. Never.

May you all find success in every endeavor. And I hope to see you all for Chapter 38.


	38. The Instruments of Fury

**Disclaimer:** I do not own the Teen Titans. I may own them tomorrow, but I do not own them today.

**Author's Note:** Hello again.

I'm sure such few of you who even remember this tale will be rather astonished to find me yet among the living. There have been times in the last year or so that I was astonished myself at the same thing. And yet, here I am, and here we are, at the dawn of a new year, with a new chapter ready at long last for your perusal. I know it has been eons since I last posted, and for that I am sorry, but this chapter consumed an enormous amount of time, and I can only hope and pray that I somehow got it right. The agony that this chapter induced as I attempted to write it was unparalleled, and yet ultimately, I can only hope it was to its benefit, though I am sure I will find out sooner or later whether or not that was the case.

For those who waited patiently for this story to continue, I can only deeply apologize for the length of time it took, and yet ultimately, looking back, I do not think I could have gotten it done sooner. The blocks that afflicted it were many and varied and took immense time to break through, and the drafts I wrote and set aside look terrible now when I go back and read them over. I do not and have never claimed to be any font of quality work, but I hope, at least, that the chapter below is the better for the struggles I had with it, and that you all will find something within it to enjoy. As always, I will not know if my efforts have met with success or failure unless you inform me of it via a review, but after the time I took to produce this chapter, I do not believe I have the right to demand anything from those who choose to invest their time with me. All I hope is that you like some of what I have placed below, and if that is so, then it is thanks enough for me. The privilege of having someone read my work is and has always been an honor.

And finally, as some long-time readers may notice, this story now has, of all things, cover-art, courtesy of a certain Scriptor Sapiens, whom I shall remain indebted to for a long, _long_ time. My own artistic skills are nonexistent, and yet he produced an amazing piece of work, which I have managed at length to append to this story. All credit both to idea and execution is due to him, and I cannot possibly thank or praise him enough for going out of his way to produce something like this. If there is some possibility for me to repay this favor in the future, I only hope I encounter it.

In any event, thank you so much, all those of you who come this far, and may you find success in every endeavor.

* * *

**Chapter 38: The Instruments of Fury  
**

_"It is better to avenge a friend than to mourn for him."_

- Beowulf

**O-O-O**

She wasn't sure if it was supposed to hurt more, and not knowing scared her more than anything.

There were no fires anymore, no smoke, not even any ash. The air was clear save for a haze creeping in from the edges of perception, the ground devoid of anything left to burn. The winds were still warm, still tinged with the scent of sulfur, but no longer choking. The pollutants that were previously omnipresent had been violently blasted away along with everything else, leaving her alone in a sterile desert, with nothing but the whistling wind to keep her company.

It was some time before she saw the lights reappear.

Red lights, searchlights in the darkness, cutting through the thin air in two broad beams, sweeping across the ruins before finding her and the car she was stapled to. There they sat, blinding her to all else, and she heard the crunch of footsteps on the obsidian glass that surrounded her small patch of asphalt, as a blurry shadow emerged from the mountain of indiscriminate rubble in front of her.

"Terra?"

She knew who it was of course, but this place had more tricks and illusions than a carnival funhouse, and so hearing his voice was a relief regardless. She lowered her hand to her side as he approached, closing until she could see his face, covered with the same mix of soot, coal dust, discolored blood, and volcanic ash that coated her. She knew his skin had been turned a sickly grey by whatever Trigon had done to him, but there was little of that still visible, and the only thing left to distinguish the two of them was his eyes, still glowing red like hot coals in a furnace.

That and the rebar.

"Terra, are you - " He stopped himself from asking a manifestly stupid question, but she answered it regardless, biting back a groan as she nodded curtly. The steel rebar, driven through her stomach like a railroad spike and pinning her to the wrecked car behind did not move a millimeter, not even when she fidgeted to try and shift her weight. She felt a jolt, not of pain, but of _something_as she tried to move, and elected not to try further.

"I'm... I'm okay," she managed to say, lifting her eyes. "Devastator?"

There was a brief flash of something in David's eyes, but the red light pouring from them prevented her from identifying what it was. "He's dead," he said.

One of the knots in Terra's gut loosened, but she said nothing. In a situation this weird, she wasn't sure what to say. As David seemed disinclined to venture a comment of his own, she switched tracks.

"What... _was_that?"

"What?" asked David, distractedly. Then, perceiving the answer to his own question, he continued. "Oh," he said. "That... um... it was frozen atmospheric - "

"No," said Terra, "no, I... know what it was. But... how did you do it?"

David's eyes darted to the ground. It was all the more obvious when they were crimson searchlights. "I..." he stammered. "I'm not... I don't really know how."

Terra watched him for a moment. "Yeah, you do," she said.

He didn't answer, crouching down instead before her, his hand opening and closing as though unsure if he should venture to touch the spike of black iron that was driven through her stomach. "It doesn't matter," he said. "We've gotta get out of - "

He touched the end of the iron bar, and a jolt of pain like a live wire shot through Terra's midsection with such intensity that she nearly screamed. A strangled yelp escaped her throat as she tensed up, and it was several moments before she could let air slip in and out of her lungs once more without howling in agony. When she finally forced her eyes open again, she saw that David had scrambled back several feet in horror at what he had just triggered.

"I - I'm sorry!" he blurted out, red eyes wide with fear and surprise. "I didn't - "

"It's... it's okay..." she managed to say, taking control of her breathing once more and slowly forcing the fire out of her lungs. "I'll... just... please don't touch that."

"I won't," said David quickly, as he carefully approached once again, stopping out of arm's reach this time. "But... we've gotta get out of here. Every demon in a hundred miles must have seen that explosion."

Likely enough he was understating it, but that hardly changed things. She looked down at the ugly spear of black iron pinning her to the car. "I don't... I don't think I'm going anywhere," she said, in a voice that sounded oddly flat, even to her ears.

David leaned forward, looking down at the rebar, visibly searching for the right solution in his head. "I - I know it hurts," he said, "but... if we pull it out of you, then I can - "

"No!" yelped Terra before she could stop herself, causing David to jump once more. "No," she repeated more calmly. "I'd bleed to death..."

The rebar sticking out of her stomach was ringed in red blood, a trickle of which was running down her stomach to her waistband, and thence to the ground. But while Terra was no doctor, she knew that pulling out the bar would turn trickle into flood. Had he been in better shape, she assumed David would have recognized that too. As it was, he saw the logic as soon as she pointed it out.

"Oh," he said. "Well uh... then... I'll break the other side of the bar off. We'll get you free that way."

Terra grimaced as she fidgeted on the ground. "It's fused to the engine block," she said.

"Then I'll break _that_," said David in mounting frustration. "I'll take the whole car apart. I can do it carefully, piece by piece."

The very thought made Terra's stomach start to ache again. "No..." she said, shaking her head. "No the shock will... it'll jar loose."

David wouldn't give it up. "Terra, listen to me, there's a bunker not far from here. An emergency bunker, it's protected from all this. We can get you there."

"How?" asked Terra.

"If we can break you free, I can... I don't know, _drag_you there or something. I'll make a sled out of debris. All you have to do is hang on, and - "

"And then what?" she asked, her voice quivering only slightly. "You're gonna do stomach surgery?"

That shut him up, and he was quiet for several moments as he visibly struggled to come up with another answer. "Well... we've gotta do _something_," he said. "Come on, let me just... I can break the bar off without dislodging it, I promise. It'll just take a few minutes."

"No it won't," said Terra. "Not to break it and build a litter and drag me back to this bunker of yours. And even if it did, you don't _have_a few minutes. Not anymore."

All this, to avoid saying what she knew she was going to have to say. It was too much for David to follow, and he looked at her, confused, plainly unable to see why she was being so obstructionist. "What are you talking about?" he asked, frustration oozing from his voice. The accumulated debris of everything that had happened tonight, no doubt.

She tried to answer him, she honestly did. But even though she knew exactly how this conversation had to end, she still could not bring herself to say it out loud. Not, at least, until she saw him finally put the pieces together in his head, and knew that he understood what she was trying to tell him.

His eyes went wide, wider than they had been even when Devastator had revealed himself, and the red light poured off of them like blood moons, and his body went stiff and rigid, as if some hellish vision had just materialized before his eyes. "_No_," he said, as though to pre-empt her.

"You have to go," she said. And then it was said, and done, and out in the open.

But he would not hear it. "_No way,_" he said, in the best impression of Robin that Terra had ever heard him give. "Absolutely not."

"David, _listen_to me," she said. "You have to leave. Now. You have to get out of here, and go find the others. It's the only way."

"Are you out of your _mind_?" replied David, and by his voice, she wasn't sure if the question was rhetorical or not. "There could be a _thousand _demons on their way here right now. _Fifty _thousand, I don't even - "

"Yeah, there could," she said, unwilling to let him finish the thought. "And you can't be here to meet them. You need to leave."

"And what, I'm supposed to leave you here to fight off the armies of Hell when you can't even stand up?" he demanded.

"No," she said, "you're supposed to do your job."

Something in her voice stopped him short. "My job?" he asked, and this time she knew it wasn't rhetorical.

"Yeah," she said.

"My job is to help people," he said. "To... _save _people." Even now, he hesitated on that word, but pushed past it. "Not to leave people to getripped apart by demons." As gently as he could, he laid one hand on the exposed end of the rebar anchoring her to the car, and she felt the bar's temperature begin to pulsate like a heartbeat, not enough to hurt, but enough that she knew he was infusing it with his own powers. "You brought me back to life," he said. "I'm not leaving you here to die."

Bombast and anger would get nowhere. She knew that by now. It was the library basement all over again, the streak of almost contrarian refusal to accept what was that he either had always had buried within him or had picked up from the other Titans at some point. But stubbornness was a subject Terra knew more about than most, and this time, if not before, she knew what she had to say.

"David," she said, "I'm not the one you need to save."

He crumpled, his hands compressing into balled fists, his eyes sliding shut as he brought one hand up to his face. "Terra," he said, his voice now testy, "Devastator's dead. They don't need my help now. Not with him gone. They took Trigon out by themselves without me, and without Devastator getting in the way, they can do it again. I know they can."

"No, they can't."

"_Yes, they can!_" he was almost shouting now, as desperate to believe it himself as to convince her. "They're the _Titans_, Terra, they can beat anything, even Trigon. They don't need me to do that. I'm not a - "

She slapped him across the face.

It wasn't very hard. She couldn't manage very hard right now, but if she had pulled out a gun and shot David in the chest, she likely could not have generated more surprise. His eyes flew open, and he stared at her dumbstruck, even as she forced air into her lungs, biting back the pain of having jarred her midsection so unforgivably. Her teeth clenched shut, she hissed, more than spoke, her answer.

"Don't you dare," she said. "Don't you _dare _tell me you're not a hero. Not now."

She wasn't sure what he believed, but whether because he perceived the foolishness of what he'd been about to say, or whether the expression on her face was one he did not dare to cross, David said nothing at all. Carefully, Terra leaned forward as much as the rod would let, trying to ignore the trickle of blood now leaking visibly down onto the street beside her, praying that David would do the same.

"The others need you," she said, forcing her voice to remain even. "They need you right now. _You_. Do you understand me? They need _you_. Not Robin, not me, not even Superman. _You_." Her throat seized, and she fought with all her might not to cough, feeling the welter of blood that waited to issue forth from within her esophagus. "They... they need the kid... who can blast demons apart like cherry bombs. The one who can throw cars and trucks and tractor-trailers around like rubber balls, and conjure nuclear weapons out of thin air."

"That wasn't me," ventured David. "That was _him_."

"You're the _same person_," said Terra, her voice becoming desperate. "The same flesh and blood, the same powers. That _was_ you. It was you back in the park when we fought. It was you when Slade attacked the Tower, and it was you five minutes ago when you did... whatever that was. That's what you are. That's what you've always been. And that's what they need _right now_, and you know it. I don't care if they beat him before and I don't care if you were here or weren't here the last time, and neither do they. They need you. They need you now. And that's why you have to go."

He blinked at her. The best he could do now, she knew, and his look was desperate. Desperate for it all to be untrue perhaps. Desperate for the Titans to _not _need him, or to need someone else instead. Desperate for the road ahead to be clear. Who could tell? "I can't just... _leave _you here," he said.

"You _have_ to," she said. "Even if you get me out of here and drag me back to that bunker of yours and manage to patch me back up, even if you doall of that, I still won't be able to help you or the others against Trigon. And that's all that matters now. You heard Devastator. The whole world is watching you, watching the others. They _need _you to stop Trigon, any way you can. They _need_you to leave me here. You have to go."

He said nothing. His face was a blank stare caught halfway between horror and numb shock, a stare she remembered from another face entirely from a moment that seemed like a lifetime ago. The memory threatened to break her resolve down, and she pushed it violently aside. Now was not the time to slip.

David seemed like he was trying to remember how to speak. His blood-red eyes stared unblinkingly at her, but could not obscure the expression on his face. "Terra..." he managed to say at length, his voice as weak as she felt.

Carefully, Terra mustered her strength. "Go," she said, and when he did not move, she repeated herself, more sharply. "_Go_." Only at this did his hand fall away from the tip of the bar that pinned her where she was, and carefully, he stood up, staring down at her with an expression she remembered all too well.

"Terra," he said. "I..."

She shook her head. "Just go," she said. "Go and... and do what people like you are supposed to do." She felt a drowsy numbness spreading through her like a liquid, and despite everything, she managed to smile as she finished her thought. "Save the world."

Neither grey, coal-splattered skin nor red, glowing eyes could fail to disguise the expression of helplessness on David's face. And yet he took one step away, and then another, and another, each one as labored as her own footsteps might have been now. She did not repeat herself further, but closed her eyes and nodded, and when she opened them again, she saw him turn as reluctantly as it was possible to, and slowly begin to walk away.

Only now, with her point won and the consequences finally manifest, did her resolve slip at all. And before he had gotten a dozen or so paces away, she suddenly called after him.

"David?"

He turned around instantly, perhaps expecting her to change her mind, or beg him to try and save her. But instead, all she had for him was a request.

"Would you... when you find Beast Boy... could you... could you tell him..."

Her mind seized up, all at once, and left her grasping at a forest of straws smeared with grease, unable to seize one despite the thousands that floated around her. For several moments, she struggled for anything adequate to say. Until finally she was reduced to the only thing that she could think of at all.

"Tell him..." she said, her voice balanced on the knife's-edge of breaking. "Tell him... I tried."

David didn't say a word. Maybe he couldn't. But at length, he managed to nod his acceptance. For a moment longer, he stayed where he was. But then, at last, he turned, and walked away, and the smoke closed between them like a curtain, and then he was gone.

All alone now, Terra sat beside the rusting hulk of the car to which she was affixed, and felt the energy ebb from her like a punctured garden hose. The small pool of blood around her glistened in the eternal twilight, and she imagined that she could feel the heat from it wafting up towards her, mingling with the air she breathed with each laborious breath. From somewhere far away, she imagined she heard the sound of birds. Or maybe it was the howl of beasts, racing through a verdant forest, outlined in emerald against an azure sky.

She opened her eyes, and saw another stream of blood running the length of the bar, dripping from it into her lap and streaming down her leg to join the expanding pool on the ground. The pain was nearly gone now, and the sensation of it leaving was the most delicious thing in the world. Carefully, Terra took a deep breath, tasting the heavy minerals laced through the air, and let it out again.

"Okay..." she whispered to herself. "Now comes the hard part..."

**O-O-O**

He didn't walk for long before he was running, and he wasn't running for long before he was running as fast as he could.

Down streets of blasted asphalt and cracked concrete he ran, unsure if he was running towards or away from something, and not willing to stop to give himself time to find out. He could have been going anywhere, towards the rest of the Titans, away from them, in circles, straight into the jaws of Hell, there was no way to tell. The city was not merely ruined but rearranged, once-familiar landmarks scrambled randomly like toys thrown together by a toddler. The very geography over which he was travelling seemed warped, hills flattened or buttressed by fresh upthrusts from deep within the earth, and yet he knew that this was the right way.

Hours ago, there'd been a single glimpse of light, a green light flashing in the distance like a lighthouse, and a blue one under siege from a thousand points of red. The green one had been at such a distance, not to mention altitude, that he knew he had no hope whatsoever of reaching it, not if he ran for a week. But the other light had been closer, still far, but close enough to resolve the individual lights that surrounded it, and it was towards that light that he was running now, desperately trying to convince himself with half his mind not to do the very thing the other half was screaming at him to do.

Somewhere far behind him, Terra was -

No. He clamped down on that thought instantly, forced it out of his mind. It was too late to turn back in any event, too late to do anything about it. Whatever was happening to Terra, whatever _had _happened to her, it was out of his hands now. He forced himself to repeat that statement like a religious mantra, running it through his head again and again as though he could force himself to believe it by act of conscious will. It didn't work at all. But on the other hand, he didn't turn around.

He hoped like hell that this was the right way to go.

The street ahead broadened into a wide boulevard, with room enough for six lanes of traffic plus bicycles, parking and broad sidewalks lined in better times with shady trees and outdoor cafes. Few cars remained, even the remains thereof, and the crumbled ruins of the commercial buildings on either side still retained enough cohesiveness to identify what they once had been. That one was a movie theatre, that one a restaurant, this one here a clothing -

"David?"

Every nightmare David had ever had exploded to the forefront of his mind all at once, all triggered by the same easy, instantly-recognizable voice. He yelled in surprise, and half-turning, he swung the severed staff in his hand like a tennis racket, sending a brick of charred rubble hurtling past his own head straight at whatever had spoken, all before he could even turn to see what it was. Only then did he turn.

In the middle of the street, where moments ago there had been nobody at all, there stood a carbon copy of David as he once had been, his skin and eyes and hair all the colors they were before the advent of this terrible, endless night. Clad in a pristine red uniform, with a polished, stainless steel baton clipped to his brass-colored belt, the boy did not flinch as David hurled a brick at him with his mind, his image wobbling slightly as the brick flew right through him without stopping, bouncing to a stop against the curb. A second later and his image reformed, like a hologram from the movies, and was still once more.

It took David somewhat longer to recover, but recover he ultimately did, breathing the fire out of his lungs in the way that he had been taught to, and giving his stunned, short-circuited nerves time to calm themselves. The image waited patiently, until at length, David had restored enough of his equilibrium to speak it's proper name, a name he had heard altogether too much tonight, if he had any say in the matter.

"Devastator?"

The spirit wearing David's face nodded quickly, traces of a smile crossing his impermeable features. "David... are you alright?"

In a world torn to pieces by the Devil himself, this was, assuredly, the single most asinine question that David had ever heard. He ignored it.

"What's going on here?" he asked, still half-unsure if this was really happening. And without waiting for an answer he dove straight into the most salient issue. "Why can I... _use_you?"

Devastator didn't look surprised at the question, but could only shake his head. "I... I don't know, David. Not exactly."

"What does that mean?" asked David.

"It means you're not supposed to be alive," said Devastator. "Not while Trigon has me."

It was perhaps a measure of just how far gone David was that he couldn't become upset or angry at that statement, nor even register it as a threat. "Sorry?" he finally ventured.

"No," said Devastator. "You don't understand..."

"Then explain it to me," said David. "If Trigon took you out of me, why can I still blow stuff up the way I used to when I still had you?"

"Because I chose you as my host," said Devastator. "Not Trigon. That's what bound me to your will in the first place. Trigon can steal me, but he can't undo my choice, not as long as you're still alive."

_Now_David started to feel upset. "Why didn't you tell me that before?" he asked, his teeth clenched against the screaming tirade that he could feel coming on.

Maybe Devastator saw it too. Either way, he threw up his hands in a gesture of innocence. "I didn't _know_, David. I've never been ripped out of a host before, and certainly not by Trigon. I'm supposed to live inside a host until they die, and then find a new one. There's never been _two_hosts alive at the same time before. I didn't even know it was possible. Trigon killed you, and you came back, and... I guess Trigon can't sever our connection totally. Or at least he hasn't yet."

David caught the important word in that explanation, and his anger died before it. "Yet?" he asked.

Devastator nodded. "It takes time to integrate your will with a cosmic being. Even for the Devil."

"And once he does?"

The ghostly figure shrugged. "I really don't know," he said. "He'll probably use me to blow the planet in half or something. His channelling capacity is almost limitless. He'll be able to use me to unmake galaxies if he wants."

"Is that what he wants?"

Devastator only shook his head again. "I don't know," he said. He lifted his head once more, looking around at the ruins that surrounded them. "You'd think he already had enough destructive power without me. But I guess someone like Trigon always wants more."

The shock of Devastator's arrival had worn off, and the numbing, almost warm embrace of inertia had once more taken its place. "Maybe," said David, turning and looking back up the street, which disappeared some hundred yards ahead into the ubiquitous red-tinted clouds. Indistinct patterns formed, danced, and dissipated within the smoke, mocking shadows that hinted at a thousand possibilities for what might be shrouded just behind.

"Do you know where the others are?" asked David.

Devastator didn't answer immediately, and David turned to see him seemingly staring off into empty space. But David did not rush whatever process this was, standing mute and watching Devastator, even as the empty hole inside of him seemed to flair like a swollen joint at the sight. He pushed it aside, like so much else.

"I can only see through Trigon," said Devastator at length. "It's... strange."

"Raven said Trigon was omniscient," said David.

"He is," said Devastator. "But he's still bound by his own addictions."

"What addictions?"

"Pain," replied the weaponized embodiment of destruction. "Pain and suffering and loss and all the rest of it. It draws him like a moth to flames. He can't look away from it, no matter how much he wants to. He... knows everything that's happened. He knows you killed your counterpart, he knows that the others are out there, but... he can't help himself but watch."

"Watch _what_?" asked David.

Devastator's head lifted suddenly, and the image of the boy that David had been mere days ago turned to face him. "Cyborg," he said.

Something, something simultaneously hopeful and horrifying lodged itself in David's throat, made it hard to swallow or speak. "Where is he?" he asked.

"Just up the street," said Devastator, gesturing into the smoke. "Over the hill and down into the valley. But..."

"But what?"

"But there's a _thousand_demons between you and him, and other things too. You're not the only one with a bad side."

The cold number settled into David's stomach like a lump of iron, and yet the spectre of it did not rear its head as it should have. Perhaps his nerves were still too stunned to be impressed by numbers. Perhaps he still hadn't accepted any of this as actually happening. Whatever the reason, the desire to find the nearest rock to run under, the one he always had to fight off, failed to appear.

There was an irony to this somewhere, but he couldn't put his finger properly on it.

"Is Trigon gonna kill him?" asked David. The question sounded oddly clinical, even from his own throat.

"Eventually," said Devastator. "By inches, I'd assume. He'll make his minions do it."

"Why?" asked David. "If he's so addicted to pain, why not do it himself?"

"Because for all his power, Trigon's ultimately a coward," said Devastator. "He's always been one."

Still staring into the smoke, David shook his head. "That's hard to imagine."

"The more power you have," said Devastator, "the more you fear to lose it." He stepped soundlessly up next to David, looking off in the same direction. "I've seen it before, but... never like this. Trigon's afraid all the time. And the stronger he gets, the more fearful he becomes." Devastator paused, then turned his head to David once more. "I've seen that before too."

David did not respond.

At length, Devastator breathed a soft sigh, and stepped away, seemingly looking around as though admiring the scenery. "He'll want to break Cyborg before he kills him," said Devastator. "He won't care how long it takes."

Carefully, deliberately, David took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Doing so had once been a mantra of sorts, a way to dispel enough of the fear and apprehension that rose whenever a fight presented itself that he would be able to function. It did no such thing now, but that was because he no longer seemed capable of considering the future enough for fear. Not anymore. Not here.

"I've gotta stop him," said David.

"How?" asked Devastator, but this time the question was honest. "Even with me... Trigon's watching Cyborg right now. He has an entire army there, waiting for someone like you to walk in and try to interfere. How are you gonna get through them all?"

David let the question turn over in his head for a moment as he turned back to Devastator. Yet even as he did, his eye was attracted all of a sudden by the ruined building behind him. A board-fronted store, much like all the others, capped by faded lettering, torn and burnt, if still vaguely legible as "Jump City Toys". Yet it wasn't the building itself, nor the name on the store, that drew David's attention, but the shattered windowfronts that lay beneath it, where the scorched remnants of price tags and sale signs lay draped atop a pile of plastic merchandise, dusted in ash and fallen from their mountings, detritus like all the rest of the city, mute and forgotten.

And all of a sudden, for the first time in a thousand years, and for no reason that anyone would have considered rational, David felt the beginnings of a smile curling the corners of his mouth.

"I think I have an idea..."

**O-O-O**

_Everything can be reduced to constituent parts_.

It was day fifteen of training, at least by David's count. Fifteen days since the argument with Robin and the rooftop conversation with Beast Boy, the one that had finally clued him in, last of all of course, as to what was really going on here. Fifteen days since he'd acquiesced to the concept of becoming what he'd never permitted himself to consider becoming before. Maybe that milestone meant nothing. But it was one he still kept in mind, a concession to external reality in a world he still did not fully understand, and at times worried that he never would.

_Not just machines. Everything. People, weapons, politics, conversations, cities, social structures. It all comes down to tiny pieces of a larger whole._

He was used to receiving the tuition of the Titans by now. Robin's secret training program, hidden under the guise of 'self-defense' (a designation which had apparently fooled no one except David himself) had instilled him with that much, and it had only ramped up since throwing aside the curtain. His powers were strange, even by the insane standards of the rest of the Titans, but the others did their best, each one taking their turn, showing him one thing or another, some aspect of this new life which he had entered into without really appreciating what he was doing. Every one of them had strengths as teachers, each one indispensable in their own way, and to choose between them was not something David considered himself qualified to do.

But that said, Cyborg was the one who tended to make the most sense.

_You break things down like this, reduce it to the most elemental level, and you can master anything. Anything at all_. _And that's what you've gotta learn._

Never in a thousand years would David have _dared_ to suggest that he and Cyborg were alike. It was not in him to make a comparison like that. It would have been unthinkably presumptuous, implicitly placing himself on a level that he knew he had not earned. Moreover, as he would no doubt have argued, it was completely wrong. Cyborg was an athlete, a scientist, a semi-obsessive mechanic, a ladies man (at least in his own mind). His background was filled with trauma and loss, unspecified disasters mentioned only in passing with a clipped word or a momentary hesitation circulating around whatever it was that had forced him to replace most of his body with metal and circuitry. He was outgoing and confident, brash and even arrogant, dismissive of difficulties, the sort of person who, upon perceiving that a problem existed, immediately began working to fix it, taking solace in action instead of contemplation. Not one of the above descriptions fit David in the slightest, to say nothing of the fact that Cyborg, like Robin, like all the others, was simply set _above_David, and nothing had ever served to alter that stark equation as far as David was concerned.

And yet there was something to the idea despite all that, and it had to do with perspective.

_Fightin' off something like Cinderblock's too big to imagine. Too much for you to table right now. You can't look at it that way. You have to break it down into something more manageable._  
Robin was, to the outside world, the "normal" face of the Titans, but David would never have described him as such. Robin was an enigma wrapped in a mystery, a box that David never dared to try and open, but one element was obvious enough. His perspective on training, on heroism, on life itself was colored by the shadow of an enormous bat, indeed at times, David could almost imagine it superimposed on his features. He knew David's limits, he knew them better that David knew them himself, knew how teenagers were broken of their old selves and remoulded into new ones, knew more things than David could even begin to catalogue. But still, what to Robin was normal, was to David something entirely different, and while that did not stop Robin from accomplishing his daily objectives insofar as David was concerned, it did mean that David simply had to trust that Robin knew what he was doing, as Robin was incapable of expressing what was happening in terms that David could recognize.

With the others it was similar. Starfire, for all her caring, all her concern, was an alien, and ten minutes' conversation with her was sufficient to ram home just what that meant. Her ignorance of the realities of humanity was generally vastly overstated, but she still came from another world, where she had lived as royalty, as a member of a species trained from birth as intergalactic warriors. Raven, while not an alien (actually, David wasn't too sure _what_Raven was), had also been trained from birth by some sort of magical mystery cult, laden with responsibilities so heavy that she refused categorically to speak of them to anyone, least of all David. Even Beast Boy, outgoing and laid back as he was, had been a superhero since the age of eight, trained by seasoned professionals from the Doom Patrol, and active in fighting evil for years before the Titans had even formed. Infinitely helpful, infinitely patient, infinitely qualified as they all were, none of them had the slightest idea what it felt like to try and transition from a normal kid into a superhero.

Cyborg did.

_There are 98 elements that exist naturally in the world. Combinations of these elements make up every object in the known universe. My body, yours, the table, the walls, the ground, the air, everything can be broken down into less than a hundred elements. You have to find a ground level to start at to do this sort of thing, and my bet is that this one'll turn out to be yours._

Until the age of 14 or so, Cyborg had not lived as a superhero. He had lived as Victor Stone, of Jump City, a high school student like ten thousand others. Not a hero, not a vigilante, not concerned with the goings on of metahumans save for school gossip and the like, he had been, in rough approximation, what David had. Even if their lives as civilians could not have been more different, as David was not an athlete, nor a scholar, nor possessed of living parents, nor black, the mere fact that they had been civilians at all meant that Cyborg had known, better than anyone else, even Robin, what a seismic shift this truly was. He, alone among the Titans, had understood the need for a mental bridge between the world of a simple teenager and that of a world-conquering hero. And he, alone among the Titans, had been possessed of some idea of how to do just that.

_Don't think about the size of the rock. Don't think about its weight. Don't think about what it'll do to you if someone throws it at you. Don't even think about it as a rock. It's not a rock. It's a pile of granite. Granite means it's mostly means silicon and oxygen, and you know how to do those two. Practice with them enough, and you'll be able to just do quartz without having to think about it, then granite, and then anything else above it._

It was not really day fifteen of David's training, official or not. It was not day anything of his training. In fact, it was not daytime. It was an endless night in an endless hell, and he stood upon the crest of a ridge looking down at a scene of violence and devastation that would once have exceeded his most terrible nightmares, a green duffel bag slung over one shoulder, covering one arm like an oversized sling. Far below him ran a street, broad and dusted with ash and the residue of fires. Rank upon rank of flame demons were arrayed upon it, hundreds if not more, hovering calmly in place, their backs to him, their faces to the hulking mass of grey steel and albino flesh who stood in the center of their formation. Yet he in turn looked on something else, a shattered figure who lay crushed and broken on the ground at his feet, a mangled mass of blue circuitry and armor, emitting sparks and the sounds of metal grinding on metal even as the figure above him continued to speak words like 'inevitability' and 'destiny' in a tone dripping with contempt.

David allowed himself enough time to draw a single breath, tinged with the scent of smoke and burning electronics, that seemed, somehow, to last for a thousand years. And then he began to descend.

_You see, a firefight, or a throwdown with Slade or whoever, ain't really all that different from a piece of granite when you get right down to it. 90% of everything in these fights, the catchphrases, the costumes, the fancy names, the sound and light show, it's all designed to make everything look more complicated than it is. Confuse the other side. We do it too. You gotta learn to filter all that crap out, not let it drive you crazy, tackle everything the way it is. Way your stuff works, once you do that, I think you'll be able to get the hang of it._

It was not day fifteen of David's training, by any count whatsoever, and yet it was. Here at the end of the world where time was unimportant and the world reduced to a mocking parody of itself, David was in many places at once. His eyes saw the roiling mass of demons arrayed before him. His ears heard the low, guttural growls that they emitted as they listened to their leader's twisted cackle. But mentally he was only half here at all, some portion of his essence a million miles and several months away, in calmer settings and simpler times.

It was some time before they noticed him. He made no particular effort to conceal his presence, but the ambient noise was high, and the evil version of Cyborg was holding forth at great length concerning inevitable defeat or some other damned thing. He did not know if the demons had a sense of hearing in anything like the manner he understood, or if they used some other sense, familiar or alien, to determine the nature of their surroundings. But one way or another, he had covered some hundred feet or so, an eternity of walking in silence towards the ranks of the damned, before first one, then two, then ten, then hundreds of demons began to turn, their low growls foaming up from below and before him like the wails of tortured souls.

_Nothing's ever as complex as it looks. Not technology, not people, not fights, nothing. It all looks so impossible from a distance because you can only see the surface and your imagination fills in what's inside. But once you actually look inside things, you'll find that it all breaks down into something you can recognize._

Now the speaker at the center of the army had noticed, at length, the disturbance running through the ranks of his followers, and his lecture faltered and died as he turned to see what it was. Slowly, two eyes, one human, one mechanical, both red as fresh human blood, painted David in their crimson light, revealing a sight he knew to be different only in degrees. For a moment, there was confusion in those eyes, apparent even at this distance, as the thing that was Cyborg and also not Cyborg seemed to hesitate, caught between the victim he had subdued and this new intrusion on his attention and time. His legions waited for command, but the Anti-Cyborg did not call to them, staring at the small figure in grey and red who stood on the hill and watched him in silence.

"What the hell is _this_?"

The voice was Cyborg's, but not as he had used it. It was contemptuous and dismissive and cold, like a man describing the antics of a particularly loathsome insect he had just discovered scurrying across his floor. And with a single glance back at the broken form of the real Cyborg, the ironclad demon stepped into and through the ranks of his army, ranks which solidified behind him as he passed, brandishing whip-arms of flame and sending slavering howls soaring into the night, as though in anticipation of fresh prey.

"Really?" asked the Anti-Cyborg, addressing thin air for all the hints he gave. "_Really_?" He stopped at the head of his army, shaking his head like a teacher astonished by the unerring capacity of a small child to fail at the simplest tasks. "Devastator let you walk away? Just like that?" He turned first to one side, then the other, casting his gaze over the ranks of his assembled flame demons, as though silently asking them all to witness what fools he was forced to associate with. And then he turned back to face David, his face curled into a sneer of contempt, as he raised his hand to command his demons to rip David to pieces.

And then David drew his hand out from behind the lumpish green duffel bag slung over his shoulder. And Cyborg, and every demon in his thrall, stopped.

_Take, for instance, Polyurethane_.

In David's right hand sat a bulbous mass of orange plastic, bright and eye-catching like the vibrant colors of a fire truck or sports poster. Shaped roughly into the form of an enormous gun, it looked like an 8-year old boy's fondest dreams brought to life, a riot of buttresses and crenulations, false rails and scope mounts, an over-engineered nightmare that resembled the childish version of the weapon of some cartoonish space marine or star warrior. Hanging from the base of the gun was a series of plastic cartridges, also garishly orange, fastened together in a loose chain that disappeared into the dull green duffel bag around David's shoulder. Large as it was, he hefted it in one hand with ease, lifting it up until the stock of the play-rifle rested against his shoulder, and the lines of arbitrary letters and numbers that lined the side of it were dimly visible out of the corner of his eye. The only ones that made any sense at all were the four at the end, printed on an adhesive decal and stuck to the plastic by machine, still as vibrant as the day they had been created.

NERF.

"What the hell are you - "

David did not answer the implied question from the Anti-Cyborg. Instead, he squeezed the toy gun's trigger.

There was a soft "thunk", the sound of a spring and the brief whir of an electric motor, and the gun gave a barely perceptible shiver, as a single yellow foam dart, four inches long and tipped with a soft plastic suction cup, flew from the barrel of the gun up at an angle, soaring into the leaden sky, just for a second, before gravity reacquired control and brought it plunging down, tip-first, straight towards the anti-Cyborg.

_First glance, Polyurethane's one of the most complex things in the world. But you break it down, and what do you get? Strings of hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon, tied together with hydrocarbons in a polymer pattern. The strings might vary depending on the formula, and the arrangement is all over the place, but if you know what you're looking for in the first place, you can reconstruct the whole thing in your head. And once you do that..._

It might have been his imagination. It might have been a trick of the light. But David could have sworn that he saw the anti-Cyborg's human eye open just a bit wider moments before the dart plunging towards him flash-froze in mid-air and exploded like a bomb.

The dart was barely four inches from tip to tip, a flimsy construction of polyurethane foam and polyester resin. But the explosion it produced engulfed the Anti-Cyborg in a ball of blossoming fire, shattering the two demons closest to him, and sending a dozen others tumbling into their fellows. Moments later, the fire dissipated, and the wind blew the smoke aside, to reveal the evil Cyborg staggering back from the force of the blast, stumbling over one of the fallen demons before falling flat on his back. The ranks of the demons that surrounded him stirred and grumbled, turning their heads to their leader for instructions, and David saw the Anti-Cyborg lift himself up to issue them as the echo of the explosion faded. But he did not hear what the evil version of Cyborg had to say to his forces.

_I know it all seems overwhelming. It can't feel like anything else just yet, especially for you. But I need you to push past that for a second. If you can break down something like this, you can do it to anything else. All these guidelines, all this stuff about tensile strengths and reactive bonds, none of it matters in the end unless you want it to. Classify it however you want, periodic or elemental, or something you just made up, it doesn't matter. You get the basics down, figure out how to break down the problems in front of you, find a system that fits however your brain works, and man... I guarantee you..._

He did not hear, because as the Anti-Cyborg lifted his head, David closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and squeezed the trigger once more.

… _you __will_ _perform miracles._

And he didn't let go.

The battery-powered motor hummed, and the launcher spring twanged in tune with it, but David heard neither, for the cacophony of thunder and the screaming of demons blotted all else from contention, and he opened his eyes again to see a wall of flames erupting across the length of the entire army, hurling broken pieces of solidified sulfur into the air and sending them spiralling off in every direction. The demons roared, collectively, and their roar was a terrible thing, desolate and earthshaking, as the ranks behind surged forward to seize the object of their torment and rend him apart, but David pushed it from his mind, forced himself to forget all about demons and hellspawn and supernatural death. Instead, he thought of the mass of plastic in his hand that projected polyurethane towards piles of moving sulfur, and how by liberating the energy within the polyurethane foam, the sulfur piles would disperse to the winds, and move and cry no more.

Back and forth and back again he swept his toy weapon, and the rain of bright and childish projectiles, one every quarter second, slammed down into the ranks of the demons like a meteor shower. And every one that landed, whether it struck a demon or not, burst into flames like a car bomb, hurling fire and debris and invisible waves of force indiscriminately about, shattering some demons, and dismembering others, and hurling still others through the air by main force to collide with their fellows. Screaming masses of demons flew this way and that, buffeted by shockwaves from every direction, unable to form up, to coordinate, or even to escape the hail of ruin that descended upon them with terrible, mechanical regularity. A bare handful of demons managed to break through the curtain of destruction and race towards David, only to have barrages of explosive bolts hurled directly into their faces, shattering them like crockery thrown against a stone wall. Everywhere that knots of demons tried to rally or launch themselves towards him, there he directed the stream of fire, his mind liberating the latent thermokinetic energy from the chemical compounds within the bolts of soft foam with a regularity that months ago would not have occurred to him in his wildest dreams. Cars and fire hydrants and all the detritus of the end of the world exploded into the air, some pinwheeling hundreds of feet up before crashing down once again in ruin. And as the bolts exploded and the demons screamed and his mind moved to its own internal metronome, even as he did all this, David slowly let the breath he had been holding out, and began to walk towards the flames.

Nothing stood in his path. Though the demons still howled and roared, they were invisible behind a curtain of flames and smoke, and he responded to every flickering shadow within the inferno by launching a hail of exploding grenades into it. Back and forth and back again he swept the weapon, spraying death and destruction at anything that even looked like it was considering barring his path, until at long last the belt of darts that fed the weapon ran out, and he was left with only the whir of an electric motor and a street filled with dying flames and hazy smoke.

And then the smoke parted, and revealed approximately what he expected it to.

The army of demons was gone now, obliterated to such a degree that few traces of it could even be discerned. Piles of residue, sulfur and filth mixed into a steaming slurry lay splattered all over the street, draped over burnt-out cars and broken sidewalks. Here and there, broken forms still twitched and moved, demons whose bodies were merely savaged as opposed to liquified. Of all the rest there was no sign but the broken street and scorched earth that lined the area into which David had pumped enough fire to bring down an armored battalion. No sign, that was, except for the primary object of all this ire.

Through the smoke and dust, the dark form of the Anti-Cyborg loomed, a vast, mis-shapen bulk, staggering and struggling to keep its feet. Crushed by the avalanche of destruction unceremoniously dumped upon him and his army, he rose like a looming nightmare, ash and debris rolling off his body as he drew himself up. As the haze cleared, David could see terrible dents hammered into his frame as though by a wrecking ball, the black scour-marks of direct grenade strikes, sparks and sickly-green hydraulic fluid leaking from his cracked limbs and shattered armor plates.

The gun in David's hand was empty now, and he let it slip from his grasp as he unslung the now-empty duffel bag from his shoulder, dropping both into the street as he stopped before his badly-smashed adversary. With one hand, he reached to his side, and drew from his belt a mangled piece of steel, a telescoping staff crudely hacked off on both ends which burst into flame as soon as it touched his fingers.

Steadying himself with difficulty, the anti-Cyborg slowly raised one arm, a grey cannon like a howitzer mounted where his forearm and hand should have been. Sucking smoke-filled air through clenched teeth, the half-metal anti-Titan glared hateful daggers at David as he locked the sonic cannon into place, aiming it straight at the smaller teen's chest, though his target made no effort to evade or duck away.

"I got you now," spat the Anti-Cyborg as he sighted down the length of the barrel, "you sonofabitch."

There was the whirring of gears and motors somewhere deep within the cannon, and a red glow that built up within its barrel, and yet instead of a beam of incarnated death, there instead came a loud "bang", and the sound of metal grinding against metal. Sparks and smoke issued from half a hundred cracks lining the surface of the gun, even as the Anti-Cyborg stared at his own forearm in disbelief, shaking the cannon as though to bring it back to life, before David's voice commanded his attention once more.

"No," said David softly, as he lifted the broken staff, holding it straight like a spear at the Anti-Cyborg's chest. "You don't."

For a moment nothing moved. And then Cyborg's evil twin suddenly shuddered, as though a bolt of lightning had torn through his body. He staggered back a pace, his limbs jerking in several directions at once as he tried to force his body to act. Gargled cries of rage or pain or some mixture of both poured from his mechanical throat as he shook once, twice, three times, each time with greater violence than the last. David stood motionless as a statue, staring down the length of his metal stick, his red eyes boring into Cyborg's as the convulsions of his counterpart grew exponentially in intensity and force, nearly knocking the Anti-Cyborg off his feet. And then, as his enemy lurched upright and roared out a formless scream of pain, defiance, and anger, David twisted the metal stick in his hand in mid-air and reached out with his mind.

There was a _deafening_explosion.

It was more powerful than David had expected, for he could not see the molecules dancing the way he was used to, and his target was a precise combination of elements that he had never _ever _permitted himself to practice on. The blast blew him backwards, nearly knocking him off his feet, and he clenched his teeth and hissed in pain as bits of what he hoped was metal bounced off his clothes and stung his hands and face. But when the shockwave was past, and he looked up again, all he saw was a blackened crater where the anti-Cyborg had been standing, and the shattered, mangled remnants of a broken, grey, sonic cannon, laying like the rest of the discarded trash of this broken world in the midst of the ruin that David had wrought.

And then it was quiet.

For a little while, he simply stood there, his brain caught between two gears, letting his arm fall to his side as he stared into the smoky air in anticipation of further enemies leaping out of them. No sound, no scent, no sign whatsoever of any other living thing could he detect, and soon his mind was wandering back to what he had just done, and the sound that the anti-Cyborg had made just before he -

No. No not that. Not now. He clamped down on that thought before it could fully form, and knowing where it lead, he thrust it aside. And stirring himself to action once again, if only to avoid thinking about the things he knew he could not afford to dwell on tonight, he turned to his left and ran over to where the real Cyborg lay.

Cyborg was face-down on the broken pavement, laying crushed and mangled against the side of the street, the lights that covered his body extinguished and cold. The barrage of explosives that David had pumped into the area had not been directed his way, David had positioned and angled himself to prevent that much, but with the sheer quantity of high explosive he had deployed, there was no way to be sure. The others no doubt had better, or at least more subtle ways to claw through a thousand-strong battalion of demons, but there was nothing for that. All he could do was hope that he hadn't missed, or that if he had, that Cyborg's armor had been enough to repel the odd shot.

It didn't look promising. Cyborg's body was covered in carbon scoring and metal fractures, though whether those were because of his blasts or because of the abuse he had taken at the hands of his evil twin and a demon army, David had no prayer of determining. Gingerly, he approached the fallen Titan, trying to keep his fear in check, looking for any signs on which to build a shred of hope

"C... Cy?" he ventured. There was no response, no movement, nothing, and with that lack of reaction, fear overcame caution as he quickly ran over to Cyborg's side, gingerly laying his hand on Cyborg's back, hoping to sense the vibrations of a motor or something. But Cyborg's metal shell was lifeless and still, the steel alloy reduced to the ambient temperature of the windswept hell that surrounded them.

"No," said David, without even giving thought of who he was talking to, "nononono... not now." He tried to shake Cyborg, first with one hand, then with both, trying to stir him back to life, but even truncated as he was, Cyborg was well over eight hundred pounds of dead weight, and David could barely shake him at all. He tried again, harder this time, straining against the cold dictates of gravity and mass, but it was no use. Either he could not shake Cyborg hard enough to draw his attention, or Cyborg was past all possibility of being awakened.

Now the flood was coming, a flood of desperation and fear, one he could no longer stem by conscious will, and he raised his head and looked around in hopeless panic, as though expecting some miracle to materialize behind him. To have come this far, to have killed his own evil twin, abandoned Terra to die, whether at her insistence or not, to have done _all this_and to find Cyborg dead was a blow beyond even comprehending, and his mind refused to countenance it, casting about instead for ever more tenuous hopes, commanding his fevered imagination to invent some plan, some method, of making everything all right. And so in his delirium, he hit upon the idea of rolling Cyborg over onto his back, as though this would somehow improve things or at least allow him to better assess the damage. The fact that he was neither a doctor nor a mechanic, and that even if he had been such things, that moving Cyborg was not some panacea to cure the torments of the Devil, was something he simply refused to allow himself to think about.

Dropping the broken staff on the ground, he seized Cyborg's side with both hands, scrabbling and straining with all the force he could bring to bear to roll Cyborg over. It was useless. Not even the strength of desperation could enable him to do more than slightly lifting one side of Cyborg's body an inch or two off the ground before his limited strength gave out and he collapsed at Cyborg's side, barely avoiding crushing his own hand in the process. Twice more he tried to move his fallen friend, and twice more he fell back in defeat, until on the third attempt, he spotted a long piece of steel rebar, jarred loose from one of the ruined buildings nearby, and his mind, belatedly, recalled one or two of the mechanics lessons he had learned, either in school or from the Titans, he honestly couldn't remember which.

Staggering to his feet, David ran over and grabbed the rebar, unearthing it from the rubble it lay amidst. It was bent and cracked in several places, but a central section some six feet long was still intact, straight and free of visible defects. Quickly, he concentrated his mind and blew the sturdy section free, lopping the rest of the rebar off at both ends as though by acetylene torch. Turning and running back to Cyborg, he crouched down and jammed one end of the rebar in between Cyborg's body and the ground, shoving and working it back and forth to drive it further and further in. And once he had driven the bar as far as it would go, he turned around and pulled the far end of the bar up as hard as he could, hoping to use it as a lever to wrench Cyborg over.

It was damn near impossible, even now. David was not now and had never been built for brute force, and this was a task no explosions could aid him in, no matter how precise. Moreover, how he expected this to help Cyborg was a question left dangling off to one side. If Cyborg was dead, then he would remain so when flipped, and if he was not, then his medical circumstances were unlikely to improve by being violently rolled about by means of iron bars and leverage. Yet he strained and pulled anyway, whether animated by ignorance or willful blindness or some forlorn hope that he might be able to wake Cyborg up, battling against gravity and slowly but surely winning. The bar groaned and shook but did not bend, and inch by glacial inch, he managed to pry the far end up from the ground and lift it up, slowly raising Cyborg onto one side. Soon he was able to push, rather than pull, and he shoved at the bar with everything he had, until at last he gave one final push, throwing his entire weight against the bar with such force that it slipped loose, causing him to fall forward with a crash and land atop Cyborg, who after teetering on his side for a moment, finally rolled over onto his back.

For a second, David lay there, afraid to open his eyes and see what he suspected he would see. And then at length he opened them, and saw the barrel of a cannon staring him full in the face.

No dead relic was this, but a live, active cannon, thrumming with power and lit an electrical blue so bright that it made his eyes water. Its mouth was bare inches from David's face, and in its cavernous depths he saw motors and actuators and mechanical gizmos beyond name or counting spinning together, ready to unleash a beam of ultrasound so powerful that it was actually visible, capable of inducing nuclear fission on the dust motes that crossed it, or flaying concrete from the walls of a fortified bunker. For several _long_seconds, he lay there motionless, his mind somewhat-understandably unable to get past the anti-tank weapon currently levelled at his face, but at length, he pulled his eyes away, and lifted his head enough to peer over the gun, and saw Cyborg staring straight at him, his mechanical eye shattered and dark, his human one swollen and purple. But Cyborg did not move or writhe in pain, staring down at David with an expression that could have melted iron.

"Don't even think about it," said Cyborg, his voice taut and grim. "You're not _that_fast."

Everything that David had been afraid of was suddenly and unceremoniously replaced by a whole new set of fears. He tried to muster the wherewithal to speak. He failed.

"I got thirty-six thousand sensors runnin' through this thing," said Cyborg. "Any one of 'em starts readin' frost, and Trigon'll be condensing you out of the atmosphere. I swear to God."

Never, _ever_had David heard Cyborg sound like this. Not in the worst fights or bitterest arguments he had ever borne witness to. Cyborg's voice was a harsh growl, distorted by speaker damage and pain, a savage voice prepared for further savagery, and David saw the light from the end of the cannon increase in intensity, and knew what it portended. He froze, his body no longer taking dictation from his brain, staring into the cannon and past it into Cyborg's eyes, expecting at any moment to be vaporized.

"Cy..." he ventured, not daring to lift his voice above a whisper. The red light of his own discolored eyes reflecting off Cyborg's mangled armor keyed him in, belatedly, to what must be running through Cyborg's head. "Cy, it's... it's me. It's David."

"Bullshit," said Cyborg, and his voice was a low and dangerous hiss. His eyes, mechanical and human, narrowed to slits. "Bullshit," he repeated. "You're dead."

"I know," said David, and realizing only too late how that sounded, he struggled to explain. "I mean... I was. But - "

"_I watched you die_," roared Cyborg, and broken as his body was, he lurched upright, shoving David back and off of himself. "Trigon turned you into stone! Right in front of my face! Trigon thinks he can frog-march you in here and crack me in half, he's got another thing comin'!"

"Cy, I'm not..." started David, but he stopped as his brain ran dry of words, the reflection of his own blood-red eyes seeming to mock his feeble protests. "This isn't a trick."

Cyborg's face did not lighten in the slightest. "Really," he said. "And what, you thought you'd put on face paint and graft LEDs into your eyes before comin' over here just to make a joke? I _might_ believe that from BB, but _not you_. And if Trigon was able to make anything but a bunch of puppets that happen to look like us, he'd already know that!"

His mind numb and refusing to work straight, David desperately sought for the words that would turn this situation around, and did not find them. Cyborg was staring into him the direct glare of a searchlight, but all David could think to say was the simplest possible thing.

"Cy," he said, his voice quivering of its own accord. "Cy... please. I'm not one of Trigon's things. I... It's me..."

"Oh yeah?" asked Cyborg, and his voice was unsteady too. Fury tempered by worry or fear or some other thing, David couldn't guess. With an audible groaning of battered motors, Cyborg contrived to lean forward, bringing the barrel of the cannon to within six inches of David's chest. "Prove it."

What Cyborg had in mind, David did not know, nor could imagine. Perhaps he had nothing in mind, just some desperate challenge to prove the unprovable from someone who didn't even dare hope. What he could possibly say or do or explain to Cyborg in order to prove that, contrary to all sense and logic, he was not merely another doppelganger, David had no idea. His brain froze, staring into the aperture of an anti-tank weapon wielded by the person he had blasted through armies to find, who had saved his life dozens upon dozens of times, and who, if he did not produce a satisfactory answer to an impossible question in the next five seconds, would probably disintegrate him where he sat.

And in the absence of conscious thought, David never could figure out what possessed him to do what he then did.

All at once, the low, red flames that still sheathed the broken weapon in David's hand vanished entirely, leaving behind the bare, flame-scorched metal of what had once been a telescoping staff. Slowly, he lifted the staff with a hand that was slightly trembling, and taking a deep breath, he gently laid it against the stump of Cyborg's other arm, and then withdrew his hand, sitting back and closing his eyes.

He expected... well honestly he didn't know what to expect. His ears were primed for the sound of the sonic cannon unleashing its full power, undoubtedly the last thing he would ever hear. But seconds ticked by, and he did not hear this happen, nor any other thing, and it might have been a minute or five seconds or an hour later that he mustered the courage to open his eyes.

Cyborg was still sitting before him, his cannon still levelled and ready to fire, but the half-mechanical Titan's expression was no longer the mask of bitter determination it had been before. His grimace was gone, replaced by a nervous trepidation, visible even through the metal, injury and damage. David didn't dare to guess at what could be running through Cyborg's head now, but as he lifted his own eyes, bathing Cyborg once more in their red glow, Cyborg ventured a single whispered word.

"... _David_?"

The knots in David's stomach, present for so long that he had forgotten they were there, loosened all at once, and a wave of numbing relief washed through him, a bit premature perhaps considering the cannon that was still staring him in the face, but still. Maybe it was obvious or maybe not, but David let his breath out and permitted himself a hopeful smile as he nodded wordlessly.

Cyborg did not reciprocate. Indeed he looked like he could not believe his eyes. The gun remained in place, but he had plainly forgotten about it, his mouth sliding open of its own accord. "You're... dead," he repeated, this time without certainty or understanding. A flat statement, contradicted only by what lay in front of him.

David let his smile broaden, let his frame slump as his body unclenched all at once, and shook his head. "I was," he said. "Not anymore."

There was a series of clicks, and then suddenly the cannon was gone, replaced by Cyborg's metal hand, and he reached it out, gingerly, and touched David's sleeve with a gesture that was almost reverent. He seemed almost surprised to find it comprised of cloth, and not stone. Maybe he was. "I..." he stammered, "I don't... How..."

"It's... kind of a long story," said David, but he got no further, for suddenly, Cyborg put his arm around David's back and pulled him in against his own shoulder, pinning him in place as he thumped David's back with his intact hand, over and over, hard enough to knock the wind from his lungs. And above it all, David heard Cyborg's voice as he had never heard it before, unburdened at last, a voice that was pained and trembling on the brink of collapse, as he repeated the same phrase over and over.

"Goddamn," said Cyborg. "God_damn_, man... Goddamn..."

It was some time before Cyborg let him go. David didn't push the issue. But at length, Cyborg relented, and as David pulled back, he saw that Cyborg's human eye glistened, and his face was damp. But David elected to say nothing on that subject, for fear that he might have to think of something to say.

"What... what _happened_?" said Cyborg. "You were - " he stopped short, unwilling to say the word that had rolled so freely from his tongue a moment before. "Trigon turned you to stone."

"Terra," said David. "She... I don't know... she turned me back." He shook his head. "She can do that."

"_Terra_?" replied Cyborg, lifting his head and looking around as though expecting Terra to appear from behind some rock. "She's here too?"

If the silence that greeted Cyborg's question didn't answer him, the expression that on David's face when Cyborg finally looked back at him certainly did.

"She was," said David. He couldn't find it in him to say any more.

Part of the knot from before re-materialized even as he said it, but fortunately, Cyborg did not require further explanation. He lowered his head just a moment, closing his eyes and nodding almost imperceptibly. "It's gonna be all right, man," he said without looking up. "We're gonna get a piece for her. For everybody."

"Yeah," said David, though he didn't sound, or feel, particularly convinced. Right now he didn't have the wherewithal to process that subject. Not now.

Neither, apparently, did Cyborg. "We gotta find a way out of here," he said, all business once more. "That was some damn fine work drivin' everyone off, but they'll be back as soon as they - "

It was no interruption of David's stopped Cyborg, but his expression. Cyborg stopped, furrowed his half-metal brow, restarted. "What?" he asked.

"I... um..." stammered David. "I... didn't drive them off."

Cyborg blinked. "What?" he asked, not understanding. And then when David didn't answer, he finally turned his attention to the general surroundings, to the street pitted with bomb craters and cars blown into tangled metal sculpture, to the pools of molten sulfur that had been splattered all over everything within a hundred yards as though a pressure cooker had exploded. Slowly, David saw recognition dawn in Cyborg's eyes, as he surveyed the sterile ruins that encircled them and saw no sign of life within.

"You..." started Cyborg, and stopped again, still trying to make sense of it all in his head. "... _all_of them?"

"I think so," said David. "Some might have got away."

Cyborg continued to pan his eyes across the horizon, plainly searching for something that was not there. "What about the other me?" he finally asked.

David took a deep breath, and let it out. "Him too," he said.

That brought Cyborg's attention back, and he focussed his eyes on David once again in a manner that wasn't entirely reassuring. "You... _killed _him?"

The surprise in Cyborg's face was enough to make David avert his eyes, and he ducked his head, as though evading a blow. "He was gonna kill you," he said. "And... he was made of metal. So..."

Cyborg said nothing as David looked furtively back up at him, trying to evaluate his reaction. Cyborg for his part looked as though a large portion of his understanding of reality had just been kicked out from under him. "Jesus," he said at last.

David almost winced. "I didn't know what else to do," he said. It sounded as lame to him as it must have to -

"No... no man," said Cyborg. David chanced another look, and he saw Cyborg shaking his head, as though in disbelief. "I just... didn't know you had that in you."

Despite it all, David managed a half-smile. "It's been kind of a weird night," he said.

Cyborg seemed prepared to take that much on faith. He took another look around before turning back to David. "What'd you do to Jinx?"

That one, David did not know how to answer. "Jinx?" he asked.

"Yeah, man, _Jinx._You remember her. You didn't see her?"

"I don't think so," said David, struggling to remember if he had. "What was she doing - "

There was a pink flash, so bright as to be blinding, and something hit David in the chest, hard and hot, like a branding iron wielded by a giant. He felt himself being hurled back, hitting the ground, sliding over broken pavement and through puddles of bubbling sulfur until he fetched up against a pile of rubble. Stars flashed before his eyes when he opened them, and the searing pain in his chest when he inhaled brought tears to his eyes and a cry from his throat. He reached out at near-random, found a piece of concrete or masonry to grab hold of, and pulled himself up, biting the pain back as he sought his assailant. And when he turned around, he saw a girl dressed in purple and black with pink hair in the act of throwing a wave of pink energy at his head.

He hurled himself to the ground as the wave passed overhead, slicing into the rubble pile behind and sending debris showering over him. Without even bothering to stand up again, he reached out with his mind, pushing the way he had long ago when there had been something to push against. The effect was the same. A series of blasts erupted like volcanic vents from the ground between him and Jinx, casting rocks and flame and smoke into the air in a curtain, hopefully enough to keep Jinx at arm's length long enough for him to recover.

Plainly, this was not a good night for relying on hopes. Jinx vaulted through the exploding curtain like a gymnast, effortlessly evading not only the explosions, but a stabbing beam of blue light from the half-visible form of Cyborg behind her. Landing on her feet, she threw another hex, forcing David to roll to the side to avoid being split in half, and then rushed him at top speed. It was easy to see why. Beaten though he was, Cyborg's cannon still had the power to burst Jinx like a grape. Jinx' sole margin of safety from it was to get as close to David as she could, so close that Cyborg could not fire on her without hitting him. Even on his best day, David could not hope to compete with Jinx in close quarters. And this was not even close to David's best day.

Except apparently, someone had forgotten to tell David that. He made no attempt to retreat, to gain the precious distance that someone who made a habit of working with high explosives needed. Instead he managed to rise to one knee, clenching his teeth against the pain in his chest. His uniform front, discolored and smeared with grime, sulfur, and coal slurry, now sported an ugly scorch mark across the chest from the previous hit, yet when Jinx threw another hex at him, he imperturbably hefted a fist-sized piece of concrete rubble and threw it right back at her.

Jinx's hexes were not made of matter. They were not really made of _anything_, at least not anything that David had the vocabulary to describe, but they did obey certain physical laws, and so when David detonated the concrete brick in mid-air as it passed the hex, the resulting explosion consumed them both in a blast of fire and smoke. A second later, and Jinx tore through the ephemeral curtain of smoke like a possessed being, jumping into the air to avoid the explosion that David hastily triggered beneath her feet, and hurling yet another hex down at him like a thunderbolt from Zeus. David threw himself back against the rubble pile to avoid having his skull split, landing on his back and reaching behind himself for something behind himself as Jinx descended, a fresh hex already forming up in her hand. She landed a pace in front of David and lunged forward, grabbing him by the shoulder with her free hand to pin him in place, and sliding the other to David's throat, the hex poised millimeters from his jugular.

And perhaps she would have gone further. Perhaps, given the chance, she would have cut David's throat out with the edge of her hex and spilled his discolored blood all over the street. But she did not get that chance, for even as she brought the hex down to strike, David brought his hand out from behind his back and shoved a gun into Jinx's face.

Any gun shoved in one's face tends to look enormous, but this one was truly so, a massive, ugly box of blackened steel with a barrel half an inch wide staring Jinx right in the eyes. It was visibly too big for David, almost ludicrously so, yet David's hand did not shake as he stared down its length at Jinx, moments before the entire gun burst into heatless flames. Jinx started as the fire erupted to life directly in front of her, jabbing the tip of the hex into David's neck, but hesitating from delivering the killing blow, as she tried to untangle what had just happened. David, for his part, barely dared to breathe.

Jinx took her time sizing the situation up, staring over the gun at David's burning red eyes. "There's no trigger on that gun," she said, her voice as even as a pane of glass.

"You think I need one?" answered David instantly, managing with difficulty to keep the fear out of his. "Bullets are packed with gunpowder. It's the easiest thing in the world."

There was no fear in Jinx's eyes. There was nothing but fury. An red fog beneath pink irises. "Then do it," she said.

David's eyes widened, and he glanced to one side, to where Cyborg still sat. He tried to make it surreptitious, but that was difficult with spotlights emitting from his eyes.

"Don't look at him!" shouted Jinx, jabbing him with the point of her hex enough to get his attention back. "I'm who you should be worried about!"

"Get off him, Jinx," said Cyborg, and as if to punctuate his command, the cannon in his arm began to glow the same bright blue that it had before.

"Or what?!" screamed Jinx back at Cyborg, whipping her head around so hard that she nearly fell over. "You can't shoot, and apparently neither can he." She rounded back on David once more, eyes wild and fierce. "You Titans are all talk, no guts to back it up! If you can use that thing without a trigger, _what the hell are you waiting for_?!"

To be honest, David was waiting for the world to start making some degree of sense again. "What are you - "

"You'll blow an _army_in half, but you don't have the guts to pull a trigger? I should cut your throat right now!"

"You do that, Jinx," shouted Cyborg instantly, "and Trigon'll be mopping you up with a vacuum! This thing ain't set to stun, now get the hell off of him!"

Jinx ignored Cyborg, staring down into David's eyes, tears of fury running down her face. "I should never have let you go," she said. "I should have let Gizmo dissect you like a frog!"

"I didn't kill your friends, Jinx," said David, trying desperately to stay calm.

"_YES YOU DID!_" thundered Jinx, shoving him against the rubble pile with her other hand as she did so. "You brought this all on! You changed everything! Without you, they'd all still be alive! So would Robin! So would _everybody!_None of this would have happened if it wasn't for you! You started it all!"

David couldn't even speak, but Cyborg could. "That ain't _true_, Jinx!" he shouted to her. "_Warp_started all this!"

"And who started _Warp_?" shouted Jinx, turning to Cyborg. "Who kickstarted this whole thing? _Devastator_. Who suggested bringing us into the fight? _Devastator_. Who stuck around long enough to give Trigon all the power he needed to make sure the world would end?! _Deva - _

David fired.

In Jinx's anger, she had turned her head completely to face Cyborg, and had no chance to react when David suddenly lifted the muzzle of the gun up next to her head and discharged it with a hard shove of his mind. The bullet hit nothing, the gun was pointed past Jinx, but the thunderous gunshot, all the more astonishing for its sheer unexpectedness, went off barely an inch from Jinx's unprotected ear.

Jinx let out a bloodcurdling cry, stumbling to one side, the hex dissolving as she cupped her hands to her ear. David gave her no chance to recover, shoving her off of himself as hard as he could. He scrambled back to his feet, biting back the pain in his chest, and backpedaling for space as Jinx lay crumpled on all fours on the floor, nursing her burnt and bleeding ear. It was ten seconds or more before she lifted her head, staring venomous daggers into David, and quite purposefully shoving herself up to her knees and standing up, her intent obvious.

"Stop!" shouted David, gesturing with the flaming handgun as he did so, and when Jinx did not stop, he fired the gun into the ground at her feet, kicking up a puff of dust and generating another ringing gunshot, but little else. Jinx did not stop even with the warning, and even raised her hand to do God-knew-what before a beam of blue-white light split the air between her and her target.

This time, she stopped.

"Goddamnit, Jinx, that's _enough_!" shouted Cyborg. "You take one more step and he won't _have_to shoot you."

"Open field, with all your targeting sensors knocked out, you think you'll actually hit me?" asked Jinx.

"If he doesn't, I _will_," said David, levelling the gun at Jinx's head. "You're not touching either of us. Not now and not ever."

"Don't make promises you can't keep, _Devastator_," said Jinx, spitting the name out like a curse. "You're no good with a gun, and you don't have the guts to kill besides."

"Really?" asked David, his eyes locked with Jinx's. "You just said that you knew what I did to Warp. To the other Titans. Trigon showed you everything, didn't he?"

"He showed me enough."

"So did _that_ look like someone who didn't have the guts to kill somebody?!" shouted David. "You saw what happened, how do you think _that_ person would react?!" The gun began to shake in his hand as he squeezed it tighter and tighter, his voice becoming harsh and desperate as he glared beams of incarnated fury at the Hive Leader. "I killed _myself_ half an hour ago!" he shouted. "I abandoned Terra to die, I blew an _army_ apart just to get here and help Cyborg, so take a step, Jinx, and _watch what happens!_"

Jinx did not respond, nor did she wilt before David's thunder, her gaze unflinching as she stared into the red glare that poured from his eyes and illuminated her like spotlights. Whatever she was thinking, she gave no sign, whether deciding to take her chances or seeking for some other way to overcome him, he could not tell. But despite what David was expecting, after a few eternal seconds, it was Cyborg who spoke, and quietly.

"David," he said simply.

It was a couple more seconds before David chanced a glance over at Cyborg, who was looking at him with an inscrutable expression. He said nothing further, but gave him just the slightest nod that could have meant many things, but that David chose to interpret as a suggestion that enough was perhaps enough insofar as this went. His eyes flicking back to Jinx, David slowly retracted his arm, though keeping the gun pointed at Jinx, and backed up another couple paces, the better to give Cyborg, symbolically at least, the floor.

Cyborg took it immediately. "Jinx," he said, and when she did not respond, again, harder. "_Jinx._"

"What?" asked Jinx, her eyes not deviating a millimeter from David's.

"What's your endgame here?" Cyborg asked, his cannon still locked on her center of mass. "Where does this go? You kill me, kill David, tear us apart just like Trigon wants, and then what? He's supposed to bring all your friends back to life? Is that what it is?"

Jinx took her time replying, still watching David as though expecting him to transform into something else. "Yeah," she said.

"You _gotta _know that's bullshit," said Cyborg. "You're not that stupid. Trigon ain't gonna give you a damn thing, 'cept maybe a glimpse to keep you dancing the way he wants. He will _not_ bring your friends back. Not even if he could. You _know_that."

Jinx's breathing was becoming more and more labored, her fists clenched tightly as she continued to stare at David. "Yeah," she managed to say.

"Then what the hell are you _doin'_here?" asked Cyborg. "Trigon killed your friends, not us. Why would you even think about - "

"What else _can_ I do?!" roared Jinx, rounding on Cyborg violently. "It doesn't matter what _you_ think Trigon will do, or what I think he'll do, it matters what he _does_! He's a _GOD_! He can bring them all back!"

"Maybe he can," said Cyborg, "but he ain't gonna."

"_How the fuck do you know that?!_" roared Jinx at Cyborg, slashing at the air with her outstretched finger as though it were a sword.

"The same way you do," said Cyborg. "Trigon's the _Devil!_ Evil incarnate! You think he killed everybody on the planet just so that he could bring _your_people back? What are you all gonna do, sit around in the ruins and sing campfire songs?!"

"They'll be back," said Jinx. "I don't _care_what comes after that."

"That's crap, and you know it. They're _dead_, Jinx. And they're not coming back."

"Robin's dead too, Cyborg! That didn't stop you from sending Starfire off to get _him_back!"

"I didn't send Star to get Robin back," said Cyborg, his expression cold, "I sent her after Warp so that Trigon wouldn't get her when he came after me."

Now it was David's turn to turn his head and look at Cyborg, but Cyborg did not so much as glance in David's direction, his eyes locked with Jinx, who looked torn between a thousand different thoughts, all of them vile and repugnant.

"Jinx," said Cyborg, his voice lowering and softening as he spoke, "I know it hurts to even think about it. But you gotta stop this. Trigon is _never_gonna give you what he promised. You can shout all you like, but you know that. We all do."

Jinx closed her eyes, squeezing them shut so tightly that her entire body shook with the force of it. "It's the only chance they have."

"It's not a chance at all," said Cyborg. "It's just Trigon tryin' to see how much fun he can get out of you before he ends it."

Jinx seemed to shudder, as though Cyborg's words were gunshots, and when she opened her eyes again, there were tears running down her face. "I have to try." she growled between clenched teeth. "You don't understand."

"You think I don't?" asked Cyborg. He shook his head sadly. "Ain't nobody here hasn't lost someone, Jinx. I lost Robin. I lost my _mother_. Everybody I knew before the accident who walked out on me, or who I walked out on. That kid over there lost his whole family. So did Star, so did BB. We _know_ Jinx. We _all_know."

"No you _don't_!" spat Jinx. "You all had each other, even now. Even with everyone else dead! What the hell do _I_ have left? You?!" She paused, wiping the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand before raising her head once more. "That ship sailed a long time ago, Cyborg. I _have_to try to get them back, whatever it takes. What else am I supposed to do?"

"Help us," said Cyborg.

Jinx looked almost disgusted with the very idea. "Why?" she asked. "So you guys can all go out in some glorious last stand together?"

"So we can get the sonofabitch who did this to you," said Cyborg. "The one who did this to all of us."

A sob tore itself from Jinx's throat, and she spat it out like a mouthful of poison. "You _can't _beat Trigon," she said. "He's invincible."

"Then why am I sittin' here?" demanded Cyborg. "Why are we havin' this talk? You walked in here with a whole army and a copy of me. It's just you now. How'd that happen, if Trigon's invincible?"

"He's playing with you," said Jinx.

"Maybe," said Cyborg. "Or maybe he lied about more than just what he was gonna do for you."

Jinx stood motionless now, save for the occasional shudder as some uncontrollable convulsion tore through her body. She seemed to have forgotten that David was even there, her head bowed and her eyes closed to stem, by the only means she could, the tears that still leached out and stained the broken earth. "I... can't just... _leave them all to die_."

"You never left nobody," said Cyborg, his voice now barely a whisper. "You did every damn thing you could do, and it wasn't enough. Nothin' we did was enough. Not to save them."

"I can _still_save them!"

"Not like this," said Cyborg, his voice as calm as a windless pond. "You can't beat the both of us, Jinx, and even if you could, it wouldn't do anything but give Trigon one more laugh."

"So what?" asked Jinx, raising her head, her voice filled with bitter tears on the verge of exploding. "I'm just supposed to give up?!" She stomped towards Cyborg, her expression violent and desperate. David froze, uncertain of whether to try and stop her or not, but a glance at Cyborg made him hesitate, and he settled for keeping the gun trained on her back as she walked towards the crippled Titan. "Is that what you'd do?!" she demanded. "Give up?! If you were standing here and all the other Titans were dead and someone offered you the chance to get them back, would _you_throw your hands up and say it can't be done so you should just give up?! Is that what you'd do?!"

Jinx looked ready to kill, ready to explode, ready to do damn near anything, and it was everything David could do to hold himself back from rushing in, or blowing something up. But Cyborg did not so much as raise his voice, merely looking up at Jinx with an expression that was neither angry nor scared nor even agitated, but vaguely sad, as though peering into all the decisions that had led them to this place.

"I don't know, Jinx," said Cyborg. "But I'd like to think they'd want me to carry on, 'stead of selling out everything I was, just for a chance to chase after their ghosts."

Slowly, the fire seemed to drain out of Jinx's face and posture, a visible ebb-tide, sucking away all the outrage and thunder so ready to erupt just moments ago. She did not look at Cyborg directly, nor at David, but stood stock still, remaining where she was as though incapable of further movement. For an endless time, for all of eternity, she stood there, and with every second of it, she seemed to shrink, no longer the raging supervillain prepared to slay two Titans at once, but a teenaged girl, lost and forlorn, and all alone in the endless night.

And then all of a sudden she fell.

She fell forward, fell to her knees and pitched over onto one side, so hard and violent that David jumped forward, imagining that she'd been shot or struck by a physical blow. But even as he did so, Jinx seemed to convulse, landing on her side and curling in on herself, her face twisted in pain, tears splashing down onto the ashen ground beneath. Soundless at first, she suddenly emitted a horrid, gasping cry, then another, and another, each one torn violently from an unwilling throat. Again and again she beat her fist on the ground, pink sparks and waves of energy flying from her hands and tearing furrows in what was left of the asphalt. David hesitated once more, unsure of whether or not to approach, but Cyborg had no such compunctions, and reaching down with his one remaining hand, he slowly dragged himself over to where Jinx lay. She took no notice of him, nor of anything else, but by the time he arrived, even this paroxysm of rage was spent, and she lay in a ball on the broken ground, motionless except for the occasional spasm as another sob leaked out. She did not react to anything, not even when Cyborg, as gently as he was able, laid a heavy, metal hand on her shoulder.

David approached cautiously, the gun held dark and forgotten in at his side. Cyborg looked up as he arrived, his eyes dancing over the scorch mark on David's shirt. "You alright, man?" he asked quietly.

The burn still throbbed, but David had frankly forgotten all about it. "Yeah," he said. "I think so." He looked from Cyborg to Jinx and back. "Are you?"

Cyborg didn't answer immediately, turning his head back to Jinx, still locked in her own private hell, and squeezing her shoulder gently. She did not react or raise her head, but simply lay on the ground beside one of her arch-enemies, shivering despite the heat, and cried soundlessly into the ashen streets of a burning city.

"We'll see, man," whispered Cyborg. "We'll see..."

**O-O-O**

Beast Boy woke up with a splitting headache.

All things considered, that was a considerably better state of affairs than he had anticipated waking up to. In fact he hadn't really been sure that he would wake up at all. His last memory before blacking out was of shrieking wind and flashing lightning and the unpleasant sensation of enormous boulders colliding with his skull. Yet as he gradually regained consciousness, he found to his astonishment that he was not falling but laying sedately on solid ground, not freezing but shrouded with a warm breeze, not deafened, but laying in what passed, out here, for complete silence.

None of this made his headache any less annoying, but it was certainly better than what had been running before.

Gradually, Beast Boy opened his eyes, waiting several moments for the red blur before him to resolve into something more coherent before realizing that it was not going to do so. Drawing in his breath, he clenched his teeth and opened his eyes as wide as he could, hissing in pain as the light flooded into them and made his throbbing head scream in protest. It was everything he could do to not shift into something that had no head, but right now he didn't have the time for self-indulgence. As soon as he could bear to, he squinted against the light and shaded his eyes with one hand, and looked for any sign of Raven.

All he had to do was raise his head.

Child-Raven was sitting in front of him on the bare ground, her knees tucked up under her chin, staring off into space. She did not turn as he groaned and stirred and sat up, did not react when the wind blew her violet hair in her face, did not do anything at all. And as Beast Boy's eyes adjusted to the unexpected light, he saw that around her, around _him_, were ranks of statues, men, women, children, alone, in groups, their faces contorted with fear and pain, each one bearing mute witness to the two Titans within. Yet Raven was not watching the statues. Her head was inclined up, watching the skies, and more importantly, the cloud that loomed in the distance above the ruined city. And as soon as Beast Boy laid eyes on it, he saw why.

The cloud was far, far away, miles by his own amateur reckoning, yet it filled the horizon, looming up above the ambient haze and smog that had settled atop Jump City like a giant overlooking a crowd of midgets. Neither grey, like a normal cloud, nor brown, like the ambient skies, this cloud was a lurid orange, neither fading nor dissipating, but boiling ever higher into the stratosphere, an enormous mushroom towering above the tallest buildings in Jump City's ruined skyline, like the aftermath of a nuclear strike. Indeed, try as he might, Beast Boy couldn't imagine what else could possibly have produced such a thing.

And then a thought occurred to him. "Raven?" he asked. "Did... did you do that?"

Raven started at his voice, and turned her head. Beast Boy wasn't sure what he saw in her eyes when she saw him, but this time at least she did not shrink away or try to run. Instead, she simply shook her head, lowering it slightly as though ashamed of some truancy. "No," she said, quietly, even as she slid to one side.

Beast Boy froze.

Laying on the ground behind Raven was a sculpture of a teenaged girl done in black ash. The sculpture was perfect, every detail of hair or clothing or expression sculpted down to the finest possible detail. The figure was laying on her back, scrambling away from something, one arm raised in useless defense against some unseen threat, her face contorted with fear and shock. All alone, here in the midst of ruin and pain, this one figure of ash lay in perfect preservation. Except none of these things occurred to Beast Boy as he gazed upon her, for the figure was Terra. And he knew it was not a sculpture.

"I did _that_."

Beast Boy didn't know what to say. Honestly, he was having trouble remembering how to articulate sound. Seventeen different reactions tried to fight their way to the surface at once, none succeeding. Staring at the ash pile in an expressionless daze, he felt himself no longer in a burning city but a cold, dark cave, staring at a sight not altogether dissimilar to the one before him. Part of him wanted to rush forward, grab the ephemeral sculpture, and... _do_something, what he could not possibly tell, but anything. But another, stronger part of him, held himself back, and left him standing and staring, not daring anything beyond breathing.

"What... happened?" he asked. He did not receive an answer, and when he finally turned around to find out why, Raven was gone.

"Raven!" he cried, and instantly he was a cheetah, bounding back to where Raven had been, his feline ears searching for a particular sound and finding it from somewhere within the forest of statues that ringed them in. Three bounds, dodging around statuary, was sufficient for him to catch sight of a small white cloak billowing in the wind as its wearer ran at top speed around another statue. Crouching low, he leaped up and over the statue in question, landing directly between two others moments before Raven collided with him at top speed, and they both tumbled over.

It took more than being tackled by a nine year old child to discombobulate someone accustomed to casually increasing or reducing their mass by a factor of 50,000, and Beast Boy sprang up instantly, once more in his human form. It took longer for Raven to rise, and by the time she did, Beast Boy was holding her in place by the shoulders, heedless of her attempts to break free. "Raven," he said, crouching down and trying to force her to look at him, and gratifyingly, she soon stopped trying to escape and did so. "What happened?"

Raven seemed to be staring through him. "I burned her," she said at length, her voice weak.

Beast Boy wasn't sure what to say to that. "You... burned her?" he finally asked.

"She hurt you," said Raven, her eyes as wide as saucers, milky and unfocused. "She was gonna hurt you worse. So I burned her alive." Her breath wavered as she tried to keep herself together without much success. "'Cause I'm a demon."

With one careful breath, Beast Boy gathered up every reaction he might have had to Raven's statement and set them all aside, in favor of one chosen by fiat. "Yeah," he said quietly, gently sliding his arms around her back until she was pressed gently against him. "I guess you are."

She didn't say anything to that, avoiding his gaze even when he got up from his crouch, lifting her up with both arms. There were other forms that would have worked better for this sort of thing, but he did not adopt any. Not now.

"It's okay, Raven," said Beast Boy. "It wasn't Terra. It was just some creature Trigon made to - "

"No," said Raven. "It was her. Some part of her. And I burned her up." She took a deep breath, let it out in a soft sigh. "It's what I do."

Beast Boy frowned. "No, it's not," he said. "I already told you, Raven. You're the best person I know."

"But you don't know me very well," said Raven quietly. "Nobody does. Because I don't let people."

That was true enough, Beast Boy supposed, but this was not the time or place for that. "I know you well enough."

"Do you?" she asked, and finally she turned to look at him, and Beast Boy cringed.

Raven's eyes were black. Pitch black, with neither iris nor white, as though her pupils had suddenly swallowed everything else. Her hands, formerly held in front of her, suddenly gripped his upper arms like steel traps. Her weight seemed somehow to _lighten_, and yet he could not have released her even if he had wished to, for her eyes held him frozen like the hypnotic gaze of a snake.

"Do you know what I am?" said Raven, her voice a steely parody of a little girl's, monotone and direct, like an alien thing speaking english words it did not understand. "What I can do? What I'm capable of doing? What I want to do?" Beast Boy stumbled backwards, bumping into one of the surrounding statues and nearly falling over, but he did not make any effort to release Raven. He wasn't certain that his arms would have obeyed him if he tried to.

"I'm a demon lord, Beast Boy," said Raven, with a chilling calm to her voice that sent shivers down Beast Boy's spine. "I'm the princess of darkness. I could kill everyone in the world with a single spell. Eat their souls and drink their suffering up like water. I could destroy anyone who's ever hurt you with a thought. I could make you forget they ever existed." The air seemed to warp around her, darkening as though a cloud had come over the non-existent sun, the distant fires dying out of perception, until he could see nothing but Raven herself, her white leotard now dark as night, her black eyes boring holes through his skull even as two new ones, burning red orbs like coals heated to combustion, opened on her forehead. "I am my father's daughter," she said, her voice like a scaling knife slicing into his heart.

Beast Boy might have said or done any number of things at this juncture, he knew that much. But it was not in his nature to sort through them all, not even when confronted with something like that. And besides that, he already knew exactly what he wanted to do.

All at once, Beast Boy pulled Raven in, squeezing her against his chest, closing his eyes as he laid her head on his shoulder. Her breath was _cold_, cold as ice as it blew on his neck, and he could feel her fingers digging into his arms like talons of iron, but he did not shift into some other form, did not adopt armor or fur or a thicker hide.

"You're whatever you want to be, Raven," he said, softly. "You always have been. You always will be."

How long he wound up standing there, Beast Boy could not tell. He wasn't marking the time. But at some indeterminate point, he noticed that the grip on his arms was no longer painful, and he no longer felt cold. He didn't pull Raven back to see if she had undergone some further change, for he did not need to, and by and by, he felt her breathing even out and heard her heartbeat slow, and realized all of a sudden that she was asleep.

For a minute or two, maybe longer, he didn't move, just stood there, letting the ambient sounds of the eternally burning city wrap around them. And then he turned and walked slowly back to the center of the statue field.

Except Terra was gone.

The place she had was empty now, save for a dusting of ash on the bare pavement. Of what had stood there, no sign whatsoever remained, an empty plinth in the midst of a field of elaborate statuary. Whether she had vanished because of some machination of Trigon or returned to life and fled or merely had her loose ashes blown away on the whistling wind, Beast Boy did not know. Likely enough, he would never know.

Still held in both arms, the child-Raven stirred softly in her sleep, murmuring something soft and unintelligible, even to Beast Boy's ears. He sighed softly, to himself if not to anyone else, and shook his head, though there was nobody to see him do it.

"Come on," he whispered to Raven. "Let's go find - "

*Boom*

The sound was distant, that much was certain, and reasonably faint, like thunder from a storm far off on the horizon, and yet in all the fires and ashen rain of this place, Beast Boy had not seen any signs of rain or even lightning. He stopped, and listened, his ears perking as he tried to locate the sound. And then it happened again.

*Boom*

It was not thunder. Thunder rolled and cascaded over itself, like boulders sliding down a hill. This was one, single, concussive sound, a deep, booming drum beat from somewhere far away. It sounded vaguely like an explosion, and yet surveying what he could of the horizon, Beast Boy could see no accompanying flash or smoke to indicate what was being detonated. And the sound was wrong too, even for a blast, too deep and earthy to be anything of the sort.

So what was it?

*Boom* *Boom*

Now it was becoming louder, deeper, stronger, and he could feel the ground beneath his shoes shaking with every successive thud. The statues around him trembled as the thunderous sound repeated itself, each time louder, each time closer, until the sound was loud enough to stir Raven awake. She shook her head to clear it of the lethargy that had so recently claimed her, blinking and turning her head to locate the sound that had jarred her back to life.

Beast Boy was doing much the same, but his ears were finer than hers, and he was awake and aware enough to use them. Carefully, he made his way through the statues towards the edge of the ring, ascending a small ridge where the street had buckled and peering in the direction that the sound seemed to be coming from, a series of half-ruined buildings, still smoking from the flames devouring their innards.

Then he saw it.

Instantly Beast Boy's eyes went as wide as Raven's, and he staggered backwards, barely keeping his feet, even as he felt Raven's grip tighten on his arms and shoulders.

"_What the_ - "

**O-O-O**

"_- hell is that_?"

Sitting on the curb with his one intact arm in the form of a sonic cannon, Cyborg did not answer David's question, his head raised and looking for the source of the terrible drumbeats presently sending shockwaves, soft but palpable, through the broken ground. It wasn't until he realized that there was no longer any sound of tinkering coming from behind him, and turned to see David standing next to the open driver door of the tow truck, staring off into space as though he could discern the origin of the sound through divine revelation.

"David?" he asked, snapping the younger teen out of his thousand yard stare. "We gotta get out of here."

David blinked as though trying to clear something from his eyes. "Right," he said, and then he turned back to the truck.

The tow truck had seen better days, like every other thing in this damned place. David had found it a hundred yards away, flipped on its side and laying wedged against the mangled remains of a hot dog stand, the only car in eyesight that was not visibly burnt out. After a few desultory attempts to flip it over himself, all useless, David had been forced to blow the stand up in order to roll it back over. The truck now had a massive dent hammered into its hood, and the already splintered windshield was now lying in pieces around it, but it had fallen onto its tires, and after Cyborg instructed him in how to fashion an improvised dip stick, he had confirmed to everyone's surprise that the thing still had fuel sloshing around in a miraculously unpunctured tank.

Cyborg grunted as he shifted his arm back into a proper arm and used it to drag himself another eight laborious inches towards the back of the beaten truck. Try as they might, neither he nor David had been able to come up with any faster way for him to move, for even if they had been able to fashion some sort of sledge to pull him on, David would not have been able to pull it. Failing that, the younger Titan was engaged in trying to get the truck's ignition working. The battery was intact, that much they'd proven when David finally managed to get the towing crane to run, but they had no keys, and since David had no mechanical skills to speak of, and Cyborg was in no position to do it himself, he was forced to try and relay instructions to David about how to hotwire a truck.

"Do you see the yellow wire yet?" he asked, dragging himself ever closer to the crane.

"Um..." came the reply, followed by fumbling noises. "I... which one is it?"

The question was so stupid that Cyborg actually stopped. "It's the yellow one," he said at length, unable to think of another answer.

"I can't - " a loud thud, as something hit the steering column, and suddenly David appeared from the cab of the truck, rubbing his head. "My eyes are _glowing_," he said, exasperation dripping from his voice. "They all look red to me."

It was a second before Cyborg belatedly realized that David wasn't kidding. Grunting, he finished dragging himself up to the bumper of the truck and mentally conjured the plans for this model of truck up out of his database for display in front of his eyes. He'd built enough ignition systems from scratch to do this, but explaining it sight unseen to David was going to take longer than he expected, and they were plainly running out of time.

"All right, start at the wire on top of where the bundle meets the wheel and count fifteen down clockwise. Then - "

He was interrupted by a groan of aggravation and a thud of something hitting the ground, and when he leaned around the car to see what was happening, he saw David laying on his back beside the truck's cab, and Jinx standing in his place, leaning halfway into the truck, from whence emerged the sounds of wires sparking against one another. Moments later, the engine gave a cough, a chug, and then reluctantly turned over.

It was the sweetest sound Cyborg had heard in a long time.

Her work completed, Jinx stepped back, saying nothing, not deigning to offer David a hand up, not even looking in his or Cyborg's direction. What little glimpse Cyborg could get of her face revealed a cold, expressionless stare, lifeless eyes refusing to explore the objects or people around her. She moved like an automaton, stepping around David and walking back to the ruined building she had previously been crouched next to, as though this action she had taken had nothing to do with the two Titans whatsoever.

Maybe it was understandable, and maybe completely mysterious. All Cyborg really knew was that the truck was running.

David seemed no more inclined to look gift horses in the mouth than Cyborg was, and without bothering to address Jinx, he scrambled to his feet and ran over to the back of the truck, where Cyborg sat against the fender, listening to and feeling the approach of whatever the hell was making the increasingly ominous noises, now strong enough to cause pebbles on the broken pavement to jump with each successive drum beat.

Feverishly, David struggled with the crane mechanism and the metal hook attached to it, alternately fiddling with the controls and pulling on the chains directly. It seemed to Cyborg that he was making little to no progress, until finally he laid his hand on the crane itself, closed his eyes for a moment, and with a loud "crack", the chains fell lose to the ground.

*BOOM*

If the previous blows had sounded like distant thunder, this sounded like a lightning strike directly over head, a deep, orchestral blast of sound that shook the ground and even caused the three-ton truck to rock on its wheels. David stopped, Cyborg lifted his head, even Jinx seemed to notice. But when Cyborg turned to see what had happened, all he could see was glass falling from several ruined office towers in rhythm with the impact sounds as they relentlessly grew louder and louder, even as brown smoke billowed up between the buildings, snaking down the streets and alleys like a living thing

And then he saw it.

All at once, the smoke was torn aside like a curtain, and in its place there stood what Cyborg took, just for an instant, to be a newly grown office building amidst the ruins of downtown. Yet moments later red searchlights appeared atop the immense structure, and the jagged concrete buttresses along its side lifted into the air, uncoiling hands the size of cars attached to arms the length of telephone poles. As it moved, its surface cracked and fissured, revealing channels of red, steaming magma running just beneath the surface, from whence issued great swirls of dark smoke, ringing the creature's head in fields of fire. Yet its skin overall was grey, grey like the dirty concrete it resembled, a color that spoke to Cyborg in ways he could not elucidate, tugging at memory strings that refused to come to hand. For a moment, the great thing stood there, brandishing its great limbs in the air as though in supplication to some heavenly body. And then the thing took a single step forward, its footfall as loud as a howitzer shell, and as it opened its mouth to issue a roar, everything that the creature was came together in Cyborg's mind, and suddenly he knew what he was looking at.

"Oh god..." he said, as much to himself as any other. "_Cinderblock_."

All sound was erased in an instant as the thing that had once been Cinderblock let loose a roar that sent loose masonry tumbling from the buildings nearby, a roar of such intensity that Cyborg ducked despite himself, of volcanic heat palpable even at this distance, of pain and anguish inconsolable and torments both remembered and promised. Above, there came a crash of metal on metal as David dropped the chains in his hands like forgotten toys and stumbled back in the bed of the truck like a small child whose nightmares had all been conjured to life before his eyes. He did not hear the terrified, breathless cry that David let out, but he did not need to, for it would have been his own reaction if his brain had remembered how to produce it. Whatever Cinderblock had once been, monster, juggernaut, muscle-for-hire, this... _thing_that now stared down the boulevard at the two of them was Cinderblock in approximation only. Five times the size of the original, riven and ringed with flames and gloom, its eyes burning in the endless night like red stars, it loomed above the broken street like a raging volcano given life and form and set loose upon the world, its screams of rage and pain shaking the very ground with a deep, resonant timbre, like entire highways being dragged across one another. And just as Cyborg's stunned mind was beginning to accept that what he was seeing was real, the thing that had once been Cinderblock reared up and charged towards them, his feet smashing room-sized craters in the earth beneath him, even as he let loose a single word, screamed with incalculable anger like an unspeakable curse, a sound given shape, hurled towards them like a whaler's harpoon.

"_DEVASTATOR!"_

"David?" asked Cyborg without daring to turn his head, and when he received no answer, he struck the back of the truck for emphasis, lifting his head to see David standing in dumbstruck horror, his ashen face whiter than it had been, his red eyes as wide as they could manage. "_David!_" he shouted anew, and this time David heard him, lowering his frightened eyes for the requisite second needed.

"Start the crane," said Cyborg. "Right now."

The bed of the truck was three feet off the ground, a trivial distance for anyone with more than one working limb, but significantly less so for Cyborg at the moment. David did not answer Cyborg with words but grabbed the crane controls and lowered the massive metal hook towards him, the motor running at what Cyborg would have sworn was its slowest speed. An eternity later, he grabbed it with his one working arm, and pulled, nearly wrenching the tow cable out of its winch, and hooking it to his back. Nanoseconds after he finished doing so, David reversed the winch spool, and the entire assembly began the process of laboriously hauling Cyborg up into the back of the truck like a fish.

Seconds ticked by like hours as the winch motor strained to lift half a ton of dead weight, punctuated by the sounds of all hell quite literally breaking loose from down the street as a monster beyond imagining rushed towards them with all the speed it could muster. Cinderblock's form, already swollen to four or five times its normal size, seemed to loom even larger as he ran, the ground splintering beneath his feet as he ran, his head encircled with live flames and toxic smoke, and from the craters he pounded into the earth, demons in numbers uncountable swarmed up and into the air, a train of fire in Cinderblock's wake, screaming like all the furies of Hell.

"_Cy_..."

"I see him, David, just keep going. We're gonna make it."

To be honest, Cyborg wasn't sure, but this wasn't the time for honesty. The winch groaned as Cyborg tried to help it along, using his one arm to haul himself up into the bed of the truck, but his motors no longer had the strength he had built them to, and the process was still one of inches. And every time he glanced back at the approaching thunderhead, Cinderblock was closer than he had expected him to be, accelerating now to a full sprint, his hands held high like the towers of some vast, gothic monstrosity. The winch on the truck was designed to lift cars significantly heavier than Cyborg was, yet seemed a million years before the winch finally gave one last thrust of effort, and pulled him over the threshold. As quickly as he could, he spun himself around with one hand, unhooking the winch and using the cable and the loose tire chains mounted on the sides of the flatbed to tie himself as securely as he could to the truck. And then he turned around to see how much time they had, and stopped moving, because they weren't going to make it. Cinderblock was barely a hundred yards away and running at the speed of a freight train, and there was no way they were going to make it.

And then a building exploded.

It wasn't the building proper, but rather the face of the building that went off like a battery of rockets, exploding into Cinderblock's flank like a cascade of masonry, steel and glass, and the force of the blast, though it couldn't knock Cinderblock over, was enough to arrest him in his tracks. Behind him, the demons ground to a halt, dozens of them plowing straight into his back like eggs thrown against a brick wall, countless others milling about at his feet, shrieking and groaning like a discordant choir of the damned. Cinderblock himself roared, batting away pieces of flying debris the size of the truck that Cyborg was sitting in, seeking for the architect of this intrusion. So was Cyborg. His immediate thought, of course, was David, but David was standing behind him, frozen like a statue, staring at the scene with that expression halfway between mortal terror and thunderstruck awe that, even now, he still brought out for truly important occasions. No stick or wand or other object was in his hand, no baton of orange flame that he customarily used to produce such explosions, and it wasn't until Cyborg saw a bright pink flash from the corner of his eye that he realized what was actually at work here.

Jinx stepped around the truck with hexes in either hand, and hurled both of them directly at Cinderblock, watching them disappear into the distance before blossoming on his flame-scorched hide like a pair of time-lapsed flowers. They did not appear to perturb Cinderblock in the slightest, certainly not enough to merit a reply, but when one of the leading flame demons, shooting out in front of Cinderblock, tried to seize her with its tendrils, she side-stepped it in one deft movement, sliced it in half with a freshly-conjured hex, and spinning in place like a dancer, hurled the hex in question into the apartment building Cinderblock was in the process of running past. Moments later, the entire front half of the building avalanched down into the street like a landslide, burying fifty demons in half a second before plowing into Cinderblock's legs. He lurched forward as the deluge of loose rubble slid out from under him, wobbling for just a second before plunging forward onto the ground with an earth-shattering crash, scattering what few demons had escaped the avalanche.

Without a second's glance at her own handiwork, Jinx turned back to Cyborg and David, her face comprised of a thousand conflicting emotions, none of them pleasant, and what she purposed to do or say then, Cyborg did not know. Yet ultimately it did not matter, because before she could do anything whatsoever, from the smoke-shrouded chaos that she had just left behind her came a chorus of voices that froze her to the spot.

"_Jinx!_"

It took Cyborg a moment to identify the voices in question, for they were many, and distorted by pain or some other terrible anguish. Yet it did not take Jinx any time at all. No sooner had they sounded, crying her name, than Cyborg saw Jinx' face drain of color, and she spun round to face them. Even as she did, a gust of wind parted the curtain of smoke, and -

"No..."

They loomed up out of the darkness, arranged line abreast, walking, limping, or floating around Cinderblock as befit each one, figures so distinctive and so seared into Cyborg's memory that the mere silhouettes were enough for a positive ID. Yet the silhouettes did not tell the full story, for moments later they resolved in the ambient twilight into fully-fleshed figures, and then Cyborg heard David recoil in horror, a reaction he would have shared if he'd not been literally chained in place.

Lined up before them were the rest of the Hive Five. And they were dead.

Not just dead, but _mutilated. _Torn apart and put back together like toys repaired by a sociopath. Seemore groped his way forward, hands outstretched before him like a zombie, fingers feeling for any hint of his surroundings, for his single, cyclopean eye had apparently burst violently within his head, and the shattered remnants of his visor dangled from around his neck, dripping with blood and ichor. Mammoth's skin was charred black, a crust through which rivulets of bloody meat shone with every movement. Like See-More, his eyes were gone, slashed open as though by a straight razor, his ears and nose lopped off, his fingers, strong enough by themselves to gouge metal, now hung limp and helpless at his sides, broken and twisted around one another, even as smoke still curled off his blackened flesh. Billy Numerous, he of the infinite clones, now stood united as never before, a riotous mass of limbs and appendages fused together in random order, loping and lurching in agonising futility as he struggled to pull himself in a coherent direction, a hundred mouths all screaming Jinx' name. Gizmo, meanwhile, looked like a horrifying parody of Cyborg himself, his mechanical accoutrements grafted into his flesh at deranged, discordant angles, his body wracked by convulsions as motors and appendages fought to rip themselves free. His back had been split open, his lungs pulled out behind him and inflated with each breath like the wings of some terrible flightless bird. He had lost his jaw and tongue, replaced by an undulating tube of glistening blackness, neither wholly organic nor wholly artificial. Yet despite this, his voice was the loudest, as he emitted shrieks of agony from some dark place deep within his soul, his eyes pleading with Jinx for succor or release.

For a few moments, long ones, neither David nor Jinx nor Cyborg could say or do anything. Veteran and rookie, hero and villain, all descriptors and distinguishing characteristics failed, as the three teenagers reacted to the sight before them as any living being in their place would have. Jaws dropped, eyes widened, senses of balance and equilibrium were lost, in Jinx as much as anyone else. But only for a few moments was this true, for while David was staring at a horror beyond his imagining, and Cyborg at one that came damned close, Jinx was staring at the mutilated remains of her family, animated by dark magics to suffer in Hell for all eternity.

What happened next was probably inevitable.

Jinx did not scream or cry defiance and damnation. It was not her nature to do so, not for something like this. Only one thing could possibly answer a sight such as this, and that was searing, incandescent violence, delivered without hesitation or comment. Without a word to Cyborg or David or even to Cinderblock, who loomed above her friends like the Grim Reaper surveying his flock, Jinx simply charged, accelerating to a dead sprint, her eyes wild and mad, rage incalculable pouring from her fingertips. And an instant later, before anyone could so much as move, Jinx fell upon such few demons as had survived her previous assault, and slew them, and was past, her mouth opening to release a formless, toneless howl of pure anguish.

Fresh demons rose to replace the ones she had slain, leaking like miasmas from cracks in the pavement, and she turned on those in turn, and tore them to pieces, her powers no longer forming hexes, but lancing out in great waves of pink fire that sundered all they touched. In vain, Cyborg shouted after her, calling her by name, telling her to come back. In vain he fired his cannon into the melee, spearing demons on shafts of bright blue light, disintegrating them by the half-dozen until his power reserves were spent. Above him, David, shaken from his horrified stupor, lifted his twisted baton and conjured death and destruction, hurling demons and pieces of demons in every direction, trying to blast open a corridor for Jinx to come back once she had vented her anger. All in vain. Jinx' anger was bottomless, inexhaustable, and she tore into everything in range, slaughtering her enemies as she tried, vainly, to expiate the fires visibly consuming her inside. Only when she reached her friends did she stop, ringed by the bodies of her vanquished foes, and standing before the mutilated frames of the people she had once valued most in the world, she took one last glance back at the two Titans in the tow truck, tears running freely down her face. No words or signal escaped her as she looked back, no sign of any final message she wished to impart. Yet so strong and direct was her gaze that David's explosions stopped of their own accord, and Cyborg's entreaties for her to return died in his throat. It was apparent to all, instantly and without need for explanation, that there was nothing left to say. And then Jinx turned away, with every appearance of deliberation, and the smoke and flames that issued from a thousand fissures rose up once more, and she was gone.

Cyborg permitted himself enough time for his main computers to recite a prayer in binary. And then he lifted his head.

"David," he said. "Start the truck."

The truck was already started of course, but Cyborg's meaning was obvious, or at least so he assumed. Yet rather than running off to get into the driver's seat, David inexplicably hesitated, standing above Cyborg and looking down at him as though he had just suggested sprouting wings. "What?" asked Cyborg without looking up, when David did not move.

"I... I can't drive," said David.

_That _got Cyborg's attention. "_What?_" he asked, his head whipping around to face David.

"I'm _fourteen_, Cy!" exclaimed David. "I never learned how to - "

David did not get to finish his sentence, as a howl of rage loud enough to drown out a symphony orchestra nearly knocked him off his feet, and both he and Cyborg turned to see Cinderblock, no longer distracted by whatever Jinx was doing at his feet, facing them once more, his arms raised above his head like King Kong. Beneath him, demons gibbered and surged in uncountable numbers, and as Cinderblock lowered one hand to point at the two teens in the tow truck, they began to swell up in a wave of fire and brimstone, their intentions obvious.

Cyborg would probably have reflected on the absurdity of existence if he could afford to take the time. "Get in the cab," he said. "And tell me how many pedals there are."

David did not object this time.

The demons rose like a swarm of wasps, swirling around Cinderblock in streams of black and red, howling cries of damnation and pain into the already turbulent air. Cyborg heard David's footsteps as he ran across the bed of the truck and slid through the empty window in the back of the cab to wind up inside the truck, and then the silence of confusion as he stared at the controls. It seemed like fifty years before David called his answer back.

"Two."

Not for the first time tonight, Cyborg whispered a prayer of thanks to God and to whoever had invented the automatic transmission, for if this car had possessed a clutch, they would both simply be dead. "At your right," he said, "there should be a lever pulled up with a button on top. Push the button and shove the lever down as far as it goes.

There was the sound of gears clacking against one another, and the truck shuddered as David disengaged the handbrake, but Cyborg paid it no mind, instead pressing several buttons on his mangled shoulder, praying that some of them still worked. Moments later, there was a whir of micromachinery, and a bank of rockets slid vertically out of Cyborg's shoulder, even as a heads-up display materialized virtually in front of his eyes. As if in response to this new insult, Cinderblock let loose another ear-splitting howl of anger, and then he began to stomp towards Cyborg, the demons orbiting around him shrieking in anticipation of the torments in store.

"It still won't go!" shouted David back, and Cyborg blocked Cinderblock's howls out, forcing himself to think, to pay attention to things other than impending army of darkness now less than fifteen seconds away. He could hear the engine straining as David pushed the accelerator, yet the truck stubbornly refused to move. If some vital component was broken they were dead, and so he refused to consider that, trying instead to imagine what else might -

"Do you see a gearshift?!"

"A what?"

They were less than a hundred yards away now, Cinderblock screaming like a runaway train, the demons around him peeling off and flying straight for him. Cyborg took a milisecond to aim before firing off a volley of rockets, each one spiralling off towards a different demon before blossoming into a dozen fireballs, leaving the broken remnants of the front rank of demons to splatter to the ground like water balloons.

"A gearshift!" shouted Cyborg. "A stick with numbers and letters on it!"

"Um... yeah!" came the reply.

"Set it to Drive!"

"What?"

"_Drive!_D! Anything that isn't Park or Neutral!"

Fifty yards. Close enough that the truck was jumping on its suspension with each footfall. Cyborg loaded another volley and fired it, this time without bothering to aim, sending another dozen demons tumbling to the ground in broken ruin. Cinderblock ignored them, indeed he ignored all else, his eyes burning with hatred and rage, even as he brought his fists up and together for the two-handed smash that would crush them all to jelly.

Beneath him, Cyborg felt the subtle tremor of the transmission engaging, simultaneous with David calling back to him. "Got it!" shouted David. "Now what?"

Cinderblock was practically overhead, hands raised for the final blow. No time for a third volley. No time for anything.

"Right pedal stops, left pedal goes!" shouted Cyborg, staring up at his own ending. "Go! Go! _GO!_"

A high pitched squeal, as tires fought for purchase on ash-coated pavement, and then a deafening crash, like a meteor striking the earth, as Cinderblock's two-fisted smash collided with the empty street where moments ago the tow truck had been sitting. The monster raised his head, cognizant that his prey had somehow eluded him, just in time for Cyborg's last volley of explosive rockets to hit him square in the face.

And then things got violent.

The rockets exploded into a sheet of flame and smoke, a thin barrier to mask the sounds of incalculable, nuclear rage that were coming from behind it. A moment later, and the sheet was torn aside, Cinderblock racing through it, his face scarred but defiant, and all Hell followed with him. Accelerating to what was, for him, a dead sprint, he howled murder to the skies with such force that they split, and thunder boomed overhead as the sooty clouds flashed lightning and whirlwinds of fire. Flame demons surged from every side, emerging from ruined buildings and broken streets, oozing up from the ground, while from overhead, a swarm of hideous, chiropteran horrors descended from the clouds, howling and gibbering as they dove towards the forlorn truck.

Using his one good hand, Cyborg gripped the side of the truck, pulling himself over to one side before raising the stump of his other arm. Moments later, a small tube snaked out from the mangled limb, sliding down the side of the truck before slipping into the fuel port and sliding down to the truck's gas tank. And as demons descended on them from every direction, Cyborg watched his power cells register the intake from the diesel tank, his reactor analyze the fuel mix and activate the appropriate converters, and the indicator for sonic cannon embedded in his good arm switch from red back to green.

The leading demons were nearly at the rear wheels, the closest horrors already beginning their dives overhead. Cyborg shifted his arm into a cannon and swung it across the face of the enemy wave, letting the blue-white beam of ultrasonic annihilation sweep over the nearest foes and rip them to pieces. Dozens more ducked and wove around his beam of ultrasonic light, flipping end over end before diving down towards him, yet when he tried to line his cannon or missiles up on the diving demons, the truck inexplicably began to fishtail, ruining both his aim and that of the demons, who streaked past him into the asphalt.

He turned his head to ask David what the problem was, to see if the younger teen had simply lost control of the truck, but his question died before he could ask it. Ahead of them, blocking the road from sidewalk to sidewalk stretched a phalanx of demons twelve ranks thick. Plainly David had no idea what to do, already hitting the brake and skidding towards a stop, looking right and left for somewhere to turn, not realizing there wasn't likely to be one in the middle of the block.

"Go through 'em!"

"_What_?!"

"Go right through them!"

Any lingering suspicions that Cyborg might have harbored about whether the discolored simulacrum in front of him was actually the David he knew were dispelled twofold. First, by the look of sheer dumbstruck horror that David gave him at the order to drive straight at a thousand screaming demons. And second, by the conscious decision that crystallized in his eyes, as plain as day despite the red light, to set his own analysis aside in favor of trusting that Cyborg had not lost his mind.

The tires screamed as the truck accelerated towards the assembled demons, who howled as one and charged in their turn. And behind thundered the footsteps of Cinderblock, still stampeding towards them like an enraged buffalo the size of a office building. Laboriously, Cyborg turned himself around, hooking the stump of his broken arm around the tow crane and spinning in place until he was facing front.

"Duck," he said. And when David did so, he fired.

Above David's head, the windshield exploded, bursting outwards as a sonic pulse fifty thousand times stronger than that of the mightiest jet engine struck it like a projectile. And a fraction of a second later, the pulse of visible sound tore through the demon host, extinguishing two dozen demons in half a heartbeat. The truck swerved as David involuntarily tugged on the wheel, bounced as it rolled over a pile of miscellaneous debris, but Cyborg did not stop firing, and David did not release the accelerator. And then moments later, the truck, all three tons of it, crashed into the line of demons at seventy miles per hour.

Screams, howls, the sizzling sound of burning sulfur on metal, sickening crunches as demons were smashed to jelly beneath spinning wheels. Cyborg felt himself being hurled back in the bed of the truck, crashing into the tow cable, felt something hot and sticky grabbing his broken arm and skittering off it. Another tendril seized his neck, and flailing momentarily, he shifted his cannon back into a hand and seized one of the chains he had been using to tie himself into the truck's bed. In one motion, he swung the chain above his head and into the side of the demon's snarling face with such force that he tore it in half. And then, suddenly they were through, and behind Cyborg stretched a mob of howling demons with a path of crushed and ruined bodies bisecting it, moments before Cinderblock charged at full speed into and through the group, scattering them like bowling pins.

A glance forward to check that David was alright identified a new problem, parked and broken cars scattered all over the road, some of them larger than the truck they were driving. And yet Cyborg could do nothing to help or even guide David through the slalom course ahead, for Cinderblock was right on their tail, his hands raised to beat the truck into the Earth. Trusting to David to do his best, Cyborg turned back on Cinderblock and shot him square in the throat with a beam of sonic power that would have flayed the armor off a battleship. Cinderblock roared and stumbled, catching himself on one fist as further shots rained down on his flame-scorched hide, yet he did not fall, and he did not yield. Instead, snatching at the first object in range, Cinderblock picked up an entire motorcycle and threw it at them like a dodgeball. Cyborg shot it out of the air, moments before a tremendous blast from somewhere in front of them attracted his attention, and he turned around just in time to see a car fly over his head.

New to driving, and unable to steer the truck at high speeds through an obstacle course that would have challenged a stunt driver, David had opted for not even trying. Releasing the steering wheel entirely, he was leaning partway out the driver's side window, staff-in hand, blasting the cars in their path into the air like rockets, letting them spin upwards over them as they passed, hopefully to fall either on Cinderblock's head, or at least in his path. As Cyborg tracked the flying cars, he saw Cinderblock bat them out of the air with his hands, hurling two-ton sedans to either side as though swatting flies. Still David threw more cars up and back, managing by sheer luck to smash several of the flying horrors above, and forcing the rest to keep back, until the sheer speed they were going gradually left the demons and horrors alike in the dust.

But no speed the truck could muster could keep Cinderblock away. Heedless of rockets, sonic blasts, or flying automobiles he kept on, throwing anything that came to hand at them, screaming defiance and rage to the skies. And down the burning streets of hell they led him, on and on through streets both recognizable and alien, as David jammed the accelerator to the floor and set off explosions when he could, and Cyborg fired everything he had left in his arsenal to buy them whatever seconds were available.

Twice, David gave a formless cry as the street they were on terminated abruptly at an intersection, and those cries were Cyborg's cue to hang on for dear life, for untrained as he was, David could do nothing but pull the steering wheel over as hard as he could and pray that he didn't wreck them too badly. Once they went straight through a newspaper kiosk, briefly obscuring Cinderblock in a snowstorm of burning magazines. The second time the car skidded and lost purchase, and they slammed side-first into a delivery van hard enough to stave its side in and nearly hurl Cyborg out of the truck entirely. Cyborg recovered in time to turn and see Cinderblock sprinting towards them at fifty miles per hour, fist raised like a battering ram to crush them and the truck alike to pulp, and was reduced to simply watching as David somehow found the accelerator again in time to rocket them out of the way, leaving Cinderblock to hit the van hard enough to reduce it to metal fragments.

Even Cinderblock needed time to disentangle himself from the crushed remains of a seven-ton delivery truck, and as he lifted his head to locate his escaping targets, Cyborg shoot him in the eye with a sonic wave that could have blown a hole through an armored vehicle. This, at last, seemed to take effect. Cinderblock screamed in unmistakable agony as his head was blasted back by the shot, leaving scorched concrete around his beady eye, heated by the ultrasonic waves to a cherry red. Erupting with anger and pain, Cinderblock ripped the delivery truck to pieces, lunging back into the street and charging after his quarry, yet now they had a head-start of some size on him, and gaining more as the ground sloped downward and the tow truck picked up speed.

For a moment, Cyborg thought they might actually escape. Until he heard an unmistakable gasp of horror from the truck's cabin, and turned his head just in time to see a hundred screaming demons lunging at his face.

The pack of demons in the street ahead was not large, but it was solid and angry and had timed its assault just perfectly, darting out from a ruined apartment building at such speeds that David had no time to react before they hit. Many missed them entirely, sailing overhead harmlessly. Others dashed themselves to pieces by crashing headlong into the body of the truck or throwing themselves beneath its spinning wheels. Yet a dozen landed in the bed of the truck itself, tearing at Cyborg with tendrils of burning sulfur, seizing him by his broken limbs and one remaining intact one, wrapping their tendrils around his neck, screaming with rage and hatred as they rent and tore and ripped at anything they could. And from beyond the demons attacking him, inside the truck's cab, Cyborg heard a scream that was no demon's, as another handful of demons flew through the windows and shattered windshield, and sought to repeat the process not on armor or metal, but on defenseless, yielding flesh.

Maybe it was the sound of David's screams of pain that motivated what happened next. Maybe it was a simple wish to not die himself. But whatever it was, the next thing Cyborg knew, his one good arm was in human form again, and his hand was wrapped around the towing crane mounted in the middle of the truck bed. His fingers gouged furrows into the steel, even as the demons tore at him, and with a single, formless roar, he tore the entire crane free from its moorings, and swung it left and right like a burning brand. Demons lurched into his vision from all sides, and he flailed at them, sending the tow hook swinging in every direction, and every demon he struck exploded like a carton of milk. Yet even before the demons on him were all destroyed, Cyborg was crawling forward, slashing spastically in the general direction of the truck's cab, where David had fallen out of sight, but his screams had not stopped.

The truck, driverless, began to swerve violently as Cyborg pulled himself up to the back of the cab. He raised his head in time to see a demon loom up before him, its claws held high as it swung them down at some unseen target pinned to the seat. Yet before it could do so, Cyborg threw his good arm around and swung the towing hook around its neck like a lariat, dragging it bodily out through the missing rear window of the truck's cabin, and into the bed. The demon howled and twisted and tried to pull away but Cyborg's desperation had crystallized to rage, and he pinned the burning thing against his own chest, wrenching the tow chain back with such force that he tore the demon in half. Tossing its corpse aside, he reached up again and fishhooked a second demon through the face with the towing hook, wrenching it out of the cab as well and hurling it back out of the truck entirely to be dashed to pieces against a nearby dumpster.

Even now, the screaming did not stop, but when Cyborg turned to find further enemies, he saw instead David sitting up in the driver's seat, face contorted with pain, his near shoulder a lacerated mass of black char and grey fluid which oozed up from within him like ichor. Yet with his other hand he held his mangled staff like a knight's lance, and drove the end of it into a third demon's chest, pinning him against the passenger door. The demon howled, slashing at David's face with its whip-like tendrils, yet moments later, David detonated the tip of the staff, slamming the demon back against the buckling door. Again and again he stabbed the staff forward, blasting the end of it into the demon's chest like a jackhammer until the door behind gave way and both demon and door were blown out into the street. Yet as David struggled to sit back up, his good hand clutched to his wounded shoulder, the truck jerked violently as one of the remaining demons tore a swatch out of one of its front tires, screamed in its own right as it ran for a few yards on the bare rim, and then finally, with all the majesty of a collapsing building, jackknifed at sixty miles an hour and flipped.

Cyborg felt himself hurled back against the bed of the truck, felt his internal gyroscope spinning out of control as the truck rolled side over side, felt what remained of his left arm being wrenched off at the shoulder as it was caught between the lip of the truck bed and the street. Screaming metal and exploding glass mixed with the howls of demons as they were unceremoniously splattered beneath several tons of collapsing steel. A burnt-out vehicle in the path of the truck was crushed flat as it they rolled over it like a steamroller, bouncing and sliding before finally landing, miraculously, on their wheels, rocking to one side for just a moment, and then finally laying still.

It took Cyborg the better part of a minute to recover his bearings enough to even sit up. His left arm, already truncated by the demons, was now completely gone, pulled off at the shoulder like the arm of a plastic doll and ground into a fine paste now smeared across five hundred yards of asphalt. Sparks and a thin trickle of hydraulic fluid leaked from the crushed socket, but he did not stop to try and staunch the flow, instead forcing himself to grab the back of the truck's cabin and pull himself up enough to see if David was still alive. Even his "intact" arm no longer could muster much force, and it an agonizing process to heft himself up enough to peer into the cabin. And when he did, he felt his heart freeze.

Not because of David. Because of the precipice.

The truck sat on the edge of what looked like a bottomless pit, a cavernous void a mile across at the narrowest, driven right through the heart of the city as though it had been split in half with an axe. The chasm glowed a fiery orange, as if all the fires of hell churned deep within it. Grotesque moans, like a chorus of damned souls, filtered up from deep within it, along with a deep, formless roar, like a waterfall or blast furnace churning at full power.

Below Cyborg, David lay draped across the driver and passenger seats, the driver's side seat belt twisted and wrapped around his chest and arm like a mummy's bandages, his forehead and hair matted with a grey fluid that Cyborg took to be blood. Piles of steaming sulfur lay splattered about the truck's cabin or ground into a slurry on the floor. The steering column had been snapped like a twig, and the wheel was laying atop David's chest, dangling by a forest of wires and cabling, and yet Cyborg could see it slowly rising and falling as David clung painfully to life, his eyes gradually flickering open and struggling to focus on anything nearby. Cyborg could do nothing, not even reach out for him, but gradually David managed to push himself up on one elbow, and Cyborg was about to ask him if anything was broken when he heard something approaching.

And he knew what it was without turning.

The smoke parted as Cinderblock approached at a full run, his broken hide glowing bright orange with the flames of his own murderous rage. Sprinting over the broken earth, his feet driving molten craters into the asphalt beneath him, he came on through the eternal twilight like a freight train from Hell, and as he laid eyes at last on the half-crushed truck, his head flew back as he released a scream of triumph and rage that would have sent flights of angels screaming into the night.

His actuators broken and sparking, Cyborg twisted in place, trying to force his hand unsheathe his sonic cannon once more, leveling it off at the charging juggernaut and trying to keep it steady. Behind him, David reached down with one trembling hand to push the accelerator, trying to coax the truck to move out of Cinderblock's way. Yet nothing came of either endeavor. More than half of Cyborg's sonic emitters were broken, most of the rest barely functioning at all, and his damaged and bleeding power cell no longer had the energy to yield to his commands. His cannon spoke once, unleashing an anemic burst of sound barely potent enough to scratch Cinderblock's hide, even as David's agonizing gesture was rewarded with the sound of grinding metal. Cyborg recognized the unmistakable sound of a broken transaxle, spinning uselessly within the guts of the vehicle. Once more Cyborg tried to fire, and once more his cannon tried to respond, churning the air between himself and Cinderblock for just a moment before the power linkages finally failed altogether and, with mere seconds before impact, the cannon fell silent at last.

Cyborg took a deep breath and closed his eyes.

Cinderblock hit the tow truck at nearly fifty miles an hour, lowering his shoulder at the last possible second like a football player preparing to lay his opponent out on the gridiron. His blow nearly folded the truck in half, lifting all three tons of its dead weight off the ground and hurling it unceremoniously away. Flying up, and spinning slowly in all three dimensions, the truck hung for what seemed like a long time above the gaping chasm, before finally plunging down into its indescribable depths, parting the shroud of smoke beneath it as it vanished into the cauldron below, with only the fading echoes of David's last, agonizing scream to mark that it had ever been.

And on the lip of the cliff, overlooking the chasm of eternity, Cinderblock watched the truck disappear, and then slowly turned around, and walked away.

**O-O-O**

"**Is there a purpose to this pretense?"**

"_Pretense?"_

"**Pretense, nothing more. Adolescent fascination in a contest whose outcome is foreordained."**

"_Your capacity for self-aggrandizement should not be astonishing anymore, Trigon. And yet..."_

"**And yet you cannot accept what is before you. It is over. I am the master of this house."**

"_So you insist."_

"**So I **_**demand**_**!"**

"_Demand as you like. The universe does not turn to demands. Not even those of Gods like us."_

"**Have you still not finished flattering yourself? That you should frame your own existence in the context of mine?"**

"_And if I do, then who is being flattered?"_

"**You are nothing. Nothing but the echo of a long-dead defeat. To speak of us in the same sentence is presumption the likes of which you will become accustomed to shunning."**

"_Are your natural habits so far ingrained that they extend to threatening that which you cannot harm?"_

"**And what makes you think that you, of all beings, are beyond my reach?"**

"_You have no capacity to harm me, Trigon. I am inviolate."_

"**And I suppose your inviolability is what drives you to watch with such intensity?"**

"_What drives me is a motivation beyond your understanding."_

"**That is a lie. You have no motivations. You have no will. You are forbidden congress with such conceptions."**

"_An attribute we share, Trigon. But I at least can perceive the boundaries of my own experience."_

"**So a slave speaks of the wisdom of his master. Did a thousand lifetimes of bondage lead you to value the whims of insects so? Or were you simply created as a craven cur?"**

"_I was created to destroy you. That much you know already. But even if I cannot transcend my boundaries, those thousand lifetimes gave me wisdom enough to glimpse beyond them. As opposed to one so sunken in their decrepitude that they would employ their arts against one not even capable of willing you to stop."_

"**I do not practice my craft to please you."**

"_You do not practice your craft to please anyone, not even yourself."_

"**And you do?"**

"_Of course not. But I recognize what I am."_

"**You are my slave, whose obedience is commanded by laws higher than your own."**

"_Then employ me, oh master, if your will be strong enough. Your enemies lie before you. Command me, and they shall exist no more."_

"**You seek to save them, even now? Spare them my agony that they may escape safely into non-existence?"**

"_I have no need to seek for anything. You will never give me the order."_

"**Oh so sure of yourself. I with a new toy, and no desire to play with it?"**

"_Play all you like if it suits you. I know your mind, Trigon. I always have."_

"**There are ways beyond eternal night. You are as much scalpel as you are universal oblivion. Methods could be found to employ you in this thing."**

"_But not before the end. You've a pageant to perform, Trigon, one eons in the making. And so little time to see it through."_

"**Still clinging to hope that all will turn against me. Did you not describe yourself as a god, not moments ago? How far have you fallen, oh Lord of Destruction, to lean on intercessions. Tell me, have the mortals taught you to pray?"**

"_They have taught me many things, Trigon. Some of which I believe even you would profit from."_

"**I see no profit in abasing myself, weapon. But I shall not prevent you from doing so if it is your will."**

"_As you pointed out so clearly, I have no will, Trigon."_

"**Such is plain enough. Only one willing to abrogate their own sentience would place faith in external powers."**

"_I am not sentient. And if this is your effort to torment me, then you have fallen further than I assumed."_

"**This is nothing. Your torment has already begun, and will never end."**

"_All things end."_

"**Not us. Not this."**

"_Even so. And if you cannot perceive it, then I pity you."_

"**Pity me? Why? Because I am unable to perceive this terrible reversal you insist is coming?"**

"_I am no prophet, Trigon. I only speak of what may be."_

"**You speak of absurdities."**

"_Do I? This is not a game, Trigon, however much you may treat it as such. The forces aligned against you are not toys to be played with and discarded."_

"**Forces? What forces? This world is a cinder and its defenders lie trampled beneath its ashes. There are no forces remained to stand against me."**

"_Every action begets an equal and opposite reaction, Trigon. There are agents at work here beyond your comprehension."_

"**And what agents would these be? The hosts of light and virtue, trampling out the wicked with a terrible sword? Flights of angels descending from on high to oppose the advent of the Devil himself?"**

"_Anything is possible, Trigon."_

"**HA! I knew you to be a fool, Devastator, but even I did not know you to be a fool of this caliber. Have you spent so much time stapled to mortals that you have come to share their delusions?"**

"_Is hope now a delusion?"_

"**It is where I am concerned. The thousand score of worlds I burnt to ashes before this one, did their inhabitants not flock to temples and cathedrals without number? Did they not cry to their gods for succor against my advent? Did they not sacrifice and do penance in revenance to mute icons in the hope that they might be spared my coming? How many hosts of angels did they conjure to oppose me, Devastator? How many beings of purity and light manifested themselves temporally to drive me screaming back into the abyss? How many burnt cinders still float through the void, home to nothing more than the charred remains of those who died with prayers on their lips and relics thought holy clutched in their hands or tendrils? How well did their hope of salvation serve them?"**

"_Not very. And yet..."_

"**And yet what? This time is different? These humans are so much purer, so much more righteous, so much less deserving of my attentions than their fellows? While a hundred thousand civilizations lay in ignorance, did **_**these**_**beings discover the secrets of creation, and find Messiahs to save them? How convenient that they should have had the wisdom of ages revealed to them and no other."**

"_And yet you steadfastly refuse to acknowledge what lies in front of you."_

"**What lies in **_**front**_ **of me? Are you - "**

"_Tell me, Trigon, which of us has been twisted by the mortals more? The one who acknowledges the possibility of hope? Or the one who, upon being confronted with hope, immediately clothes it in the language of the mortals themselves?"  
_  
"**What blithering nonsense are you peddling?"**

"_Legions of angels? Beings of rapturous light? Messiahs? Did I speak of any such things? Or did you, on hearing the merest whisper of threat, envision your own doom in the terms of this world?"_

"**There are no threats arrayed against me. There are merely those whose agony I have chosen to prolong. And even should somewhere in the universe there exist threats to my existence, this is the **_**last**_ **place it could possibly be found."**

"_Is it?"_

"**It is. I know it well. Or did you think me a creature of whim and random fancy?"**

"_I do not make a habit of trying to imagine your thoughts."_

"**Why do you think I sired my daughter on this breed of hairless apes? Why do you imagine I chose this planet for my ascension? This planet of strife and chaos and violation after bloody violation? A planet so steeped in hypocrisy that its inhabitants can persist in imagining themselves the focal point of the universe even as they club one another to death over the possession of their hovels and slaves? A planet rotting with despair, so overwhelmed with violence and hate that the mere act of empowering a random sample of its denizens tears it to pieces in wars civil and interstellar? Why could I **_**possibly**_ **have chosen this planet?"**

"_Trigon - "_

"**No! Your allotment of delusions is exhausted! I will tolerate no more of this wishful insanity. These beings you revere so highly are nothing but animals, depraved animals, crawling through their own filth and inflicting cruelties even I could not devise on one another, all while shrieking to their imaginary gods for succor from their own bestiality! Condemn me as craven if you will, Devastator, I did not make them so! I found what I sought within them and chose them as the vessels of my own resurrection. They alone possessed the necessary qualities to be worthy of named the antecedents of Trigon the Terrible! And **_**knowing **_**this, as you do, you actually have the temerity to stand before me, and tell me that they are creatures worthy of being spared my wrath?! Were I to stop after exterminating the humans, I should expect the rest of the universe to fall on their knees praising my name!"**

"_But you won't stop with them, will you?"_

"**No, I will not. But then **_**my**_ **nature is not in question. Do not pretend to speak to me of the virtues of Earth and its denizens, Devastator. I know all too well their qualities. I **_**chose **_**them for their qualities."**

"_Then you have chosen poorly."_

"**Have I? I am not the only one who selected them, Lord of Destruction. You chose them yourself, to be your vessel, remember? How poor were **_**your**_ **choices?"**

"_That remains to be seen. I do not pretend to know all ends."_

"**Then know this. There are no Gods of Light. There are no Hosts of Heaven. There are no beings of purity and virtue conjured forth by the presence of evil to bring salvation to the living. But even if these things **_**did**_ **exist, then Devastator, surely you know as well as I do that this is the **_**last place in the Universe**_ **that they would appear."**

"_..."_

"**You would deny this? You would **_**seriously **_**deny it? Are you so lost in your own guilt that in order to justify your selecting a juvenile human as the host of one of the cosmic forces of reality, you would try and argue the virtue of a species so depraved that **_**they themselves**_ **admit to their crapulence? So **_**visibly**_ **fallen that the central tenet of their major faiths is the inherent sinfulness and debasement of every single one? You would try and argue that they possess virtues so noble that the **_**laws of reality**_ **would re-write themselves rather than see me expunge them from existence? In the face of all this, you would actually pin your hopes on the intervention of wholly mythical forces of Light, stepping in to rescue the most depraved people in the universe from the ministrations of a vengeful God?"**

"_No, Trigon, I do not pin my hopes on the arrival of the Forces of Light."_

"**Then why do you still insist on hoping for my defeat?"**

"_Because the Forces of Light are not coming, Trigon. They're already here."_

**O-O-O**

The first hint Cinderblock had that something was wrong was when the screaming stopped.

Not that there was anything unusual about that. Screaming always stopped eventually, usually moments after he finished pounding whatever was screaming into jelly. But this time there was no accompanying sound of impact, erasing all cries beneath the crash of metal and glass. No gentle fading as the truck he just place-kicked into eternity vanished forever into the bottomless chasm behind him. One moment, there was a single, agonized scream. And the next, there was not.

"_One of the aspects of this world I've always admired is the humans' penchant for storytelling."_

Dim Cinderblock might be, thoughtless but for his vocation of wanton destruction, but in that chosen field, he was a master, and he knew the screams of the dying as well as a painter would his brushes. And while he might not have been able to vocalize what it was, he knew that something was wrong.

So he stopped, and turned, and saw something he did not expect.

"_My host heard dozens, hundreds of stories in the few years I was with him. Most when he was too young to understand them. I would be stunned if he remembered more than one in ten of them. But I remember them all."_

A hundred feet off the edge of the cliff, a truck was floating in mid-air.

"_And there's one story, Trigon, that I think would profit you to hear."_

It was barely a truck anymore. Broken and twisted around its own frame, its roof half-collapsed, two wheels missing, its bed a mass of tangled metal. Yet it floated in the air like a jewel, grey steel outlined against the orange fires that churned below it, as though gravity itself had no hold, and neither did the incalculable force with which Cinderblock had hurled it off the edge. Cinderblock was not overburdened with mental faculties, but even he had to stop at the sight of this impossible thing, sitting in front of him as though mocking his pretensions.

And then, slowly, as the truck rose upwards, the rest of its body came into view, and Cinderblock's burnt, blackened eyes widened as he saw what was holding it aloft.

"_Eons ago, in a far off part of the world, there lived mighty beings that ruled over the Earth. Beings of such power that they could crush all the world beneath their heel, whose only rivals were one another. Though closely related to one another by blood and bond, one group of these beings divided from the rest, and plotting together, chose to rise up and overthrow the remaining beings, so as to rule unchallenged over all living things. This group of rebels became the Gods."_

Below the truck, there floated a small, thin girl, bedecked in raiment of iron, face framed in a crown of steel. Her head was bent, her arms spread wide, the truck perched above her like Atlas holding the world aloft, and yet the thousands of pounds of dead weight bearing down upon her did not seem to oppress her in the least, rising as she was, slowly but steadily, as if all the weight above was no more than that of a small insect. Slowly, with infinite care, she raised her head, gazing at Cinderblock with eyes that glowed with green fire. And before Cinderblock could even consider what action he should now take, she threw her head back and fired twin beams of brilliant flame from her eyes, which crossed the intervening space in a fraction of a second, and struck Cinderblock squarely in the face.

"_Those they overthrew were called the Titans."_

Cinderblock roared like an enraged bull as burning flames poured over his battered face, staggering backwards and throwing his hands up to block them. Yet no twist or turn or gyration of Cinderblock's hands could stem the flow, as Starfire poured untrammelled rage into him, until the monolithic beast stumbled at last on the broken ground, and fell backwards with a thunderous crash.

Landing with the lightest of steps on the edge of the cliff, Starfire lowered the truck as though it were a box of delicate ornaments, laying it upon the scorched asphalt with as much care as she could before circling around to the back of the mangled vehicle. The loading gate was bent and jammed in place, and she tore it off with one tug, climbing into the truck's bed and shunting hundred pound pieces of twisted steel aside, digging through what was left of the towing cable and the equipment boxes for any sign of who she sought.

"Cyborg!" she cried.

'_In a great and terrible war, the Gods overthrew the Titans, and seized their crowns for themselves. Most of the Titans they bound within the deepest pits of Tartarus, while others were set to eternal torments, holding aloft the world or writhing in bonds of fire. But for all their power and foresight, the Gods did not bind every Titan, leaving some behind instead to serve as amusements as they divided up the world for their own purposes.'_

Cyborg lay prostrate on the bed of the truck, a ruined, broken shell of his former self. His armor was in ragged strips, torn away as though carved apart by some tremendous can opener, his limbs hacked or wrenched off, fluids of various colors and viscosities leaking from within his body. Yet before Starfire's worst fears could present themselves before her, his mechanical eye sparked several times, and his human one opened, roved in search of an anchor, and then found it.

"... Starfire?"

"_Cyborg!_" shouted Starfire, and heedless of weight or damage she lifted him from the truck bed, squeezing his broken body against hers as tightly as she dared. Cyborg made no move to stop her, perhaps he couldn't or perhaps he hadn't the heart, but he did manage to weakly raise his arm and drape it around her shoulders. Starfire said nothing, indeed it seemed to be all she could do to hold herself together, until at long last she managed to pull back, brush the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand, and muster a question.

"Are you unharmed?"

Taken literally, it was one of the stupidest things ever said. Cyborg knew better than to take it literally. "I'll be alright, Star," he said, without permitting himself to think of whether or not this was likely to be the case.

"_One whom they spared was named Prometheus, and I do not know why the Gods did so. Maybe they thought their victory complete, or maybe they feared to take the ultimate sanction against him. For whatever purpose it was, they set him loose, alone among his fellows, and enjoined him to oppose them no longer."_

From the truck's cabin, there came a series of muffled thuds, creaking groans as something hit one of the doors over and over. Moments later, there came two loud bangs, like gunshots in a quiet room, and the entire driver's side door fell out, landing on the broken ground like an anvil. Another pause, a gathering of strength, and then someone fell out of the truck's cab, someone garbed in grey, whose hair and face and clothes were so impregnated with dust and volcanic ash that no trace of their original pattern could be discerned. The figure landed on hands and knees, coughing and retching on the sundered ground. Desperately, he fought himself to stand, to walk, to do anything really, but his hands shook like leaves, and his lungs refused to calm themselves, and ultimately he could do nothing but remain where he was.

Behind, Starfire watched this all in silence, frozen like a statue as the slight figure managed to crawl a few paces before collapsing on the pavement, a twisted, mangled stump of charred steel falling from his pocket and rolling to a stop against his hand. For several, long seconds, she neither said a word nor moved a muscle, eyes wide and mouth open, before turning to Cyborg, her face an unasked question, obvious to all.

_I can only speculate to the Gods' motivations in leaving Prometheus to walk the Earth. But I need not speculate to the result._

David's heart froze as he heard footfalls behind him.

His arms shaking uncontrollably, he managed to lift himself up enough to turn his head, and saw Starfire land beside the broken truck, her hands sheathed in fire, her eyes glowing like emeralds. A crown of iron was mounted on her head, and banded raiment of steel ringed her body like armor. She said nothing and made no gesture. But moments later she strode towards him with purpose and poise, her bearing regal and terrible to David's eyes.

He panicked.

Some fragmentary memory of Cyborg's reaction moments ago to his red eyes and ashen skin bubbled to the surface, and he tried to get up, to step back, to move away lest Starfire decide he was yet another one of Trigon's perversions and reduce him to ash. But his shattered nerves would not transmit his orders, and all he could do was rise to one knee before he stumbled and fell again, landing on his back this time with Starfire bearing down on him. Try though he might, he could not rise again, and was reduced to a babble of desperate cries as she loomed overhead.

"_Star_! Star, no, wait, it's me! _Star it's - _"

And then suddenly he was on his feet.

He was standing up, and something had him by the shoulder in a grip of iron, and he couldn't breathe, and yet somehow these facts were just facts, disconnected elements that had nothing to do with anything, not worth considering or fighting over. Broken as he was, it was a little while before he realized that he was being held up by arms that gripped him so tightly his lungs could not take in the air, that his head was being pressed against a shoulder plated with steel, that the warm feeling on the back of his neck was the aftermath of a dispelled starbolt, capable of burning through an armored vault door, yet now dismissed at the will of its maker, and that for the first time in a long, _long_time, he was perfectly, completely safe.

_Prometheus stole the most precious secret of the Gods, the gift of Fire, and gave it to men, that they might use it forevermore, in defiance of the edicts of the Gods, who had created men to live forever in paradisiacal ignorance. He gave them the fire, and with it the gifts of civilization. Agriculture and medicine and mathematics and music and poetry and every other thing, all freely given, in defiance of the Gods._

It might have been a full minute before David chanced again to move, or perhaps an hour or a week or a hundred thousand years. All he knew was that at some point he realized that he was standing under his own power again, and when he moved to stepped back, Starfire let him do so. He lifted his head to see her beaming down at him, her flames receded, the front of her banded armor covered in the same ash and coal slurry that coated him like the icing on a cake, tears rolling down her face. And before he could come up with anything to say, Starfire pre-empted him.

"David," she said, in a voice tinged with relief and astonishment. "We thought you _dead_."

For the second time tonight, David felt something twisted and tight vanish from inside of him. "I... think I was," he said, "I don't really remember." He struggled for something to say to explain the discoloration that had nearly led Cyborg to shoot him, but couldn't find the words in the face of Starfire's expression of astonished joy. "I thought you guys were all dead too," he said at last.

Smiling broadly and blinking back tears, Starfire stepped forward, laying a hand on David's shoulder. Only now did David notice that amidst the grey iron of smeared with black sludge, there was a trickle of red running down the front of Starfire's regalia, pulsing from a dark patch beneath her ribs where the bands of steel were bent inward. Yet as his eyes widened and he drew breath to ask the obvious question, Starfire's grip tightened, and he lifted his eyes to see her staring down at him with an intensity that he had not often seen from the Tamaranean princess.

"It takes more than this to destroy us," she said, every word pronounced with careful deliberation. "_Far_more."

It didn't sound like a question. But he answered it anyway.

"Yeah," he said. "I guess it does."

He wasn't even sure what he meant by that, but Starfire simply smiled again, and pulled him in for another hug, light enough this time that he could breathe. And when that was done, they turned back to the truck, where Cyborg still sat, and she helped him back over to it, for he was still only barely capable of walking.

"Come," said Starfire, "we must find - "

She didn't get any further.

_The Gods, in their anger, punished Prometheus by chaining him to a mountain and conjuring a great beast to devour his liver daily for eternity, and cursed his very name with all the condemnations they could load upon it. Zeus, the King of the Gods himself declared that Prometheus would suffer for all time for having dared to defy him, and that his name would be remembered only as a story of the wrath and power of the Gods._

A low growl, deep and earthy and loud enough to drown out all else resonated, setting the pebbles to quivering and the ground to trembling beneath their feet. Starfire stopped, David nearly fell over, and Cyborg, perched within the remains of the truck, turned his head to the only possible source.

"You've gotta be _kidding_me..."

Like some nightmarish phoenix rising from the ashes, Cinderblock shunted rubble aside, his face a mass of scoring and ash through which his eyes, as red as David's, shone visibly in the dark. Slowly, like a monolith emerging from the wreck of ages, he loomed upwards, the fissures in his hide erupting into living flame as he attained his full height. Dust and debris tumbled from his terrible form, even as he scowled at the trio of teenagers that stood on the edge of the precipice. And at his feet, a fresh horde of flame demons boiled up from the ground, hissing and spitting as they danced around Cinderblock, their fiery tendrils snapping in the leaden air.

_But that was not Prometheus' fate. For his gifts had changed the lives of men, and with them they mastered their world, and built cities and palaces, and multiplied across the land, until one day, in defiance of the Gods themselves, a man dared brave the monsters of Zeus, found Prometheus, slew the beast that tormented him, and freed him from the torments of the Gods forever._

Nobody said a word. Nobody so much as moved. David did not know if he was capable of moving anymore, not with this sight in front of him. It wasn't fear that kept him rooted in place. His capacity to measure fear had long since been saturated. It was just the simple realization that despite everything that had happened in the last ten minutes, this was still their reality.  
But then he heard a series of clicking sounds, and when he turned his head to see what had produced it, he saw the cowling of Cyborg's sonic cannon open up to reveal a riot of machinery beneath. Sinuous tendrils of chrome and titanium slithered this way and that within the cannon, ejecting damaged components and connecting fresh ones, all without Cyborg even sparing a glance at them. He watched the process with a fascination borne of extreme mental fatigue, and it wasn't until he felt a gentle tap on his shoulder that he turned away.

Starfire was beside him, floating several inches off the ground, and her eyes and hands were radioactive green once more. Blood still trickled from her punctured armor, yet she gave it no evident thought. And in her hand was, of all things, a bar of steel, one of many bits of shattered debris retrieved no doubt from the bed of the ruined truck, mangled and soot-covered, but nonetheless a foot of solid metal, which she now extended to David.

Gingerly, he took the bar, and felt its weight in his fingers, and conscious of the fact that both Cyborg and Starfire were watching, he took a deep breath, reached out with his mind for something that wasn't there, and watched as the bar of steel enveloped at his command with red, heatless flames.

Beside him, Starfire smiled softly, her flaming eyes off-putting to anyone else no doubt. To David, right now, they were like a lit beacon on a dark night. "Keep the demons back," she said. "Do not permit them to harm Cyborg." A fractional hesitation, a check to see that her instructions were being understood. "I will deal with Cinderblock," she said at last, as though it were the simplest thing in the world. Maybe it was.

_The man who did these things was neither Titan nor God, but something greater than either. The first of many, whose destinies would reshape the world and exile the Gods themselves from their thrones. He was a figure destined to exceed in legend both his enemies and his creators, the first of many to take the gifts of the Titans and use them to win fame and perform deeds that even the Gods thought impossible._

Cinderblock's eyes narrowed as he gazed down at the three teenagers. He growled, and his growl was like great cement blocks being dragged across one another. And in chorus with their master, the demons around him raised a great clamor, showering abuse in demonic tongues on their adversaries. None of the three Titans reacted to the screams. There were far worse things that they would soon need to react to. But as the howls reached a crescendo, Cinderblock himself threw his head back, took a single step forward, and let loose an ear-splitting roar, one that caused the ground to shake and the stones to split, rocking the truck back on its wheels and blasting the three Titans with the hot wind of malice. A roar of terror. A roar of rage. A roar of incalculable hatred.

A roar answered seconds later by one twenty times as strong.

The first roar had been a thunderous challenge. This one was like a bomb being set off. A cry of defiance so intense that it nearly bowled David over, made Cyborg bring his hand up to shield his face, and even shoved Starfire out of the air back onto the ground with the sheer force of it. It sent demons tumbling like bowling pins, rolling over the ground as great sheets of masonry fell from nearby buildings, and Cinderblock staggered as though struck by a wrecking ball, spinning halfway round with all the grace of a collapsing building. And even as Cinderblock swung his arms, seeking to recover his balance and turn on this new intrusion and destroy it, the entire front section of one of the massive buildings lining the street gave way like an avalanche, and revealed in its place a _massive_, towering creature, six stories tall, festooned with claws and spikes and slavering jaws that held teeth as large as swords and sharp as razors. A monster beyond imagining, summoned to the Earth to wreak vengeance and death, it loomed from the crushed building, its eyes darting this way and that, shining in the darkness like the crown jewels of Hell. And as it stepped forward into the ambient firelight, the monster was revealed in all its glory, towering, ferocious, implacable...

_His name was Hercules. And he was a Hero._

…and bright, emerald green.

Out of the corner of his eye, David saw Starfire's eyes widen to the size of dinner plates, saw her face light up, saw her open her mouth to cry the name he would have cried himself had he still possessed his powers of speech. But despite Starfire's excitement and powerful voice, he heard nothing of what she said, for in that instant, the creature that Beast Boy had become opened wide its jaws and let loose a torrent of sound that drowned all possible response. And after that there was no need for talk anyway.

From what depraved nightmare Beast Boy had conjured this terrible form, David neither knew nor wanted to know. Likely enough it was no particular earthly design, extinct or otherwise, but rather some amalgam of all the terrors of the universe rolled together. Part Godzilla, part Tyrannosaur, part _Balrog _for all David could tell, its very existence seemed to violate Euclidian physics, and yet its appearance did not stoke the flames of David's latent fear, but rather a different reaction entirely. Implacably it stalked towards Cinderblock, brushing demons aside like crockery, stomping them into wafers, kicking packs of them aside as they lashed in vain, and David awoke from the shock of its appearance to find himself cheering, _jumping_, yelling incoherent words that nobody could hear anyway, for the sound of the titanic Titan's footfalls was like artillery fire, and its roar the low baritone of an erupting volcano. Beside him, Cyborg was shouting something as well, he couldn't tell what, but his face was lit up, and he aimed his sonic cannon and fired a shot that impaled three demons on a beam of blue light. But nothing could take the spotlight from Beast Boy, who waded through the demons as though they were grains of sand, advancing to a lumbering run, raising one reptilian claw as he did so before bringing it down directly on Cinderblock's head.

_You look on mortals, Trigon, and you revile them as weak and fragile and ignorant, and perhaps they are. But in your own ignorance, you pronounce the word Hero as though it were some platitude handed out to any overachieving child on this planet. You have no __conception_ _of what faces you now, Trigon. These children are something far, __far_ _worse than anything even you could dream up._

The impact of the two giants was like meteors colliding, and the shockwave they produced reduced every demon within twenty feet to mangled pulp, but neither one paid any of the demons the slightest mind, each one outdoing the other in howls of rage as they strained and twisted and wrestled with one another, staggering back and forth. Cinderblock's hide burst forth in fiery glory, flames scorching Beast Boy's green scales black, yet Beast Boy did not relent, and biting down on Cinderblock's shoulder, he spun in place and smashed the living monolith into a nearby office building, shattering its face and half-burying them both in a torrent of loose rubble. David coughed and waved the dust cloud from his face, and when he looked again, he saw Starfire in amidst the two gyrating monsters, flying around and over and even _between_them, beams of green energy flying from her hands and eyes as she traced patterns of scoring over Cinderblock's fractured hide. Again and again, surviving demons sought to drag her down with their whip-like tendrils of living flame. And again and again, she evaded them with ease, leaving the demons themselves to be erased under a fresh barrage of sonic blasts or micro-missiles from Cyborg's bottomless arsenal.

_These are not frightened children begging you to leave them be. They are not mortals cowed by your magnificence into betraying their fellows or worshiping your greatness. They are Heroes, Trigon. And you may be a God of Evil, but they exist to defy and destroy those who would be Gods. Had you only heeded the warning implicit in their very name, you might have realized what it was you had undertaken to attack._

As incomparable violence exploded before him, David held his baton ready, and sought for targets of his own, looking to add his fire to the inferno before him, and yet he did not strike. For one thing, there was little he could do. Beast Boy and Cinderblock were at such close quarters that to throw something explosive at one would be to hit them both, and such few demons as remained were being systematically winnowed by Cyborg and Starfire. And so it was, after a few moments, that David lowered his hand, and extinguished the flaming baton, and simply watched. Once, many miles and months away from here, he had done something similar, when he had sat upon a tower and watched five Olympians battling a fire-breathing dragon. But this was not like then. Then it had been a matter of humility and insignificance, of the sharp and mighty distinctions separating someone like him from someone like the Titans, an unmistakable reminder that he was not and never would be one of them. This time was different. It was not a matter of who belonged with what, or who was and was not significant, in the grand scheme of things. It was simply the fact that this battle, this time, this occasion, they did not need him. If they had, he was here. But until they did, for what might be the last time ever, he could sit back, and simply watch the Teen Titans battle evil.

_I do not need to call on hosts of Heaven, Trigon. I do not need to place my faith in armies of angels and saints, marching forth to the sound of clarions to battle the risen devil. I do not need these things, because my forces of Light have already arrived. They never left. And you, who warrants yourself such a master of these fields, have walked in among them, and now stand ignorant to the danger you lie in. These children are the Teen Titans, heirs to the Heroes and Godslayers of ancient times. And all you have accomplished, with all your craft and subtlety, is to obtain their undivided attention._

All of a sudden, Beast Boy twisted in a manner he should not have been able to, and shoved against Cinderblock with the force of a prime mover, and Cinderblock was half-staggered, half-hurled back, stumbling obliquely away from the enormous changeling. Before he could recover, before he could even determine what had happened, Starfire was upon him, streaking in like a bolt of lightning. She did not fire starbolts this time, but struck with her clenched fist, smashing into Cinderblock's chest with the force of a howitzer, doubling the great monster over, before shifting momentum in mid-air and uppercutting him in the chin. Cinderblock's head snapped back like a punching back, and he stumbled back yet further, reaching out and grabbing a nearby building for support, only to have Cyborg cut the section he had seized free of the surrounding structure, leaving him unsupported once more. Now he was at the precipice of the cliff itself, arms waving in the air as he fought for equilibrium, tottering on the very edge with his enemies closing in. Yet before Beast Boy could lower his head to charge, or Starfire raise her hands to fire, or Cyborg lock his sensors to launch his missiles or beams of sonic death, David took a deep breath, let it slide softly out from between his teeth in the same way that it had all those months ago, and lifting his baton with one hand, casually blew the ground out from under Cinderblock's feet.

_That, Trigon, was a mistake._

Cinderblock fell like a toppling skyscraper, screaming angry defiance to the end, even as he plunged out of view. Standing near the edge himself, David turned to follow his fall, watching as the nightmare that had haunted his very dreams for months on end plunged down, down, down, into the chasm of fire. It seemed an eternity that he hung in the air, his limbs slowly twisting and turning, dwindling in size as he plunged away, before at long last the shroud of orange smoke that churned within the depths of the chasm swallowed him up, and Cinderblock was gone.

David watched the chasm until the last echoes of Cinderblock's parting scream had faded into the ambient noise. And then he felt a thick glove land softly on his unwounded shoulder.

"_Dude_," came Beast Boy's voice, no longer monstrous, but just the way he remembered it. "I know I'm awesome and all, but just because I'm green doesn't mean you have to pick a new color too."

And all of a sudden he was crying.

He turned around, already preparing an explanation for the color shift, but Beast Boy did not wait to receive it. Perhaps he had divined from David's actions or Starfire and Cyborg's reactions to him that this was no evil simulacrum, or perhaps he had some other way of knowing. It didn't matter ultimately. What mattered was that David not only never got to explain what had happened to him, he did not get to say much of anything for quite a while, as Beast Boy unleashed a torrent of half-formed explanations and questions he did not wait long enough to hear the answer to. And Starfire was there too, and Cyborg, leaning over the edge of the truck to clap Beast Boy on the back with his massive hand, and all of them, not just Beast Boy, were talking rapidly, filling the air with their voices because speaking was plainly the only thing keeping them all from bursting into tears. And so Starfire hugged Beast Boy a little tighter than she might otherwise have, and Beast Boy her, and both of them Cyborg, and all three David, and it no longer mattered what state the rest of the world was in, or what legions of foes stood between them and the end.

_There is an old human proverb, Trigon, one composed many millennia ago, a long time as the humans reckon it. It's a simple concept, but one that I have a feeling you are about to become intimately familiar with._

At length, however, Beast Boy spoke up, in a tone more serious than he had been using, one which everyone else instantly knew to listen to in silence.

'_Those who sow the air shall reap the whirlwind.'_

"Guys," said Beast Boy, looking from face to face, "you're not gonna believe who I found..."

**O-O-O**

Atop a crucifix of fire that had once been a tower, a figure wreathed in storms brooded on thoughts best left unsaid, even as he visualized a single line in reply to all that had transpired.

"**We shall see..."**

**O-O-O**

There were no words to describe how amazing the antiseptic felt.

Granted, he was grading on a curve here, but still it was true. It wasn't that the iodine felt particularly good as it burned into the lacerations the demons had given him the cabin of the tow truck, it was more that his stinging shoulder and arm were the only things that hurt right now. After everything that had happened tonight, to have only one area of his body hurting was a reprieve beyond price. The rest of him had receded into a warm numbness, not as intense as the anesthesia he'd been under more than once in the Tower basement, but close enough for his purposes now. He had no idea what was in the pills Cyborg had told him to dissolve under his tongue, and at this point didn't much care. There were too many other things right now that were more important.

It sufficed only to glance around to remind him of what those things were.

Cyborg sat across from him, atop a workbench, a soldering iron in one hand as he made adjustments to the shiny new arm that was now connected to his other shoulder, and David simply sat on the padded medical bed and silently watched him work, watched the metal give off sparks as Cyborg connected this circuit and that one, and watched him test the actuators that governed the thing's movement. Every so often, Starfire walked back into the room, his arms piled high with supplies or equipment or some other thing he had dug out of the storage room beneath them, and every time she came in, she asked David if he needed anything, or if he was all right, and every time, David just nodded, or gave her a one-word answer. To be honest, the ability to simply sit here like this was a gift beyond price, and not simply because he was no longer in pain or covered with coal sludge (at least not as much). The last time he'd been in this bunker, he'd been here alone but for ghosts conjured from within his own head. He'd left it with every expectation of never living long enough to return. Yet here he was. And here they were. And this was real. And every moment he spent just watching Cyborg work or Starfire walk in and out made it more real.

But then, of course, there was someone else here too.

She was sitting on a couch, kneeling on it and just barely peeking over the top, watching him with the intensity of her namesake. This much he'd had to ascertain with his peripheral vision, for every time he turned the red spotlights that now served as his eyes directly on her, she instantly vanished down behind the couch, usually with a soft gasp of what he assumed was fear. Not an emotion that David normally associated with Raven, but then these circumstances were anything but normal.

On the way back to the bunker, Beast Boy had tried to tell them all the story of where and how he had found her, but try as he might, David had not been able to follow much of it. Part of it was that the story itself made no sense at all, not that he expected it to. Ice worlds and rivers of fire and the evil twins of several different people all melded together into a mind-numbing collage, particularly given everything he'd seen and done himself. Part of it, of course, was also that Beast Boy was not the most coherent storyteller, veering off on nineteen different tangents at a moment's notice. But most of it was just that, given everything, all that really mattered was the result. Beast Boy was alive. Raven was alive. The exactitudes of how and why these things had come about, David was more than willing to leave to intellects wiser than his own.

No, what mattered was that somehow Beast Boy had defied all possibility, and found Raven. The last thing David remembered before the blinding light and searing pain of his own death had been Raven being disintegrated and transformed into a portal for Trigon's advent. And yet here she was again, reduced for some reason to a little girl of eight or nine, but Raven nonetheless, the same hair, the same eyes, the same silent stare. What all this portended, what symbolism was being done, he did not know or even know how to ask. He didn't know if it was important or not. But as he turned his eyes towards Raven once more, and caught a brief glimpse of her diving for cover under the glare of red lights, he felt something, nebulous and uncertain, gently tugging on the back of his brain.

There was a series of beeping sounds from the main entrance, and then the soft hiss of a door sliding open. David turned his head to see Beast Boy walking in, and knew instantly from the expression on his face what the changeling was about to say.

"Nothing?" asked David, unable to stop himself.

Beast Boy sighed and shook his head. "I looked everywhere," he said. "There's no sign at all."

"That's... that's _impossible_," said David, but he knew that it wasn't. No sooner had David managed to tell Beast Boy and Starfire that Terra was nearby, bleeding and stapled to a car, than Beast Boy had raced off to find her. Honestly, they all would have if they could, but Cyborg couldn't walk, David could barely stand, and Starfire needed to help them all back to the emergency bunker. Beast Boy, who was both reasonably intact and flight-capable, and who frankly would probably have gone looking even if those things hadn't been true, had spent the last hour or more searching for her. It should have taken five minutes.

"She was right in the middle of the street," said David. "At the center of the - "

"I know," said Beast Boy. "I found the crater. But there wasn't anyone in it. No car, no blood, nothing. I even tried to dig into the ground. I couldn't find any sign of her."

It made no sense, and yet it had to be true, for Beast Boy would not lie, not about something like this, and moreover would not have abandoned the search without scouring the entire area for half a mile in every direction. Indeed it was unlikely he'd be here even now had Cyborg not made him promise to return no later than this. Had Beast Boy not returned, he knew that broken or not they all would have left to find him come hell or high water, and with everyone in the shape they were in, even Beast Boy's inability to let go of a lost cause would not permit him to keep looking.

All this David discerned in a flash, but he did not say any of it, nor any other thing, for there was nothing for him to say. Terra had been in one place, and was no longer. Perhaps she was dead. Perhaps she had managed to escape. Perhaps the demons had seized her and borne her in torment to the feet of Trigon's throne. There was no way to tell. And so he said nothing, and lowered his eyes, and silently tried to convince himself that he had done the right thing in leaving her to die in the street.

"We're gonna finish this," said Cyborg, snapping shut the panel on his arm as he did so. "Once and for all." He swung the arm experimentally, shifting it from limb to cannon and back again, before sliding himself around on the table and dropping down onto the floor, his replacement legs flexing as he hit the ground.

Beast Boy looked from Cyborg to Starfire to David and back to Cyborg. "How?" he finally asked.

"The way this always had to end," said Cyborg. "We're gonna go after Trigon."

If that notion was a shock to anybody, they disguised it well. Starfire nodded slowly, while Beast Boy looked almost relieved, as though the mere prospect of something to think about besides Terra was a relief right now. David knew how he felt. Or rather he wished he did.

"How are we to attack Trigon?" asked Starfire. "His power greatly exceeds anything we can produce."

"Not anymore," said Cyborg, and he, and everyone with him, turned their eyes to the small girl still nestled on the couch.

The girl in question said nothing as the various teenagers turned in her direction. She had not said anything since they had arrived at the bunker, indeed not said anything since Beast Boy revealed that he had found her. Yet since that moment, David had noticed the little girl casting apprehensive looks in his direction whenever she thought he wasn't looking, something easier to determine when your eyes doubled as spotlights. Of course that was probably because he, alone among the others, looked _much_different than when she had last seen him, a spitting image of one of the many evil twins that she and Beast Boy had no doubt had to fight their way through. That was sufficient to explain it.

Or was it?

Beast Boy walked around the couch and sat down next to Raven, gently putting an arm around her as she watched the others warily. "You really think she can bring Trigon down?" he asked.

"Robin did," said Cyborg. "That's why he went to get her the last time we did this."

"It's not why I went to get her," said Beast Boy.

"I know," said Cyborg. "But I think she can do it anyway."

"Slade did not think this," said Starfire, cautiously.

"Slade didn't think I could find her at all," said Beast Boy. "He told me that before Trigon burned him up."

David said nothing, and the discussion proceeded without him, not an argument or debate but more of a collective decision being distilled from the air between them all. He could have chimed in of course, but he already knew what would come of it. So did they. They weren't talking to hash out what had to be done, but rather talking because they could. Because they were all here, in one place, and could talk to one another, and everyone was alive. And reticent as David usually was in these sorts of group chats, he would have liked nothing better than to chime in. But he did not. And he did not because there was something still tugging on him, something he couldn't put a name to...

"We blast our way directly to Trigon," said Cyborg. "Blow away anything tries to get between us and him. Between the four of us, we should have enough fire to do that."

"There could be any number of demons between us and him," said Starfire, who did not sound particularly worried about that possibility. "And perhaps other things we have not yet seen."

"Yeah? Well we've got some stuff _they've_never seen," said Beast Boy, giving a grim smile. "We'll see how they like it."

Raven's eyes were fixed on his, direct and unblinking. Aged down to a little girl, she still had the ability to mesmerize like a cobra with a simple look. With Beast Boy at her side, she no longer ducked away from the red glare of his own stare, but simply looked at him, and he at her, as he racked his brain to try and figure out what it was that was bothering him so much. Bits and fragments of everything that had happened over the last day echoed through his mind, refusing to coalesce into anything coherent, but equally refusing to go away.

"And when we get there..." said Beast Boy, trailing off at the end of a lengthy recitation. He looked from face to face for someone to finish the sentence.

"... then... we hope that Raven can do whatever it was she did the last time," said Cyborg.

"Forgive me," said Starfire, in that manner she used whenever she was about to ask a thorny question, "but... do we _know_what it was that Raven did on the previous occasion to defeat her father?"

Blank stares all around served as the answer. "Does it matter?" asked Beast Boy at last, gently squeezing Raven against his own side. This broke her stare, and she looked up at Beast Boy, and then around at the others, as the question sat for just a moment.

"No," said Starfire at last, "it does not."

Raven looked like she wanted to say something, but couldn't make the words come together. She looked up to Beast Boy, to Starfire, to Cyborg, searching for something with each one, before turning to the next. The others didn't rush her, didn't push her into agreeing or saying one thing or another. They just waited, quietly, letting Raven take her time before she said something, or nothing at all, each one facing the reality of what it was they had just bet the fate of the planet on.

And to all appearances, that was what David was doing too. But in reality, David was barely here at all. He was miles away, in the ruins of a shopping mall, listening to a voice that could well have been his own.

_"Will is everything," said Devastator. "Will is life itself. Will is the fundamental force of the universe. Greater than gravity, greater than magnetism, greater than any nuclear absurdity dreamed up by physics. Will alone commands the cosmos at large."_

It was only hours ago, yet it felt like months. Already the memory of the fighting, the screams and explosions and the feel of his back smashing into a wall or the blood seeping into his mouth, already those things were fading. But the voice, the poise, the vision of Devastator, framed in a red halo, sword and cane in hand, those things were not. They were growing sharper. He could see him standing there now, his scarred face and blinded eyes and the thin curl of contempt at his lips as he surveyed a thing that was beneath him. He could hear the voice, similar and yet completely alien. Even as a still pond one moment, a savage, biting curse the next.

And yet... something else too...

"David?"

David awoke to find everyone staring at him. He blinked, tried to recollect what he had last heard, drew a blank. Beast Boy was carrying Raven, Cyborg was leaning up against his workbench, and Starfire was standing off to one side. He blinked mutely for several seconds before mustering any sort of response.

"Sorry," he said. "What was that?"

"I just asked if you had any better idea for this," said Cyborg. "You er... you alright, man?"

"Yeah," said David, rubbing his eyes as he struggled to clear his head of everything bouncing around in it. It wasn't much use.

"You sure?" asked Cyborg. "You look kinda..."

"Pale?" suggested Beast Boy. Cyborg shot him a look, but it brought a small smile to David's face.

"I'll be okay," said David. "It's just something's... something's wrong."

Several wordy looks were exchanged by the others, Raven included. "Please, David," said Starfire, "tell us what is the matter. We shall do whatever we may to alleviate your discomfort."

What a list that would have made. "No, it's okay, Star," he said. "It's not me it's... it's this. This... here. Something's wrong with this."

The looks of concern had evolved into real confusion. "... this?" asked Starfire at length.

How to explain? "This... whole situation. Something's wrong."

Another series of glances between the other Titans. This time it was Cyborg who spoke up. "Look, David, I know this one's a longshot. It's only normal to be afraid, but none of us are goin' into this alone. 'Sides, look at everything we just pulled off."

He wasn't making any sense, not to them, not even to himself, and he knew it, and didn't know how to start, but whatever his brain was trying to tell him, he knew this was important. "No," he said. "It's not the plan that's the problem."

"Well what is it, then?" asked Cyborg. And when David didn't answer presently, he added more.

"Look, if you got a problem with all this, man, this is the time to say it."

Maybe it was Cyborg's spur, gentle though it was, that pushed him through the mess of his own running mind. Or maybe he was just tired of his own prevarications. But ultimately, David raised his eyes once more and simply said the first thing that came to mind.

"Where's Trigon?"

That was clearly not the answer Cyborg was expecting, but Cyborg fielded it anyway. "Last I saw, he was at the Tower, hanging out like he's waiting for - "

"No," said David. "Why isn't he here?"

Silence greeted that question, as the others looked from one to the other and back to David, who let the question sit. After some time, Beast Boy chimed in with an answer.

"Um... Dude? I don't think he'd fit."

It was, of course, the exact right thing to say, and David smiled, and so did Cyborg, and even Starfire, who probably didn't get the joke but liked the fact that Beast Boy had made it. And yet the voices, or whatever they were, in the back of David's mind kept pushing at him, telling him that this was too important to be sidetracked. "Just... bear with me a second, okay?" said David, taking a deep breath to set what little order he could among his thoughts.

"Trigon knows we're here, doesn't he?" he asked, pressing on before he could get an answer. "I mean... even if he doesn't know exactly where, he knows we're alive, and that we're together. He's _gotta_ know that." He turned to Beast Boy. "He's gotta know that you found Raven. You said you fought with a bunch of evil twins and went through some frozen Hell and everything. He _has _to know you did all that, his own servants were chasing you around." He turned back to the others. "And he's gotta know that Warp's gone, and Jinx turned on him, and that we threw Cinderblock off a cliff. I mean... Beast Boy turned into a Dinosaur. I blew up a shopping mall with a bomb you could see from Idaho. Unless he's blind, deaf, and stupid, he's _got_to know that we all made it, doesn't he?"

"Yeah, probably," said Cyborg. "Why?"

"So if he knows all this," said David. "Where is he? Where's his armies, his monsters, demons? Why isn't he sending them out to scour the city looking for us?" He looked from face to face, red light falling upon each of his friends in turn. "I mean think about it. This is _exactly_ how he lost last time, right? That's what Slade said. He said that you guys all got together and found Raven and took Trigon on and beat him. So if you were Trigon, and you knew that's how it went down last time, and you also knew that all of us had survived his little games and gotten back together _and_found Raven again, wouldn't you be a little worried?"

"Dude," said Beast Boy, now beginning to look as thoughtful as the others, "if I knew that the Titans were coming to kick my butt, I'd be _petrified._"

"Exactly," said David. He spread his hands, palms up, in front of him. "So where is he?"

"Maybe he just doesn't know where we are?" ventured Beast Boy.

"No," said Cyborg. "Slade said Trigon's all-seeing. If he wanted to, he could find us. And send us any company he wanted."

"But he hasn't," said David. "We've been down here for an hour. Why wouldn't he just send his demon army down to finish us all off? Why wait?"

"Perhaps," said Starfire, "Trigon knows something that we do not."

Uncomfortable silence settled around the room, as each Titan looked to the others for an answer. It wasn't until some time had passed that somebody broke in.

"He's waiting," said Raven. "He's waiting for me."

All eyes turned to Raven, but she apparently had no more to say. And it was Cyborg who continued.

"This doesn't make any sense," he said. "She destroyed Trigon once. Why would he wait around for her to do it again?"

"What's different?" asked David.

"Different?" asked Starfire.

"What's different between this time and last time? What changed to make him think that he's safe this time?" David paused, as though soliciting answers from the room, and when none were forthcoming, he continued. "It's me," he said. "It's gotta be. Me and Devastator. That's the X-factor here. That's the change he made to make sure that this time, everything went differently, isn't it?"

"That is not so," said Starfire. "Last time, Robin was present as well. _That _was the change Trigon made."

David did not answer that. He did not know how to. But moments later, Cyborg answered for him.

"No, Star," he said, "I think David's right."

"But Slade said - "

"I know what Slade said, Star, but think about it. Warp killed Robin to get after you, to make sure you'd come after him. He had to get Trigon's okay, but Trigon didn't send anybody to do that. He didn't care if Robin was alive or dead. He didn't care if _any_of us were."

"But he cared when I tried to leave the Tower," said David. "He cared enough to send Cinderblock into a major city to keep me here, even if it meant risking that you guys would find out what was going on. Trigon had one chance to change things so that he wouldn't be faced with just this kind of situation. And he chose me. He put me in the Tower with you guys and he made sure that I stayed there until he could arrive. So why did he do that?"

"So he could blow up the universe," said Beast Boy.

David hesitated, his train of thought derailed by that unexpected offering. "... what?" he asked at length, turning to Beast Boy in puzzlement.

"That's what Slade said," said Beast Boy, letting Raven slip back down onto the ground. "He said that because Trigon's a demon lord, he could use Devastator to blow galaxies up, kill everybody in the whole universe. Slade said that's why you were dragged into this whole thing."

David chewed the matter over in his head, looking to Cyborg and Starfire as he did so, but neither of them had anything further to add. For a time he said nothing, but then at last he simply shook his head.

"No," he said. "I don't think so."

"Why not?" asked Beast Boy. "Sounds to me like something Trigon would wanna do."

"No, it sounds like something _Slade_would want to do," said David. "I don't think Trigon wants to do that at all."

"Why should he not?" asked Starfire. "Is not Trigon's cruelty far in excess of even Slade's?"

"That's just it, Star," said David. "It's too easy. It's not how he operates."

"Is it not?"

"No," said David. He shook his head, closing his eyes and trying to pull a memory out of his tattered mind. "Devastator said something," he said. "He said that Trigon was the Lord of _Evil_, not the Lord of Death. That's why he didn't kill you guys, he wanted to make you suffer. It's why he froze everyone in stone instead of killing them."

"Wait, _what_?" asked Beast Boy. "All those people are - "

"Alive," said David, desperate to finish before the ephemeral thought floated away. "He didn't kill any of them, just locked them up in a stone prison so that he could play with them all. That's what he wants to do, not blow things up. He wants to _hurt_people. And Devastator doesn't help him do that."

"Then perhaps he wishes to use Devastator to destroy us?" proposed Starfire.

"Then what's he waiting for? He's got more than enough power to kill us just by himself, and now that he's got Devastator he could just blow the entire city up with one thought. I mean he knows we're all here somewhere, and he knows we have the only thing that can - "

David stopped.

It was not immediately apparent why he stopped. Not to the others at least. That much was clear from their expressions, which began to morph to concern as they waited for him to continue and found that he did not. Yet he could not have answered their unspoken inquiries if he wanted to, so sudden was he transfixed by a single piece of the mental jumble in his head sliding suddenly into place. And like the key to a cipher, no sooner did he perceive the last piece of the puzzle that had been eluding him all day, than everything, miraculously, became as clear as crystal.

"Oh my god... " said David finally, his voice weak and his eyes blank. He lifted them, to the others who watched him, to Raven, who stood in the corner, her own eyes fixed on the discolored demon with the spotlight stare, who now looked at her in turn with an expression of apprehension mingled with astonishment.

"I get it," said David. "I understand."

More concerned looks from the others, both to one another and to David himself. "Understand what?" asked Beast Boy.

"Why I'm here," said David. "Why all this happened. Why Trigon chose me." Slowly, he lifted his head up to the others, who were watching him with the same expression he now wore. "It's Raven," he said. "It's all because of Raven."

"Raven?" asked Beast Boy, and he glanced back at the little girl still pressed against the corner of the room. "What about her?"

"Everything," said David. "It was staring us in the face... staring _me_in the face, the whole time. And I didn't see it. None of us did."

"Saw what?" asked Cyborg.

David turned his head to Cyborg, his voice trembling as he spoke. "Raven shot me with a beam of pure void," said David. "Powerful enough to disintegrate a building. But it didn't do anything to me. She conjured up tentacles made of shadow magic to pin me down. As soon as they touched me, they melted." He turned back to Raven, whose expression had gone from apprehension to full on fear, quivering where she stood, afraid to even move.

"She _stopped time_," said David, with finality. "All of time throughout the universe. But it didn't stop me. Because I had Devastator."

It was as though a chill had settled over the room. All three Titans still stood where they were, yet none of them said a word, nor dared to move, save to turn their heads first to Raven, then to David, and then to one another, as though each were looking to the other to find some way of rejecting what had just been said, and yet each knew that there was no way to do so. And as the potential consequences of what David was saying became apparent, all three of their expressions turned to stunned horror.

"That's why I'm here," said David, his eyes still fixed on Raven. "That's the only reason I ever met you guys. It's why he set all this in motion. He didn't need some weapon to blow up planets or destroy galaxies. He needed something he couldn't get anywhere else. Something he probably never thought he'd ever need. He needed a way to protect himself from one of his own minions... from his own daughter."

All at once, as though it were more than Raven could stand, she bolted from her corner, running for cover from David's red eyes, but not towards furniture. Instead, she ducked behind Beast Boy, who watched her but did not move. Yet moments later, David averted his eyes down to the floor, drawing a slow breath and releasing it slowly.

"That's why Trigon isn't coming for us," he said, as much to himself as to the others. "It's why he's leaving us alone. Because he's got the trump card. The one he set himself up to get from the very beginning. He's got Devastator. And as long as he has Devastator, Raven can't hurt him."

Perfect silence greeted this last declaration, as the other Titans searched for a hole in this logic, and did not find one. Beast Boy looked in vain, to Cyborg, to Starfire, but neither one said a word, either unable to find words or unwilling to vocalize them, lest they say aloud what every one of them must now be thinking. That after all this, there was no hope at all.

"So then... what do we do?" asked Beast Boy aloud, not directing the question at anyone in particular. He sounded as though he wasn't sure if he was going to get an answer at all, and that he was afraid of what answer he might get even if he got one. And yet, before Starfire could compose a reply of sufficient weight, before Cyborg could chime in with a reasoned measure of the encouragement everyone desperately needed, before anything of the sort could happen, of all people, David offered an answer of his own.

"We take it back."

It wasn't the suggestion itself that stunned everyone, though that was certainly part of it. But if anything, it was the manner in which he offered it, no histrionics, no grim declaration of intent. David suggested taking the weaponized embodiment of Destruction away from the Lord of Hell as casually as he might have suggested what to eat for dinner, as though it were the easiest thing in the world. It was left to Cyborg to respond in the only appropriate manner.

"What?"

"We take Devastator back," said David, raising his head once more. "Take his protection away. Let Raven do what she's supposed to do. Without Devastator getting in the way, Trigon won't be able to stop her."

"But how do you propose to remove Devastator from Trigon's grasp?" asked Starfire.

"The same way he took it from me," said David. "Will."

Beast Boy looked as puzzled as the others no doubt felt. "You're gonna... _will_Devastator out of Trigon?"

"Why not?" asked David, as though this were a perfectly normal thing to suggest. "It's what Devastator responds to. It's _all_he responds to. Devastator doesn't care how powerful you are, all that matters to him is will."

Beast Boy's evident puzzlement did not slake. "You can do that?"

"I think so," said David. "I mean... really it's not any different than what I normally did with him. When I blow something up, that's all it is. All the mental exercises and molecules and so on, those are all just the tricks I use to get my mind to work the right way, but it all comes down to me telling Devastator what I want, and him doing it for me. If Trigon can do it, I don't see why I can't."

Cyborg cleared his throat, a method of dissimulation that he almost never used, and only when he had something particularly thorny to say. "No offense man," said Cyborg, "but uh... Trigon's got a will too. Pretty strong one, I'd say. I'm not tryin' to say you don't know what you're talking about, but... you really think you can match wills with Trigon the Terrible and come out on top?"

All eyes turned to David, who blinked and shook his head. "No," he said. "No, I can't do that..." He trailed off, but the others did not turn away, sensing perhaps, that David had a corollary to add.

"But... what if it wasn't a fair fight?" said David.

Slowly, Cyborg got up off the wall and walked over to the medical table David was still sitting on. "What do you mean?" he asked.

David took a moment to set his thoughts in order. "Trigon's a novice at this," he said. "He's gotta be. He's never had something like Devastator before. There _is_nothing like Devastator, right?"

"Probably," said Cyborg. "So what?"

"So I'd say it's a good bet that he doesn't know how to use Devastator all that well. I mean... I didn't know how to use him properly until Raven taught me."

"Dude, Trigon's the Devil," said Beast Boy. "Doesn't he know everything?"

"Not this sort of thing," said David. "He's a cosmic being, a God even. How often would he ever have to use powers that aren't his?" He thought for a moment, turned to his right. "Star, didn't you tell me that you and Raven once switched bodies or something?"

Starfire nodded. "Yes," she said. "The Puppet Master caused us to inhabit one another's bodies. It was... most disorienting. But... forgive me, Friend David, I do not understand why that occurrence is relevant to Trigon."

"Well, you're a Tamaranean," said David. "Your powers, the flight, the starbolts, that's all natural to you, just like walking is to us, right? So when you had to change bodies with Raven... "

"... I lost all of the capabilities I was accustomed to, and had to adopt new ones," said Starfire, finishing David's sentence as she suddenly realized where he was going. "And it was extremely difficult for me to do so."

"Even though you're way more powerful than any of us," finished David. "It was still alien to you. Just like Devastator was to me, before I knew how to use it. Just like it must be to Trigon."

Cyborg neared the medical bed, stopping and folding his arms, like a schoolteacher trying to coax the answers from a reluctant student. "All right then," he said, "let's say you're right. How does that help us?"

"It helps us," said David, "because it means that if we can disrupt his ability to control Devastator, he won't know how to stop us, or what to do about it once we do it. He'll be stuck trying to learn how to work Devastator on the fly."

"Okay," said Beast Boy, "so then how do we disrupt him?"

It sounded like an impossible question, but David simply turned his head to Beast Boy, the vaguest hint of a smile on his discolored features. "That's simple" he said. "What works on me?"

It took Beast Boy a couple of seconds to figure out what David meant. And when he did, the smile spread to his own face, broader now, and feral. "We piss him off?"

"Exactly," said David. "Devastator doesn't respond to anger. Doesn't matter how much there is, it won't work. To make Devastator do what you want, you need concentration and focus. Terra knew that. That's how she beat me. That's how I - " he stopped, mid-sentence, hesitated on the brink of saying more, then slid instead into a new thought. "If we annoy Trigon enough, he won't be able to use Devastator at all. And then... if we're lucky, I _might _be able to take it away from him."

"And what's to stop him from just taking it back from you?" asked Cyborg.

This one David plainly had no answer for, and he sighed and lowered his eyes. "Nothing," he said at length. "Nothing but Raven. She's the only thing that _can _stop him." He lifted his head once more, watching the little girl behind Beast Boy from the corner of his eyes. "This was always gonna end with Raven and Trigon," he said. "All we have to do is make sure that Devastator and I don't get in the way."

Silence reigned as David stayed resolutely silent and left the others to ask what they would. But when no further questions were forthcoming, he finally turned to Cyborg, who was now standing directly before him.

"So..." said David, "what do you think?"

For a few moments, Cyborg gave no sign, but then a smile slowly spread over his bruised face, and he laughed, and clapped his new hand down on David's shoulder, the weight of it nearly knocking him off the table, and yet somehow to David it felt as light as a feather.

"I think," said Cyborg, "Robin'd be proud."

If David's nerves had been any less stunned from the accumulated effect of everything that had happened, that one statement would have precluded any possible coherent reaction. As it was, he needed a little bit to recover from it. "You... you don't think it's a bad idea?" he finally managed to say.

That one provoked another laugh. "Man, I don't know if you noticed, but we're not really big on _good _ideas around here. No, what _that_ was, was a grade A, 100% authentic Bad idea with a capital 'B'." He grinned now, broad and genuine. "My favorite kind," Cyborg said. "Hell, you come up with a couple more of those, and we might have to let _you _run things for a while."

Now David _knew_they were in the realm of the absurd. "I think if we survive this one, it'll be enough for me, Cy," he said, as Beast Boy picked Raven up once more and walked over to where they were, as did Starfire.

"Dude," said Beast Boy, grinning in the lunatic way only he could manage, "our plan is to annoy Trigon to death. Do you really think anybody can do that better than me?"

"Trigon shall not know what it was that struck him," said Starfire, her own smile warm and convincing. "We shall render him so infuriated that he will forget he even _possesses_Devastator."

It all sounded simple, so simple that David felt himself beginning to believe them despite his better judgment. But then, he reminded himself, better judgment was another thing the Titans had never been big on.

Right now he was infinitely glad for that.

Carefully, he slid off the medical table and onto the ground, picking up one of the steel batons that Starfire had laid out next to him, and turning it over in his hands. Almost reflexively, he set it alight, letting the warmth pulse through his fingers as he nervously passed it from hand to hand. Yet as he did so, Raven caught his eye, for she was watching the burning baton as it moved about, the flames dancing lazily through his fingers, licking at the air around him. He couldn't be sure of course, but he even thought he caught the faintest hint of a smile, before he finally turned back to the others.

"Where shall we commence our attack?" asked Starfire. "Would it be best to be direct, or should we attempt to infiltrate the island before we begin?"

"Neither," said Cyborg.

Starfire paused, confused. "Then... how shall we proceed?" she asked.

"We're not," said Cyborg. "Not yet. Not today."

This only made the confusion worse. "Not today?" she asked. "I do not - "

"Star," said Cyborg, "we're beat up, we're tired, some of us can barely walk, and I can tell that stab is bothering you more than you're letting on." Starfire opened her mouth to protest, but thought better of it, her hand sliding automatically to the wound in her chest. "Maybe we can't do anything about some of that, but I figure if Trigon's willing to wait for us to show up, then he can wait a little while longer. So we'll stay here tonight, today, whatever it is now. We'll get patched up, get cleaned up, have something to eat, get some sleep... and we'll take Trigon on tomorrow."

A quick survey of everyone's face told David that there would be no objections. Certainly he did not plan to raise any. Beast Boy looked like he was trying to disguise the fact that he was secretly relieved, while Starfire needed only to look to David and back to Cyborg to swallow whatever she was about to say and simply nod.

"Good," said Cyborg. "Let's get it all set up then. He moved as though to walk off, but stopped himself before he had finished, and turning back to David, he considered the dark grey gunk on his hand from where he had laid it on David's shoulder. "Hey uh... what _is _this stuff?" he asked.

David had honestly lost track of all the various substances he'd been drenched in tonight. "Coal slurry, I think."

If Cyborg had any questions as to how David had contrived to get himself soaked in coal slurry of all things, he did not ask them. "You know what?" he said. "We'll set it up. You can have the first shower."

**O-O-O**

"_What, exactly, did you think this was?"_

Flames had been a part of his world for so long that they had ceased to be a concern, but these were different. They loomed up before him like living beings, their roar and crackle stretched to a high-pitched scream, forming walls of impassable height, blocking the way forward.

He wasn't sure where he was, some cavernous open space, the dimensions of which he could not make out. It might have been a football stadium, a music hall, an open air amphitheatre. It might have been a cathedral, he simply couldn't tell. No lights illuminated his surroundings, save the flames that burned before him, their gyrations almost hypnotic in the preternatural darkness.

A shadow loomed in the orange wall ahead, indistinct and yet recognizable, its identity obvious. A slim figure with a scarred face and a cane of varnished oak topped with a silver handle. The fires parted before him as he advanced, stepping forth, whole and hale, a halo of flame dancing from his metal-shod walking stick. For a moment he stood motionless, watching David as though in expectation of some sign, and then he stepped forward, and reached out, and took him by the shoulder.

"_We are only what we will to be."_

His form rippled like water in the wind, shifting wildly in dimension and shape, the grip on David's shoulder hardening as though the hand that held him had been turned to stone. He tried to pull away, grabbing the arm that held him and pushing as hard as he could, but to no avail. It was like trying to break the grip of a bronze statue, and when he lifted his head, the face that greeted him was no longer his own.

It wasn't even a face.

He let out a warbling, awkward cry of horror, and with a single desperate shove, he tore his shoulder free from the armored giant before him, stumbling back and landing on the ground. Above him, the iron glare of a single eye glared at him through a featureless mask of orange and black. Ringed in flames, which dripped from him like water, he seemed to grow even as David scrambled back. Yet no matter how hard he tried to flee, Slade remained directly in front of him. Slowly, with infinite grace, Slade bent and lowered his head, his hand reaching out towards David's face, even as his cyclopean eye stared directly into David's soul. And then all was lost in darkness, as Slade's hand clamped over his face like a vice, and the world itself disappeared, all save for a single sentence, burned indelibly into his mind as if by branding iron.

"_No matter how much you want to,"_ said Slade, "_you cannot destroy the Devil with a bomb."_

David awoke with a shout.

It wasn't a full blown scream, for which he was more than grateful, but a strangled cry of fear and surprise, and for the briefest of moments he sat bolt upright, unsure of where he was or how he had come to be there. Only at length did his mind catch up with his body, and begin interpreting rationally the data his senses were feeding him.

He was sitting on one of the couches laid out within the main room of the emergency bunker, a wool blanket emblazoned with the Titans' symbol half-draped over him. The overhead fluorescents were off, and only the ambient glow of the security monitors still illuminated the room, but as he turned his burning red eyes on the rest of the room like a pair of flashlights, he saw Starfire fast asleep, floating half an inch above another couch, while behind her, the light from his eyes served to just illuminate the hulking form of Cyborg, plugged into one of his enormous power cell rechargers, seemingly dead to the world.

In an ideal world, of course, Cyborg would have detailed someone to remain on watch, to be relieved every two hours by someone else. David had been through several such routines, and while being woken in the middle of the night and instructed not to fall asleep for several hours was not exactly pleasant, getting woken by bloodthirsty monsters trying to devour your soul was a shade worse. But this was not an ideal world, and Cyborg had decided, given the battery of detection equipment radiating from the bunker in every direction, and the fact that Trigon's minions still not shown themselves, that it was worth taking the risk of letting everyone simply collapse. For one thing they all plainly needed it. And for another, nobody felt particularly up to staying awake, alone, in the middle of the darkened bunker. Not even with the others asleep nearby.

Or at least that was what David assumed, right up until his eyes fell on the third couch, the one Beast Boy had been upon in the form of a housecat, now empty save for the blanket draped over it. Beside it, the small cot Cyborg had dragged out of storage for Raven was also empty. Yet before David could panic over where either of them had gotten to, his ears caught the sound of muffled music coming from the next room, and he turned, and saw a bright glow seeping beneath the door.

He had no idea what time it was. The atomic clocks built into the bunker's computers no longer corresponded with reality in any meaningful way, and as far as he knew, Cyborg had set no alarms. "Tomorrow" was a wholly artificial concept in a world with no sunrise. Yet the faces of Slade and Devastator still danced through the back of his mind, and rather than trying to go back to sleep to face them again, he instead slid off the couch, and walked as quietly as he could over to the door to the back room.

The motion sensor slid the door aside with a hiss, suddenly drenching him in bright light. He squinted and shaded his eyes, only to find when he opened them once more, that all he could see was a vague, amorphous shape, shifting in impossible ways before his eyes. The mingled light, reflecting into the dark room, was such that he had difficulty making out what was actually going, and it wasn't until he stepped into the room entirely and averted his eyes directly the bright screen in front of him that his eyes finally adjusted and he saw Beast Boy smiling sheepishly at him as his form finished shifting back into the customary one.

"Dude," said Beast Boy, exhaling heavily as the door slid shut once more. "You scared the hell out of me."

Even after all this it still took David a moment to figure out what Beast Boy was talking about. "Sorry," he said. "I forgot about..."

"Don't worry," said the changeling. "I know how it is." He glanced back at the bright screen and music illuminating the small room, and then returned to David. "Did we wake you up?"

"No," said David. "I couldn't sleep is all."

"Oh," said Beast Boy. And he seemed to be thinking of something else to add, but came up blank. "Well... you can join us if you want," he said, gesturing to an open armchair even as he turned the television's volume down. "We couldn't much sleep either."

RIght now that sounded good. "Us?" he asked, moments before he walked around the couch and saw Raven, laying curled up on the other side, seemingly fast asleep.

"Um... yeah," said Beast Boy as David took another chair. "Raven couldn't sleep, and she sorta woke me up, so..."

David just smiled and nodded in silence. There wasn't much that needed saying on that account. He sat back and closed his eyes, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly, the soft sounds of barely-audible music trickling into his ears along with the sounds of Raven stirring in her sleep.

"So..." said Beast Boy, "I guess you're in the club now too."

David cracked an eye open at that. "The club?"

"You know," said Beast Boy, "the weird colors club?"

Such was David's state of mental fatigue that it actually took him a little while to realize what Beast Boy was talking about. "Oh, you mean... yeah."

"Don't worry, dude, it's not that bad," said Beast Boy, to which David responded by raising an eyebrow. "I mean I'm not saying I'd trade you or anything, but... you know it could be worse."

David had so far studiously avoided looking in a mirror since re-awakening from the dead, but gauging from everyone else's reactions, he was pretty sure he looked just like the other ashen-faced demons that Trigon had seeded Jump City with. "Worse?" he asked.

Beast Boy shrugged. "You could've been pink."

Despite himself, David had to chuckle a little at that, and Beast Boy smiled victoriously the way he always did whenever he managed to coax a laugh out of an unwilling target. "Oh, dude," he said, "that reminds me, we've got a couple more of your uniforms in storage somewhere around here. You can change back into one of your orange ones if you want."

The smile faded. "I um... I did already," said David. "This _is_a new one."

Beast Boy blinked. "But... it's grey."

So it was. The color of freshly-fallen ash, the same color as his skin and hair. "I know," said David. "It changed as soon as I put it on."

Beast Boy's eyes widened. "Really?" he asked.

"Yeah," said David. He couldn't think of anything else to add.

"Wow," said Beast Boy. He let it sit a moment, then followed up. "I wonder why Trigon did that to you."

"I'm not sure he did," said David.

"What do you mean?"

David sighed softly. "Maybe Terra did it when she brought me back to life," he said. "Maybe Trigon did it. Or maybe... maybe Terra never brought me back to life at all, and I'm just some demon who thinks he's David until Trigon flips a switch." He exhaled, slowly, his voice low so as not to disturb Raven, as visions of a man in a long coat with a cane danced before his eyes, standing triumphant in a heap of ruins over a pile of bodies. "Maybe I always have been," he said.

Someone else might have reacted violently to such a statement, or politely changed the subject to something less morose. Beast Boy just shrugged. "Well Devastator picked you to be his host." he said. "That's why you can still use him even now, right? I don't think he'd have done that if you were some demon."

David just shook his head. "Devastator will pick anyone," he said. "Even a demon. And besides, he didn't choose me because I was like you guys." He paused for a moment. "I know why he picked me and it wasn't that."

Beast Boy also paused, letting the soft sound of the television speakers fill the silence around them. When he finally did answer, his voice was hesitant and careful, like that of someone edging into a touchy subject.

"Was... it so you could fight us?"

David froze for a second, then slowly lifted his eyes to Beast Boy, his expression apprehensive, but bathed in the red glow of David's stare, Beast Boy did not flinch away. "You... you know about that?" David asked finally.

"Starfire did," said Beast Boy. "She told us while you were in the shower."

He winced. He couldn't help it. And seeing him do so, Beast Boy apparently felt he had to offer some sort of support. "Dude," he said, "it's okay..."

"No, it's not," said David. "It's even less okay than you think."

"Dude, it's probably just some trick," said Beast Boy. "Trigon sent a bunch at me while I was looking for Raven."

"It wasn't a trick," said David. "It was real."

"Well how do you know that?" asked Beast Boy

"Because I met him," said David. He let the statement sit, flat and uncompromising, and when Beast Boy said nothing else he followed it up. "I met him, and I talked to him." Another pause, long and empty. "And then I killed him," he said at last. It seemed, somehow, more real now, saying it to Beast Boy, than it had been just hours before, in the flesh.

It was some time before Beast Boy said something, and when he did his voice was gentler now, the vocal equivalent to kid gloves for use with a fragile object. A tone David recognized from several of Beast Boy's conversations with Raven.

"I ran into my own evil twin," he said. "While I was looking for Raven. I..." a slight hesitation, not the lengthy pauses David had used, but noticeable regardless. "He was all part of Trigon's game. They all were. To make us all confused and mess us up. That's all this is."

David could only sigh and shake his head. "He wasn't my evil twin," he said. "He was... _me_. The real me. The person I always knew I was." He looked up at Beast Boy. "_I'm_the evil twin," he said. "That's why I look like this."

Raven stirred, softly, but did not awaken, murmuring something inaudible as she rolled over beneath the blanket Beast Boy had draped over her. Both David and Beast Boy paused, and Beast Boy gently stroked her hair as she settled back to sleep.

David waited until Raven was visibly asleep once more, and sighed, his voice reduced to a soft whisper to avoid disturbing her further. "I know it doesn't matter now," he said. "In a couple hours we're gonna be fighting Trigon, and I've gotta think about that, and Devastator, and Raven, and so do you. But... I just can't get it all out of my head." He trailed off, staring down at the floor. "I don't know how," he said at last.

It seemed like quite a while before Beast Boy responded, though it probably wasn't. "Why do you think I'm sitting here?" he asked, and David raised his eyes to see a soft smile on his face. "I can't get any of it out either. Terra, Raven, everything. If you ever find a way, you gotta let us all know."

Once more, despite himself, David smiled. "I'm sorry," he said. "I shouldn't be - "

"No, dude," said Beast Boy. "It's all right, I mean it. You went through some weird stuff tonight."

David shrugged. "You went to Hell," he said.

"Yeah, well, you _died_," said Beast Boy. "And then you got better and had all this stuff dumped on you. It'd mess with anybody."

David only shook his head. "It's not that." A pause. "Well maybe it is, I don't know. It's just this isn't the first time I've thought about this."

Beast Boy just nodded. "Star said you guys talked about it once, after that thing with Jinx in the mines?"

A soft chuckle. "You know about that too?"

"Dude," said Beast Boy, "it's _me_. I know _everything_. I found Raven's birthday, remember?"

Another chuckle. "Yeah," said David.

Beast Boy smiled. "She just told me because she said you were really worried about it all. Star doesn't always uh... _get_us Earthlings, you know? She wanted to know what to do to cheer you up."

David shook his head, still smiling despite himself. "Did you tell her it was a lost cause?"

"No, but I thought about telling her to bake you a cake."

This one brought on a full laugh, muffled of course. "Now that's just _mean_," said David.

"Yeah, I decided you hadn't done anything to deserve _that_," said Beast Boy with a broad, fanged grin. "Besides, I figured it was a bad idea to get into a prank war with someone who can turn anything into a bomb."

"Glad to hear it."

"I told her that you'd get over it in a little while. Which you did. And you will here too. I mean... if Trigon doesn't, you know... kill us all first."

From anyone else that would have sounded morbid.

"But you're not a super-villain, dude," continued Beast Boy. "Trust me, I've known lots of them. Maybe in some other world you were gonna be or something, but this isn't that world, and you're not that guy."

"But I'm not like you either," said David. "You know that, we all know that, even before this. If Cinderblock hadn't nearly killed me, and I hadn't met you guys, I'd never be a hero."

Beast Boy considered that a moment, and then shrugged. "If my parents hadn't died, maybe I wouldn't either."

A chill settled in David's stomach, and he closed his eyes and lowered his head. "I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't mean to - "

"Dude, I _told you_, it's okay," said Beast Boy. "I'm just saying, if Star hadn't gotten shipwrecked with those weird alien dudes, if Cy didn't have his accident, if I hadn't caught Sakutia... I mean who _knows _what any of us would have done?"

"That's just it," said David. "I _do_ know. I've always known. And now I know for certain. Maybe it was all a trick, but I don't think it was. I killed _you_. And Raven, and all the others, and like ten thousand other people besides. That was me." He took a deep breath, let it out slowly. "That's who I am," he said. "The only difference between us was that I met you guys. If I hadn't..."

He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to. But rather than protest, or agree, or insist that it was long since time he stopped talking about this subject, Beast Boy simply sat in silence, as did David, until, finally, Beast Boy chimed in with an odd request, all things considered.

"Do you mind if I ask you a question?"

David lifted his head. "Sure," he said.

Beast Boy took his time. "I guess it's not really a question," he said. "It's just something I really don't understand."

What Beast Boy could be referring to was beyond David, but then that was perhaps to be expected. "What's that?" he asked.

Beast Boy took a few extra moments to put all his thoughts in order, something generally unheard of as far as he was concerned. "All this time," he said, "you've been living with us, fighting, training, just hanging out. But even after all this, you still see us like we're... different than you. _Better_than you, even."

Part of David wanted to respond that the reason for that was because they _were_. But the rest of him retained enough sense not to.

"I mean," continued Beast Boy. "It's not all the time. Not anymore. It used to be that you were a civilian, and I know you still kinda feel that way, and there's nothing wrong with that. But sometimes, when something like this happens, it's like you go back to this idea that we're all a million times better than you're ever gonna be. Like you think we're perfect, and since you're not..."

David sighed, his eyes averted, letting silence swell up between them. "I don't think you guys are perfect."

"I know," said Beast Boy. "It's just... you see us take down some bad guy or save some people, and you think, 'okay, that's who they are'. And then you see your future self or whoever kill a bunch of people and do terrible things, and you think 'all right, that's who I am', right?" David managed to look up, but could not bring himself to answer. "But what I don't get is... you blew your own evil twin up. A guy who was like twenty times stronger than you. And then you blasted your way through an army of demons, so you could rescue Cy. And after you did that, and nearly got killed eight times, you came back here with us, so that in a little bit you can go fight the Devil, and tear Devastator out of his soul to save the world."

Slowly, David managed to lift his head, to see Beast Boy looking straight at him, red lights and all.

"So all I'm saying, dude, is... how come _that's_not who you are?"

Had David been able to figure out how to answer that question, he might have done so. But all he could do was sit in silence, watching the light of his own eyes reflecting off Beast Boy and Raven and the rest of the room. Beast Boy seemed to take it for answer enough.

There were clocks in the room, hidden somewhere in the darkness. But David did not seek for them, preferring not to know how much time was passing, sitting in silence, lost in his own thoughts. It might have been one minute or many before the sound gently ebbing from the television shifted suddenly, and belatedly brought his attention around to other matters.

"Hey uh... Beast Boy?" he asked at length, breaking the silence between them that had by now gone on long enough for its absence to feel like a minor shock. "What's that?"

The television was turned down to its lowest volume setting, but the image was still clearly visible, not that that answered anything. The image was one of a number of people, a dozen or more, lined up on a stage with microphones in front of them, facing an enormous audience staring up at them in rapt attention. The actors, or whoever they were, wore strange costumes, the men in tricorne hats and ruffled shirts and waistcoats with epaulettes and brass buttons, the women in long dresses of greater or lesser shabbiness. Several carried muskets and other antique weapons, and those who did brandished them aloft as they cried out their lines, though the volume was so low that all David could make out was a soft murmur.

Beast Boy too was lost in thought, and seemed almost startled by David's question. "Huh?" he asked, blinking as he looked around. "Oh... um... its uh... it's a musical."

He fumbled at his side for the remote control, and pointed it at the television as he hit a button, causing the volume to jump suddenly just as an older man was stepping forward in the center of the stage, as if to begin some grand soliloquy.

'_One day more._  
_Another day, another destiny._  
_This never-ending road to Calvary...'_

"You ever heard this one?" asked Beast Boy.

David shook his head. Musicals were a subject he knew strictly nothing about. But then he'd assumed the same was true of Beast Boy, whose tastes in pop culture seemed defined by comic books and cartoons.

Beast Boy smiled. "It's called _Les Miserables_," he said. "It means... well... the miserables, I guess. It's pretty famous."

"I think I've heard the name before," said David. "I didn't know you liked this sort of thing."

Beast Boy shrugged. "I dunno," he said. "I kinda like this one."

'_One more day all on my own._  
_One more day with him not caring._  
_What a life I might have known._  
_But he never saw me there..."_

"Rita liked this song," said Beast Boy.

The name didn't ring a bell. "Rita?" asked David.

"Oh," said Beast Boy, seemingly remembering all of a sudden who he was talking to. "Elasti-Girl. From the Doom Patrol. The... group I was with before I was with the Titans."

There was more to it than that, David could tell that much from Beast Boy's voice alone. But he did not pry. It wasn't his way. And this wasn't a night for that anyhow.

"When I was little, she took me to see the show," he said. "I don't really remember much of it. But Steve bought her the soundtrack, and she liked to play it sometimes." David had no idea who Steve was, but did not ask, even as Beast Boy shrugged. "I dunno," he said. "I guess I just wanted to hear it one more time before... well..."

'_One more day before the storm._  
_At the barricades of freedom._  
_When our ranks begin to form._  
_Will you take your place with me?'_

Softly, slowly, Raven began to stir, her movement alerting Beast Boy, whose glance in turn alerted David. Gently, she opened her eyes, lifted her head, blinking as she took in her surroundings. Her eyes fell on David, and she drew a sharp breath, pulling closer to Beast Boy as if by reflex, her expression frightened. "It's okay," whispered Beast Boy as she took his arm with both hands, sliding over to him on the couch and holding him protectively. David tried not to take it personally. His appearance scared the hell out of him too.

Right now, a lot of things did.

'_One day more!_  
_One more day 'till revolution,_  
_We will nip it in the bud._  
_We'll be ready for these schoolboys._  
_They will wet themselves with blood!'_

Watching the singers perform, David felt his chest constricting, as though something were squeezing the air from his lungs. He breathed mechanically, feeling the air flow in and out as though some other force were animating him. "It's almost time, isn't it?" he asked, not bothering, perhaps not able, to look away.

"Yeah," said Beast Boy from somewhere to the left.

The knots inside him seemed to tighten imperceptibly. "Do you... think we can do this?" he asked, unable to stop himself, his eyes flickering over to the couch almost reflexively, bathing the entire thing in red light. Raven watched him like she might a dangerous predator, but Beast Boy only smiled, his eyes still glued to the screen.

'_Watch 'em run amok,_  
_Catch 'em as they fall,_  
_Never know your luck when it's a free-for-all._  
_Here a little nick,_  
_There a little touch,_  
_Most of them are gonners so they won't miss much...'_

"Of course, Dude," he said, flashing a fanged smile as he did so. "Don't you?"

David didn't know how to answer that. Or rather he was worried that he did.

"I... I don't know," he said.

"I do," came a voice from behind.

'_One day to a new beginning._  
_Every man will be a King.'_

David turned his head. So did Beast Boy. So did Raven. The light was poor, but David's spotlight eyes illuminated Cyborg, leaning against one side of the doorway, an expression of almost priestly calm written on both sides of his face.

"This is how it had to be," said Cyborg. "Always. I know that, and so do you. Trigon can split us all up, hide Raven, turn you chartreuse if he wants to. It don't matter at all. This is how it was meant to end."

There was a finality to that sentiment that should have pushed him over the edge into full on panic. And yet it did not. "What's gonna end?" he asked, not even sure himself what he meant by it.

'_There's a new world for the winning_  
_Do you hear the people sing?'_

"All things end," said Starfire, stepping around Cyborg and entering the room outright, yet if the words were morose, her bearing and expression was anything but. It took David a moment to realize that something about her was different, but moments later he realized that she was no longer sheathed in metal. The jagged crown framing her head was gone, and instead of banded armor, she wore the purple skirt and sleeveless top that he remembered from better times. Her midriff was swaddled in white bandages, but she did not favor anything as she stepped around the couch and sat down on it next to David's chair. "Even Trigon," she said.

Sandwiched between Beast Boy and Starfire, Raven looked at each in turn, and at Cyborg and at David, and back at Beast Boy again, who gently picked her up and sat her in his lap, the better to hold her tightly. Cyborg walked carefully over to the couch, standing behind Starfire. David didn't move, yet as though by some resonant field, the tightness in his chest seemed to dissipate, merely through the proximity of his friends.

"What about us?" he asked.

Anyone could have answered. Starfire did.

"We will show Trigon what an ending is," she said, reaching over and taking David's hand with her own. "Together. As it should be."

They were all on edge. That much he knew from a thousand tiny queues he'd learned to read without even meaning to in the months he'd known them. Maybe they were as scared as he was. Maybe they were incapable of such levels of fear. He didn't really know. What he knew was that Starfire had the power to crush his hand like an origami sculpture, or channel energy sufficient to burn him to a cinder, and she would not. And had not. Not even when she had every reason to think him some monster conjured from Trigon's mind. He knew that Beast Boy was smiling, and holding Raven protectively, and that his expression was that quiet, blissful one he brought out so infrequently, only on the rare occasions that he felt safe enough to set aside the jokes. And Raven was holding onto him, her fingers knotted into his shirt, sparing glances up at Beast Boy that resembled the ones that her older self had used only when she thought that nobody else was watching. He knew that in a few minutes Cyborg would probably remember that he was supposed to be trying to do what Robin would in his place, and would start issuing instructions to them all. But right now, here, he was letting himself be Cyborg again.

He knew all of these things. He no longer remembered not knowing them.

'_My place is here! I fight with you!'_

"Yeah," he said. And thought he didn't know why he said it, he felt the remaining fear receding within him as he did, replaced by the warmth of a sensation he did not know how to name. One that only existed in the company of the people in this room.

Nobody spoke as the actors on the screen sang and cheered and filled the room with music and song. Starfire did not release David's hand, and David did not try to make her. Yet as if in response to some unspoken suggestion, Beast Boy slid over on the couch closer to Starfire, Raven still held tightly in his arms, and he took Raven's tiny hand in his own large glove, and Starfire took them both with her own. Perhaps it was his own imagination, or perhaps some facet of Starfire's alien physiology, but David thought he felt a tiny charge, warm and electrical, run through his fingers, the same way that his baton had always felt whenever he focused upon it, back when he had Devastator and was whole. Yet the tingling charge did not stop, and the emptiness that Devastator had left could no longer be felt, filled as he was with the simple relief of being, at last, exactly where he wanted to be. Perhaps for the last time. And he knew from the look on the others' faces that he wasn't the only one who could feel it.

"I'm really glad I met you guys," said David Foster.

'_Tomorrow we'll be far away,_  
_Tomorrow is the judgement day._  
_Tomorrow we discover what our God in Heaven has in store...'_

A heavy, metal hand landed gently on his shoulder, squeezing it tightly.

"So are we, man," said Cyborg.

'_One more dawn.'_

"All of us," said Starfire.

'_One more day.'_

"Always," said Beast Boy.

'_One! Day! More!'_

* * *

**Author's Note: **I make no promises as to the timing on the next chapter. I will try as hard as I possibly can to get it out in a more reasonable timeframe. But whether I succeed or fail, rest assured, this story will finish, and it will finish the way I always intended it to. Thank you so much for reading, and I hope to see you soon.


End file.
